Details sanitized and shared with appropriate discretion. Specific metrics and artifacts available upon request.
Scaling Research Operations at an Enterprise
Designed end-to-end ResearchOps infrastructure — intake, prioritization, stakeholder alignment, and dissemination — reducing research turnaround by 66% for a team serving 250k+ monthly users and 170M+ annual travelers.
Detailed case study available on request
This project contains confidential process details and internal metrics. The full case study — including methodology decisions, process documentation, stakeholder artifacts, and specific outcome data — is available to hiring managers and recruiters.
Summary
When I became Lead UX Researcher, the research function had no formal intake process, no prioritization framework, and no systematic dissemination practice. Requests arrived ad hoc; studies were siloed; stakeholders had no visibility into what was in flight. Over the following year, I designed and implemented end-to-end ResearchOps infrastructure that cut research turnaround by 66% and gave the team, stakeholders, and product organization a shared operating model.
Role: Lead UX Researcher · Timeline: 2023–Present · Team: 5 researchers · Methods: process design, stakeholder alignment, dissemination
Problem & context
[PLACEHOLDER: describe the specific friction points — stakeholder frustration, duplicated studies, time-to-insight metrics before the ops work. What was the quantitative picture of the problem?]
The team was operating reactively: studies were scoped one at a time in response to ad hoc requests, with no shared view of relative priority, no agreed criteria for what made a research question worth pursuing, and no process for getting findings in front of the right people after a study closed. The result was high turnaround times, frequent scope creep, and underused findings.
My role
I owned ResearchOps design entirely — from diagnosing the current state to building the frameworks, socializing them with stakeholders, and embedding them into the team’s standard operating procedures.
Approach & decisions
[PLACEHOLDER: describe the key design choices — how did you build the intake form, how did you structure prioritization (impact × urgency × feasibility?), what did stakeholder alignment look like in practice?]
The core decision was to make the process legible to non-researchers. Intake had to be low-friction enough that product managers and designers would actually use it. Prioritization criteria needed to map to business language (impact on OKRs, urgency to a specific decision, cost of not knowing) rather than research jargon. And dissemination had to meet stakeholders where they already were, not require them to hunt for findings.
Process
[PLACEHOLDER: describe the discovery phase (interviews, shadowing, current-state audit), design phase (framework drafts, stakeholder workshops, iteration), rollout, and measurement approach]
Deliverables
- Research intake form and intake triage SOP
- Prioritization framework with weighted criteria
- Stakeholder alignment process (kickoff templates, brief templates, mid-study check-in cadence)
- Dissemination templates and distribution protocols
- Research roadmap (quarterly, updated monthly)
- [PLACEHOLDER: sanitized screenshots of intake form, prioritization matrix, or roadmap artifact]
Impact & outcomes
- 66% reduction in research turnaround time from intake to deliverable.
- Research roadmap aligned to OKRs, giving leadership visibility into the research pipeline.
- Reduced duplicated research effort as prior findings became more findable and stakeholders consulted the repository before launching new studies.
- [PLACEHOLDER: other metrics — stakeholder satisfaction scores, number of studies completed per quarter before/after, specific decisions influenced]
Reflection
[PLACEHOLDER: what would you do differently? What did you learn about change management, stakeholder buy-in, or process design?]
The prioritization framework took longer to adopt than the intake process — because intake has a clear winner (less friction), while prioritization requires stakeholders to accept that their study might not be first. The key unlock was framing prioritization as a transparency tool, not a gate.