Role
Head of Product Design
Head of User Insights
A key part of my work is to push user centricity within an org that has been historically very business requirements driven. This included building a team from scratch, partnering with stakeholders to show the impact, setting up workflows & up skilling teams across the org.
I started with seeking to understand where we were in terms of insights maturity and decided to restructure the work (as the researcher was bogged down with user testing for all squads and working as a "service provider”).
It was critical to build a strong user insights practice, team and show the impact fast.
This freed up a lot more bandwidth for the research function and we were able to draft a roadmap and define key “exploration" topics the research team should focus on. So less UT's, more "What is the future of shopping?" kind of research questions. At this time, I also brought in a junior researcher to support and solidified a team.
With two streams of discovery set up, I partnered up with leadership partners across the org. For example, the sustainability team, the modestwear team etc to explore what user assumptions could help validate. This helped us identify projects and set up a clear roadmap.
We started running 2-3 exploratory research projects per quarter in parallel to the everyday user testing work. This helped us build our first set of user personas, and we circulated these out to the larger organization with knowledge sharing sessions and workshops with pm’s, marketing teams and even exec level stakeholders.
With the volume of people, our team realized we could vet our top feedback givers and set up a power panel of frequent users. This cut down our recruitment time for projects where the screeners are not super specific.
At this point, one year down the line, we started doing a segment in our company town hall on the “Voice of the User”, Monthly insights sharing to product and tech teams and inviting business stakeholders into a few sessions. We also heavily involved them into workshops to ideate on solutions for the pain points we uncovered.
Today, our insights are presented and shared top down across the organization. Teams (even outside of tech) use them to brainstorm and help drive their initiatives and roadmaps with a flavour of user sentiment that was not there in previous planning cycles.
The biggest success (for me) is hearing our pm’s and designers talk about the personas. “What would Sherry think about this?” Is a great indicator that the artefacts are completing their purpose, which is to be used in the day to day of the product development process.