Leading Cross-Brand Research Operations & Strategy

The Challenge

At a large professional education company, the UX team was positioned as a shared service working across multiple brands, product lines, and strategic initiatives. Research maturity was low, and the team lacked clear processes, visibility, and impact.

As a UX Research manager, I established frameworks for prioritization, stakeholder engagement, and insight sharing and tracking across brands.

Approach

• Created project intake form and project management board using Monday.com.

• Developed templates for common deliverables, such as research plans, testing schedules, rapid insights, and full presentation decks

• Established processes and best practices for conducting end-to-end research and managing stakeholder engagement, from kick-off calls to post-research follow-up

• Built research repository using Sharepoint, allowing stakeholders to search findings by brand, project, or topic. By creating an AI search agent for our site, we enabled even smarter searching of the repository with suggested prompts such as “What do we know about [user behavior, feature, or problem]” and “What research have we done on [product, site, or topic]?” that would surface summarized insights supported with links to relevant documentation

• Designed strategy for measuring research impact, using AI automation to send a survey to stakeholders 90 days after insight delivery, allowing us to track KPIs, measure our degree of impact, and gauge stakeholder satisfaction with our work

• Coached team of 3 researchers and facilitated collaboration across product, design, marketing, and leadership teams

Impact

• Significantly increased visibility and value in our research team. In 2022 we served 3 brands consistently; by 2026 we served 26+ brands

• Embedded research support on 40+ strategic initiatives across the company per calendar year

• Increased usage of research repository by 300%

• Improved operational efficiency, reclaiming 10+ hours of labor per project