Executive Case Study
Scaling UX Research: Innovation Labs
Led a large-scale research program at OpenText World, running 150+ live usability sessions across 9–15 product teams to rapidly generate insights and influence product direction through AI-assisted research workflows.
Context
Multiple product teams needed customer feedback within a limited timeframe at a live event. Traditional research approaches couldn’t scale to support parallel sessions, consistent execution, and rapid synthesis.
My Role
As the Research Program Lead, I designed the operational framework for AI-assisted research workflows, enabling designers to facilitate high-quality sessions while maintaining research rigor.
Operational Goal
Enable multiple teams to run usability sessions simultaneously while maintaining consistency and generating usable insights during the event.
Approach
Multi-Team Coordination
Aligned 9–15 product teams around shared session structure and goals.
Scalable Facilitation
Trained designers to run sessions using AI-assisted research workflows, expanding capacity beyond the core research team.
Key Contributions
High-Volume Session Execution
150+ sessions conducted across multiple teams, leveraging AI-assisted research workflows for rapid data transcription and theme tagging.
Participant Coordination
Coordinated participant flow across concurrent sessions, aligning recruitment with product needs and session capacity.
Cross-Team Visibility
Shared findings across product teams during the event through centralized dashboards.
Expanded Research Participation
Enabled designers to contribute directly to research by lowering the technical barrier through simplified AI-assisted research workflows and robust templates.
Impact
Product Impact
Actionable insights from the four-day event drove design changes and improvements to 9 products.
Team Enablement
Provided a hands-on opportunity for designers to collect and synthesize insights, fostering a more research-driven design culture.
What This Demonstrates
Scaling Research Through Systems
Designed a program that enabled multiple teams to conduct research in parallel by creating a scalable structure—not by increasing individual output.
Speed as a Strategic Advantage
Delivered insights during the event through AI-assisted research workflows, allowing product teams to act on feedback in real time rather than waiting for post-event synthesis.
Operational Design as Leverage
The success of the program was driven by how the work was structured - coordination, facilitation, and synthesis - not just the research itself.