Scaling Research Practice

The Challenge

As Workday Peakon continued to grow, so did the need for scalable, efficient, and consistent research practices. While research was valued, demand outpaced researcher capacity, and insights were not always easily discoverable or actionable across teams. To address this, I led key initiatives to scale research operations, embed research into everyday product work, and build a stronger culture of insight-driven decision-making.

My Role

As a senior UX researcher, I worked across product areas to improve the systems and processes that support research at scale. I partnered with fellow researchers, designers, PMs, and legal and compliance teams to strengthen operational foundations and make research easier to run, share, and apply, whether by researchers or non-researchers.

What I Did

  • Built flexible research templates and documentation to support consistent, high-quality practice across teams. These included study planning docs, interview guides, consent forms, and debrief templates tailored for both researchers and non-researchers.

  • Streamlined recruitment workflows by working closely with our legal and compliance teams to design a faster, GDPR-compliant process. This improved participant turnaround time while maintaining high ethical standards.

  • Co-developed an insights library using tools like Dovetail and Confluence, ensuring that findings were organized, searchable, and connected to ongoing work across product areas.

  • Facilitated educational workshops and clinics on topics like user interviewing, running lightweight experiments, and communicating insights in engaging, actionable ways. These sessions were tailored to the needs of designers, PMs, and engineers.

  • Provided ongoing coaching and support to empower teams to run research independently. I reviewed research plans, sat in on sessions, gave feedback, and helped teams make sense of findings.

The Outcome

  • Increased research velocity by improving recruitment speed and enabling product teams to run simple studies on their own

  • Improved research quality and consistency with tools, templates, and support systems that made best practices easy to adopt

  • Boosted visibility and impact of insights through an accessible insights library and improved storytelling around user needs

  • Fostered a culture of curiosity and experimentation, helping teams move from relying on assumptions to making more informed, evidence-based decisions

These efforts helped embed research more deeply into Workday Peakon’s product development process. The result was a research practice that became more efficient, collaborative, sustainable, and user-centered.