Building the research muscle: from assumption-led design to measured outcomes

TL;DR

• What I'm most proud of: SUS went from 68 to 74, key task SEQ scores went from 4 to 6, and talking to customers became part of every week.
• What I did: Baselined the team's skills, measured what was already shipped, got every PM, designer and tech lead in front of customers weekly, and made benchmarking a quarterly habit.
• At a crossroads: How do you build a research practice in a team that's never had one, without alienating people, and prove design's value fast?
• Spanners in the works: Nothing had been validated, churn was high, and decisions ran on assumptions and stakeholder happiness.
• What I walked into: A team of 4 designers optimising screens for looks, with no direct measure of the customer experience.

What I walked into

In October 2023, I inherited a team of 4 Product Designers with a mix of skill and maturity across product design disciplines. Only 2 were open to modern, outcome-driven design.

Designers were embedded in development squads, mostly optimising screens for visual appeal. Product feedback came almost entirely from senior leadership, sales and customer support feature requests. There was no direct measure of the experience customers were actually getting.

Spanners in the works

Most of what was being shipped had never been validated or de-risked for usability, desirability, value, usefulness, findability or accessibility. The consequences were showing up across the business:

• High customer churn
• Product decisions made on assumptions and stakeholder happiness, not evidence
• High cost of support and high cost of customer acquisition
• A design team that wasn't growing its skills or being pushed to

That raised questions the business had no reliable way to answer. Why were customers not subscribing, or leaving? Which parts of the design were working? What was design's actual impact on the business? What should we build next to attract and keep customers? How do we get customer insight to actually shape the roadmap?

At a crossroads

How do you build a research and measurement practice in a team that has never had one, without alienating the people already there, and prove design's value to the business quickly enough to matter?

Pulled up my sleeves

First 15 days: baseline the team, not just the product. I reframed and formalised an existing skills framework to see where the team's maturity, skills and aspirations actually sat. This was the hardest part of the whole engagement. Only 2 of 4 people were open to it, and introducing it before I'd earned the team's trust was genuinely difficult. I had to balance team morale against the financial reality of assessing the team's maturity and what reshaping it would cost.

First 30 days: measure what was already shipped.

• Introduced PURE scores to assess the current state of every key task in the application
• Introduced an SEQ-based intercept survey measuring ease of use on key tasks
• Introduced a quarterly SUS measure to track overall product design health
• Revamped the UX Principles to get better outcomes

First 90 days: get the whole product team talking to customers.

• Set a team goal: every Product Manager, Designer and Tech Lead spent at least 30 minutes talking directly with customers or users every week
• Shared work-in-progress design early and gathered feedback continuously, instead of waiting for finished work
• Led by example, writing weekly notes to Product Management, Engineering and Design about the week's focus and wins
• Opened up WIP design sharing in the office with printouts
• Championed and won a regular spot in company-wide product release announcements, to share what design was working on and how

Over 12 months: make outcome-driven design the norm. I introduced baseline and benchmark studies across the core product, key user task flows and the website. The results:

• SUS improved from 68 to 74
• Key task flow SEQ scores improved from 4 to 6
• Led Van Westendorp pricing research that informed pricing strategy, commercial packaging and new revenue opportunities
• Started influencing marketing and the external design agency to adopt a shared design system and consistent copy standards

What I am most proud of

A team that had never measured its own output now had a repeatable, quarterly view of product design health. And a product organisation that had never talked to customers now had it built into its weekly rhythm.

The shift wasn't just in methods. It changed how design's value was seen and talked about across Sales, Customer Support, Engineering and senior leadership.