I deliver insights and evaluation to inform product development, concept creation, and strategy. 

Goal: inspire company executives to make a new customer segment a strategic priority for product development through development of a short video that would connect executives viscerally with this new customer segment and help them build empathy for their stories and lives

Approach: I helped develop a research design and protocol for a global ethnographic deep-dive with this new customer segment with my clients.  I recruited these new customers in our American market, and then drove data collection in the American market in concert with my clients, and helped them manage and drive their own data collection efforts in international markets.  Over the course of data collection, we shared initial participant stories in textual and visual form with team members from design, branding, research and communications.  Then, as a large group, we iterated on the story that was emerging from the data.  

To test concepts built from these insights and from previous work, I worked with designers to refine concept testing ideas, and then drove the first round of remote concept testing and shared the results with the team.  Finally, I created visual summaries of each study participant, and a holistic final report that covered insights from all the markets we studied.  

Challenges: With an idea in mind of how they wanted their final video to land, the clients had a fuzzy-yet-clear direction they were hoping the observation and conversation with study participants would go, so iterating on the protocol and research approach as we went was important to ensure we were eliciting the insights and video clips the clients needed to tell their story.  Once I understood their vision and approach, our research engine began humming.  

Getting gratuities to participants in global locations can be challenging.  Know your tax treaties and make sure you have a great chartered public accountant on your side!

Goal: the primary goal was to develop insights and strategic product recommendations about teamwork dynamics for product development.  the secondary goals were to expose the Atlassian's team to ethnographic methodologies and how they can be used to influence strategic direction, and  to expand the team’s view of what an Atlassian customer “team” could be. 

Approach: I completed a cross-disciplinary literature review on teamwork dynamics and developed insights and strategic product recommendations based on it.  Then, I developed and drove a qualitative deep-dive study with companies who could be customers of the client to understand how some of the insights from the literature review play out in day-to-day business, and to get a view on what we might have missed in the lit review. 

Challenges: Teamwork dynamics is a fuzzy space.  Researchers from many schools of thought, including psychology, sociology, management, economics, communications and human-computer interaction, among others, have gone deep in this space since the 1920s.  Unfortunately, no one has done the work to pull together all these insights into a gestalt understanding of teamwork, so trying to stitch together uber-level insights across all those fields was like flying in the dark at times.

Also, many businesses have concerns about an anthropologist working amongst their employees, so finding businesses to participate in the research took creativity, effort and good connections.  Ten years ago, small and medium businesses were more willing to jump into research studies because they were curious about them and they would receive a gratuity for participation.  Now, participating in studies is no longer a novelty, and businesses don't want the potential distraction a researcher might bring to their workday. 

LARGE FINANCIAL SERVICES COMPANY

Goal: The primary goal was to impact future product development strategy so that it incorporated an understanding of household financial management in products already under development. The secondary goal was to train junior researchers in qualitative research, from developing project goals, to managing a large-scale, multi-market project, to learning interviewing and observational techniques, to developing creative ways to drive strategic and tactical impact based on insights with their product team colleagues.

Approach: In concert with my research colleagues, we developed and drove an ethnographic study in multiple markets across the United States to understand household financial management.  Based on the insights that emerged, and a close reading of the client company's previous research in the space, we designed and delivered an immersive workshop for the clients' larger product development team over the course of two days.

Challenges: This client already had great market-level segmentation data they had recently pulled together to understand who their customers were at a population level; nailing the right segments in recruiting for our ethnography was imperative to get great data, and also to maintain 'face validity' with my clients' teammates internally.  Recruiting against these segments was complex, and I was thankful that my research colleague at the client company managed this facet of our research.

As always, working collaboratively to wring insights and opportunity spaces out of a complex data set, and then representing those opportunity spaces in visually compelling ways to draw in team members for conversation and brainstorming, was challenging.  Thankfully the client team had a great design colleague who had spare cycles to work with us to understand what the data and insights were telling us.  He was able to help us shape it appropriately for the immersion workshop which garnered good engagement from the clients' larger team.

Goal: uncover the workflows, processes and challenges of education IT pros using cloud services, so my client could identify opportunities to improve their product for end users

Approach: I developed a research design and interview protocol for a national interview study of education IT pros.  I conducted the interviews by videoconference to increase speed, reduce costs and enable client team members to hear from participants first-hand.  Then, I analyzed the interview data and created insights and frameworks to explain the insights.  I also created a visual workflow of the set-up path education IT pros developed, and pain points associated with each step.

Challenges: the study focus was quite technical, so I found myself with many browser tabs open over the course of this work--even when interviewing participants--as I tried to absorb and understand all I could about setting up and provisioning this software experience in an educational context, without actually setting up this system myself.  This rapid self-immersion was imperative so I could drive the conversation with participants appropriately, to elicit the data and insights the client needed.  My client was relatively new to this space as well, so we were both learning as we went.

Bureau of Fearless Ideas (formerly 826 Seattle) is a youth-focused non-profit in the Greenwood neighborhood of Seattle that focuses on creative ways to teach children how to write well and offers daily homework support and tutoring. In response to executive director Teri Hein's question about how to draw deeper connections between the Greenwood neighborhood and youth attending 826 Seattle's workshops, I completed a literature review of the neighborhood development and youth empowerment and arts literature. 

Based on the literature review, I developed insights to support 826 in creating a new strategic direction for their services. I worked with 826’s programming team to brainstorm new initiatives based on the insights, and they are attempting to get funding for some of them now.