Build the team
Expanded specialist capacity and developed researchers, coordinators, and service designers.
Scaling research
at USAA.
I built research capability, developed people, and helped make human insights and design thinking critical throughout the product development lifecycle.
3 → 12
Research team growth
250+
Designers reached through enablement
My role
Research leadership & organizational capability
Make member understanding part of how work gets done.
Human-centered insights were not part of the product development lifecycle when I began. The opportunity was to build both the research capacity and the organizational capability to use evidence throughout it.
Enable the organization
Combined strategic research, business-aligned expertise, and enablement for designers, product teams, and executives.
Connect evidence to decisions
Used measurement, maturity models, and executive mentorship to make insights useful.
Greater research capacity
Team grew from 3 to 12, doubling within the first six months.
Broader capability
Research enablement reached more than 250 designers.
Insights across the lifecycle
Insights and design thinking became critical throughout product development.
Building a research capability the organization could use.
At USAA, my work connected team development, research practice, and organizational change. The goal was to help people understand member needs and use that understanding in decisions. That required both specialist research capacity and the ability for others to work confidently with evidence.
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Starting with three
We began with a small team: me, one researcher, and one research coordinator focused on operations. Within six months, the team doubled. It eventually grew to twelve: six researchers, three coordinators, two service designers, and me.
As the team grew, I built an operating model that brought together three complementary forms of research support. We dedicated people to larger strategic research initiatives, aligned research expertise with business areas, and created a workstream focused on enabling others to conduct and use research. Those responsibilities gave the team a way to support both specialist work and broader organizational capability.
A model for different needs
In the mature model, two researchers and a coordinator focused on centralized strategic research. Three researchers and a coordinator supported work aligned across Bank, Property & Casualty, and Enterprise. A researcher, a coordinator, and both service designers focused on democratization.
That allocation made enablement a defined responsibility within the team. It also preserved dedicated capacity for strategic research and business-aligned work. Research operations was represented across all three workstreams, alongside the researchers and service designers delivering the work.
Across these workstreams, I led mixed-method generative and evaluative research, combining quantitative and qualitative evidence to understand member needs and evaluate experiences.
Building capability
Our enablement work reached more than 250 designers across 20+ design teams. These figures describe organizational reach, not direct reports. We provided training, tools, and resource libraries to help designers conduct research that addressed member needs and produced defensible, traceable, repeatable insights.
The work also involved product teams and executives. My role included executive mentorship and mentoring practitioners, advising on research strategy, and helping people understand how to use insights in their decisions. Broadening participation meant developing both the ability to conduct research and the ability to interpret what it revealed.
Making measurement useful
A concrete example was our work on the property-and-casualty claims experience. I led a measurement approach that brought together product data, experience measures, and observed mobile-app behavior. Combining these sources helped us examine performance patterns alongside the experience behind them.
I built dashboards for the P&C team to surface those patterns and support prioritization. Each dashboard update also needed an explanatory synopsis: what the findings meant and what action stakeholders should consider. This made interpretation an explicit part of the reporting. The numbers and observations came with a discussion of their implications.
Alongside that work, I developed maturity models and advised executive leaders on research strategy and organizational maturity. These were additional ways I helped the organization examine its capabilities and connect research with how it worked.
What changed
The team grew from three people to twelve, and research enablement extended to more than 250 designers. Centralized strategic research, business-aligned expertise, and democratized research operated together within one model.
The broader change was in the role of insights across product development. By my departure, human-centered insights and design thinking activities were critical throughout the lifecycle. My contribution spanned building the team, developing others, strengthening measurement, and working with executives to advance the practice. Together, those responsibilities describe the kind of leadership I bring: building the people and organizational capability needed to put customer understanding to work.
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