from opinion
to evidence
building a research practice that replaces internal assumptions with continuous customer research at scale.
this case study has been condensed with all confidential information removed. If you would like to learn more about this design and process, please contact me.
overview
When I joined AWS Training & Certification as the founding UX research hire, there was no research infrastructure. No panels. No recruitment pipeline. No tooling. No shared understanding of what customer research looked like in practice.
Product decisions were shaped by internal opinion. What the team thought, what leadership assumed, what felt right based on experience. Research wasn't rejected. It just didn't exist as an operational capability.
My job was to change that. Not by running a few studies and presenting findings, but by building the machinery that would make continuous, disciplined customer research possible at scale and training an organization to use it. The metrics below reflect cumulative impact across five years of operation.
problem
The organization didn't have any research infrastructure or a shared language for what customer evidence looked like. Three gaps made the status quo unsustainable.
no customer pipeline.
Teams had no way to recruit customers. When input was needed, sales might suggest a contact. Most decisions moved forward without customer input.
I didn't build everything at once. Early wins, such as a small panel and basic recruitment pipeline, established credibility and created demand. The training program, tooling, and governance model followed as the organization's appetite for research grew.
low operational capacity.
A single study with six participants took roughly 50 hours of effort. At that pace, research couldn't keep up with the volume of product decisions being made.
low research fluency.
80% of the UX team had never conducted research. There was no shared methodology for execution and findings were anecdotal and inconsistent.
solution
The infrastructure came together in phases, each one unlocking the next.
Together they formed a single, self-reinforcing system.
recruitment infrastructure.
I built three segmented customer panels from scratch: internal employees for usability testing, external customers for primary research, and external non-customers for comparison.
The panels eventually reached 750K+ opt-ins with a 70% take rate and an average recruitment time of one day. Recruitment came first. Without a panel, nothing else was possible.
tooling and governance.
I selected, onboarded, and governed a third-party research tool that cut average study time from 50 hours to 12.
I created self-service templates and an intake prioritization rubric so product managers could run basic evaluative research independently, and established a customer listening program to maintain continuous organizational access to customer voice.
research enablement.
I designed and scaled a tiered training program: literacy sessions for sales teams, deep methodology workshops for UX practitioners, and self-paced digital modules for the broader organization.
Over time the program trained 24,000+ employees across 488 departments, 72 job families, and 52 countries, with an 80% course completion rate. Training ran in parallel once teams had something to research against.
results
Six years of operation. Measured at every stage.
467%
increase in studies
76%
less time
on studies
750k+
panel
opt-ins
The cumulative result was behavioral.
The way the organization made decisions changed. Research was no longer something that happened occasionally when someone could arrange a customer conversation. It became an operational capability, always available, consistently structured, and connected to the teams who needed to act on what it produced.
The 12-week diary study detailed in the next chapter, From Evidence to Action, is a direct product of this foundation. Without a recruitment pipeline, a trained organization, and a culture that had learned to expect and act on customer evidence, a study of that ambition and duration would not have been possible
24k+
employees
trained
275
listening
sessions
what was learned
No infrastructure build survives contact with scale unchanged.
The original tooling required SQL knowledge to access the participant database, which created bottlenecks. The panel grew faster than anticipated, outpacing early engagement mechanisms.
Over time the ecosystem was streamlined from 20 tools to 8, the database was migrated to a CMS to broaden access, and AI-assisted workflows were introduced to help teams synthesize and summarize sessions at scale. Each iteration made the infrastructure more self-sufficient and less dependent on the research team to operate it.
what this unlocked
With panels, training, and operational infrastructure in place, the organization could execute research that had previously been out of reach.
The study detailed in the next chapter, from evidence to action, is a direct product of this foundation. Without a recruitment pipeline, a trained organization, and a culture that had learned to expect and act on customer evidence, a study of that ambition would have been impossible.