Megan Blocker
Director of User Research, DigitalOcean
Megan founded McKinsey’s design research & insights practice, establishing and growing a team of one to more than 50 researchers, data analysts, and data scientists globally. As part of that transformation, she built the design research talent architecture and established McKinsey’s design research philosophy, operations, and tooling. In addition, Megan is deeply passionate about equity and inclusion. She co-founded McKinsey’s Women in Tech initiative and was a member of the DE&I global leadership team.
In her work as a researcher, Megan combines empathy with data to achieve deep understanding, craft inspirational vision, and deliver actionable insight. As a leader, she makes sense of ambiguity and thrives when building and leading teams where trust, transparency, and clarity of vision encourage risk-taking, innovation, and creativity. Most of all, she loves building something new and scrappy, then strategically operationalizing it for scale. She invests in people, Post-Its, insights, and LEGOs.
Rosenverse talks by Megan:
" Triangulate, triangulate, triangulate — use multiple data sources and secondary research to build robust insights. "
Positioning insight: Structuring teams, roles and careers for a changing research landscape
March 13, 2025
" Research is at a critical moment as relational dynamics between participants, organizations, and researchers shift from linear to plural and relational. "
Redefining the research toolkit: Expanding methodologies for a changing world
March 12, 2025
" Advanced quantitative methods can amplify our work in ways we didn’t expect, and also show us how to get started. "
Theme 2 Intro
March 12, 2025
" Tools don't matter as much as the desire to learn and ask why things keep happening the way they do. "
Day 2 Theme Panel
March 12, 2025
" User interviews are an absolute mainstay of user research practices and likely will always be a core tool. "
Methodologies: Beyond the interview [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]
September 4, 2024
" We can all become experts at stuff if we work hard enough – sometimes you have to fake it till you make it. "
Getting to the “So What?”: How Management Consulting Practices Can Transform Your Approach to Research
March 26, 2024
" Good research can be the best thing for the diagnosis of the problem in a strategy. "
Panel: Excellence in Impact
March 25, 2024
" It’s a moral obligation for organizations to engage with research and ethics; being mature is not optional anymore. "
What UX research maturity looks like and how we get there [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]
November 9, 2023
" If you want access to those names, you got to come through us and show your research plan, which helped us ensure quality. "
A Selectively Scrappy Approach to ResearchOps
November 8, 2018
