Bringing Customer Research to More Internal Teams
Summary
Learn how Brad Orego, Head of Research at Auth0 is bringing research to teams of designers, marketers and product owners. His passion for customer research is infectious and in this 30-minute session, you'll learn his tips and tricks for getting more teams to do great research.
Key Insights
-
•
Starting a research practice with operations first enables a 10x increase in research throughput by establishing consistent methods and infrastructure.
-
•
Democratizing research lets hundreds of team members conduct their own studies, reserving the core research team for complex, cross-product questions.
-
•
Creating a cross-functional Customer Intelligence Alliance (CIA) with data science, product marketing, and competitive intelligence improves insight generation and alignment.
-
•
Recruiting research participants remains one of the biggest challenges, especially balancing enterprise and free/self-service user access.
-
•
Monthly research deep-dive workshops and on-demand training help build research maturity and consistent quality among internal teams.
-
•
Templates, note-taking frameworks, and review checkpoints are critical to maintaining documentation quality and meaningful insight sharing.
-
•
Early demonstration studies that show research process and outcomes can accelerate adoption and maturity among internal stakeholders.
-
•
Research ops frameworks like the 'eight pillars' help prioritize focus areas like tooling, knowledge management, and infrastructure when building or scaling a practice.
-
•
A centralized research team can tackle complex, strategic questions beyond individual product scope, such as broad user sign-in behavior.
-
•
Continuous collaboration between qualitative and quantitative research teams, including data science, improves understanding and validates hypotheses.
Notable Quotes
"We went from about one study per quarter to about one per team per quarter — about a 10x increase — which is absolutely insane."
"I should have done a few studies first to show people what it looks like, so they could copy templates and methods."
"Recruiting sucks, especially in enterprise B2B, so building robust recruiting pipelines and processes was critical for us."
"We’re not gatekeepers; we’re here to make sure research is accurate, efficient, and impactful, not to block people."
"The Customer Intelligence Alliance brings together research, data science, product marketing, and competitive intelligence in regular discussions."
"Different perspectives across functions generate insights you never would have thought of on your own."
"We do monthly research deep dives on different methods with examples and practice, open to anyone in the company."
"If someone does research and says 70% of users do X, I remind them you can’t make quantitative claims with qualitative data."
"Research is a freight train barreling through the company — build the stations and rails first with operations or risk derailment."
"Start doing operations now; you don’t need a dedicated team to begin and it puts you at the top when jobs open."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"When fellow co-workers label an individual as difficult, it's hard not to treat that individual as a problem."
Darian DavisLessons from a Toxic Work Relationship
January 8, 2024
"We can use mental model skylines with thinking styles to find support gaps we didn’t see before."
Indi YoungThinking styles: Mend hidden cracks in your market
January 8, 2025
"I want you to have the best time possible and bring your fullest self to our conference today."
Louis Rosenfeld Bria AlexanderDay 1 Welcome
September 23, 2024
"The Idea Exchange got 40 teams to participate together across design, research, marketing, program management, even legal."
Melissa Schmidt Adam MenterHow UX Research Hit It Big in Las Vegas
June 4, 2019
"It’s far more helpful to focus on removing bottlenecks and friction points in designers’ workflows than just trying to make them work faster."
Kristin Skinner Kamdyn Moore8 Types of Measures in Design Operations
April 16, 2020
"Taking a strategic lens means answering: what’s going on here? What do we do about it? And how do we align our actions coherently?"
Dave HoraAdvice for Establishing Research
December 8, 2022
"We started to reference something that became to call the triple D challenges: duplicated efforts, disjointed workflows, and distance from users."
Sean Fitzell Sarah Han Kayla FarrellCraft of User Research: Building Out Jobs to be Done Maps
March 12, 2021
"Just assume we haven’t read it and keep it quick."
Jason MesutShaping design, designers and teams
November 8, 2018
"Only 12% of employees strongly agree their organization does a great job onboarding new employees."
Dante GuintuHow to Crush the Talent Crunch
September 8, 2022
Latest Books All books
Dig deeper with the Rosenbot
What is double-loop learning and how does it differ from single-loop learning in organizations?
How can designers and developers share a collaborative workspace that includes both design and code artifacts?
How has the collapse of design institutions like IDEO impacted designers’ professional identity?