A Fintech Giant Uplevels Its Research Team

A leading fintech research team had grown from a handful of UXRs to 50 in a short period of time.

While growth is great, it’s easy to lose sight of skill assessment and improvement. A progressive manager recognized that her people – and she – deserved coaching. The program operates on both the team and individual level, with 4 modules of interactive group learning, plus individual in-depth coaching.

The custom program uses projects in play – no self-paced, asynchronous or canned training that team members have to figure out how to apply or remember to use.

And because integration is the key to any coaching investment, we provide a roadmap of the top 5 skills the team needs the most work on going forward, and tactics to get there. Individuals know exactly what they need to get to mastery, and the team becomes a force in the company.

Research is sought out not only as a value add, but a must have for all human-centered product design.

“Julie has two obvious super powers: empathy and deep qualitative research. When you bring them together, you get one of the most powerful research coaching programs I’ve had the opportunity to witness.

The problem to solve: develop a qualitative coaching program for a team of 40 researchers, who range in skill and experience from entry level to late career. Meet each of them where they are, and help every person up their game from their own baseline. And, do it in a way that feels psychologically safe, so that each researcher can feel vulnerable and open to feedback.

That’s a tall order. But Julie took the brief in stride and delivered a compelling multi-part training program followed by in-depth observations of every team member.

She considered the entire participant experience from setup to close. She wrote up multi-page analyses and coupled her assessments with empathic coaching calls that many remarked as being among the most impactful of their career.

Seasoned researchers noted that they hadn’t had the benefit of an honest skill assessment in years, and they were so grateful for the opportunity. Leaders walked away with a clear understanding of what the top skills were for team members across the organization, allowing us to create peer mentoring pairings for continued growth.

We can readily see the increased confidence and craft in every single team member thanks to Julie’s gifts, facilitation prowess, and genuine passion for developing skills in others.” Jes K. – Head of Client Experience Research