It's not UX without research.
For many new products, I helped define user journeys to map commonalities across extremely complex processes, conducting in-depth task analysis interviews with both internal and external users.
I led in-person and remote design thinking and affinity mapping workshops for product owners to ideate, define a scope, and identify pain points and opportunities before prototyping and testing.
I also guided a project to modernize old personas in order to help product leaders with strategy development.
When discussing research with engineers or product strategists who usually focus on big data and quantitative methods, I constantly evangelized the validity of qualitative data research.
”Who said that?”
Product owners are sometimes anxious about feedback received from existing clients. I made sure that all our testing was 100% anonymized, so that everyone could concentrate on the meaning of the results, instead of worrying about sales.
”We want a culture of openness”
From a business standpoint, it's beneficial for a team to feel that they can be honest with each other. But during testing, you're more likely to get genuine responses from a user if they know what they say is private.