Scaling a Startup to Enterprise-Ready UX
How do you leverage UX & market research to help AI-driven life insurance underwriting software find its first major sale?
Management Research Services (MRS) has a highly complex, flexible no-code enterprise platform. As their first UX hire, I was responsible for building their UX team and conducting complex research with multi-million dollar clients.
This project helped MRS gain their largest client, nearly doubling projected revenue.
Created research framework and led all research strategy
Synthesize research findings into a roadmap and actionable takeaways
Developed UX team from ground-up, including skills progression plans, 1:1s, hiring
Manage team of designers who created prototypes, mockups, design system.
The Process
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Prioritizing Research
The MRS solution was built organically over time and now needed a significant feature and design overall. Prioritizing research enabled us to view the problem holistically and develop a user-driven hypothesis.
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Research & Report Out
My team and I interviewed current users, analyzed the competitive landscape, reviewed backlog requests, and conducted a heuristical evaluation. From there, I reported our findings to the C-level and made high-level design recommendations.
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Prioritization & Roadmapping
Product Management, Engineering, the CTO, and I worked in tandem on all features discovered through research. I conducted a prioritization workshop to triage. Then, the Director of Product and I developed a roadmap for the engineering teams.
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Design Experimentation
I led structured collaboration to brainstorm an overall direction for wireframing and concept testing. We wanted to bring real users into these sessions as early as possible. From there, the agile teams took over.
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Agile Team Collaboration
Each agile team had a UX designer who reported to me. They worked with their agile teams to develop mockups and live prototypes for usability testing. Testing was iterative alongside implementation for production.
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Ongoing Standards & Metrics
I started a basic design system to keep our teams working in sync. One of the UXers picked it up and built a thorough React-based Design System within Figma and Storybook. I measured iterative success through efficiency metrics and NPS scores.
Prioritizing Research
Like any tech startup, MRS wanted to dive into feature production and requirements writing immediately. They had a niche market, a great product idea, and the assumption they could just fill in the blanks along the way.
We could start delivering minor design and development pieces within a two-week sprint cadence, but I needed to sell the CTO and CEO on slowing down to speed up. We needed a research project.
I presented a "State of Research" encompassing education about the importance of user-driven research, outlining what data we had immediately available and proposing an overall research framework.
We agreed on taking a few small research "bets" to find immediate improvements alongside a longer months-long deep dive.
Conducting Research & Personas
The research consisted of three phases: working with internal users and analytics, usability testing and interviews with real users, and conducting a comprehensive industry and competitive analysis. Research fed into the creation of a roadmap, as well as the first batch of MRS personas. I also presented findings to the C level to get alignment on what findings we should prioritize.
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The platform was a highly configurable solution initially built for internal configuration teams. I started with them. We discussed how the platform could simplify their job, shortcuts, and "tips" they learned along the way. I also reviewed our current analytics and conducted a heuristical evaluation based on Nielsen Norman Group's ten heuristics.
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Internal insights gave me a great starting point, but I needed to verify assumptions with current and potential future users. I interviewed and conducted usability testing with a combination of users (new-to-role, regular, and power users) to reduce individual bias.
This became the foundation work for personas we developed later on.
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I analyzed over a dozen companies, direct competitors, and distant newcomers. I conducted a SWOT, looked at their feature sets, and benchmarked their public-facing user experience. We had a potential niche, but the market was tight.
Roadmapping & Prioritization
Next, I brought a list of recommended features to present to the C-level for approval. I worked with the PO to develop a list of product backlog items, analyzing them for user impact versus developer effort. We devised a roadmap and presented the outcomes to the tech teams.
Feature Brainstorming based on insights from initial research
Prioritized Matrix of PBIs by effort and impact
Roadmap of features we want to experiment with
Design Experimentation
I led a design workshop with a cross-functional team to develop experiments that we could conduct to meet the business needs of the UW Workbench. For most of the group, this was their first time doing any virtual collaboration. We used a combination of Miro and Figma. Based on their ideas, I did some rapid prototyping to bring to our clients. The high level ideas went over well so it was time to transition to the teams.
Design Workshop online with a cross-functional team
Wireframing ideas that the team came up with
Prototyping in Figma
Concept Testing with several clients
Agile Team Collaboration
Next, I brought a list of recommended features to present to the C-level for approval. I worked with the PO to develop a list of product backlog items, analyzing them for user impact versus developer effort. We devised a roadmap and presented the outcomes to the tech teams.
Feature Brainstorming based on insights from initial research
Prioritized Matrix of PBIs by effort and impact
Roadmap of features we want to experiment with
Ongoing Standards & Metrics
Our design team worked on a design system to keep our teams working in sync. They started building within Figma and then moved to components within Storybook and React. The Design System accounted for all branding standards, components, patterns, and some starting recommendations for accessibility.
We already had a solid foundation for hypothesis-driven designs from the ongoing research. We measured our hypothesis through qualitative and quantitative testing, efficiency metrics, and NPS scores.
Oversaw and gave feedback on Design System production
Usability testing, user interviews and shadowing
Metrics, analytics and quantitative testing
Surveys, self-reported data and NPS scores