Benny Brooks

And now we're really embedding that user research practice like into our design practice.

So, yeah.

So we went from kind of like engaging with separate teams to understand user needs to doing most of it ourselves.

And so now we kind of need to have this practice that supports quick pivots between mindsets where we're either learning to build or building to learn.

Oh, sure.

Yeah.

From like things that support that growth.

So I would say like from the bump, Benny, who you might downplay himself a little bit, is just our design and research ops master.

So like a big part of like setting the foundation here is is.

you know again we were a ux re or ux design team engaging with research teams like outside of our team right so what does that look like when that research practice is embedded in that ux practice so it's no longer just a ux backlog it's a ux and research backlog right so we use azure devops um for you know agile product development management

And so one of the first things we did was Benny led an exercise to get some research stories in there, right?

So in the past, a lot of our stories in Azure DevOps or ADO as we call it, would be research support stories.

So largely characterized by ourselves creating prototypes for someone else to bring into research.

Or we would also have research stories for doing evaluative usability tests using usertesting.com.

So that pretty much were the two types of research stories that we had.

So we needed to create a whole bunch of new research stories to include doing our own primary qualitative research and including a bunch of different methods.

divergent user stories.

We have evaluative user or research stories.

So we've got all of these stories, which then allow us to measure.

So when we first started with this new mandate, our goals were pretty modest.