Betsy Drews

Kind of like know what to expect, no surprises.

It's been such a, like, I don't want to say, like, breath of fresh air, but, like, such a change from the constraints we adopt and embrace with our design work.

It's just, we could, like, the team energy totally built over time.

Like, starting with research practice, like, this is going to be a big effort.

But I think having, like, the creative freedom and democratizing it through the team has just, like, really...

made it a fun process.

Jumping back a little bit at the end of 2024, Nick made a research ops as an objective for 2025.

And then another big piece of that, we co-created a roadmap, which led to all that research production.

And the roadmap included scope, things like that, what we thought would fit into the vision we wanted to create for the practice overall.

And then with that vision, we wanted to, like, distribute it through the team, like, the ownership of the vision.

We're all going to be executing this research.

We'll all be picking up stories.

So we all wanted to have that opportunity to weigh in on how we approach it.

And, yeah, that was something that was pretty cool and no constraints, like...

you have a focus area you're interested in, passionate about, go for it.

And we all had a big portion of this big research pie.

So that in itself was super fun to have that equal ownership.

And then I think it also helped us evolve concepts faster.

The most memorable point of collaboration, I think, was when we got together to build the first draft of the cookbook.

We had a full day workshop.