Our cross functional team set a lofty goal – to enable game changing innovation with ease within the highly regulated FinTech space at Capital One. The first step to enabling innovation was to discover ways make it easier to talk to customers and consistently gather feedback to inform product decisions.
I led the effort to remove blockers and enable research efforts with the goal of conducting research with customers on a weekly cadence.
When we started the effort, teams were conducting research, but were not researching with their actual customers. Research was not happening quickly enough or consistently enough, which was hindering our teams from being innovative.
The Problem to Solve
Conducting research directly with customers was a lengthy 2 to 3 month process. This limited the team in their ability to gain valuable feedback on new ideas quickly enough to truly be innovative and customer backed in their approach as product, engineering and design.
My Role
I led the initiative to enable weekly research directly with customers in a well managed and compliant way.
Creating the mechanism
Working within a highly regulated space meant that there were several constraints to gaining access to customers and being able to conduct research with them. I led a cross functional tiger team focused on enabling research directly with customers. I took on and assigned tasks to remove blockers in partnership with data, legal, compliance and others to start a pilot.
Streamline
During the pilot, 3 themes emerged that we needed to improve in order to scale the process.
Templates
We created templates for discussion guides and synthesis and established clear guidelines on the process to make conducting research a grab and go process.
Training
We trained up everyone in design and product to ensure they felt comfortable conducting research with customers and knew how to do so in a compliant way.
Access
We partnered with design operations to ensure everyone had access to the tools needed to conduct, synthesize and save research findings.
Results
- Research lead time went from 2 months to 1 day
- The time needed for a study went from 3 months to 1 week
- Research became democratized, ensuring that design wasn’t a bottle neck for conducting research with customers
- All of this was done in a way to minimized risk and was in line with legal and compliance governance