When I joined Paychex, Inc., I inherited a 60+ person design organization driving experience strategy across 17+ products—from payroll to compliance to workforce management. Leading three UX Design Managers, a UX Research Manager, and a Content Manager, I quickly identified a critical gap: product leadership hungered for deeper strategic insights to sharpen our competitive edge, but our research function was operating at a 1:12 ratio and struggling to deliver beyond tactical support.
I conducted a cross-functional diagnostic with senior product, engineering, and marketing leaders. The revelation: our research team was locked in a 1:12 researcher-to-designer ratio, consumed by tactical quantitative studies that individual contributors could own with the right enablement. By democratizing these methods, we could unlock our researchers to pursue the qualitative, strategic discovery work that would truly differentiate our product ecosystem.
Partnering with my UX leadership team and Principal Researchers, we rearchitected our research operating model. We codified quantitative vs. qualitative workflows, quantified the ROI of each methodology, and launched a comprehensive upskilling program empowering individual contributors to lead their own quantitative studies. Within 60 days, usability testing cycle time plummeted from 14 days to 3—a 78% acceleration—while our research team pivoted to journey mapping and strategic discovery, delivering the competitive insights product leadership demanded.
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