Understanding your product from start to finish is easier said than done. The same goes for integrating research into every stage of a project. Danielle Smith found that she would often work on foundational projects for a product team, then move right along to the next thing, losing sight of the end-to-end experience. When she was tasked with building the research team at Express Scripts, she knew she wanted to have a better view of the big picture. So she brought  data scientists, analysts, pro survey designers, and user researchers together to create a superpowered experience team.

Danielle talked about…

• How combining different disciplines has improved her recruitment process.
• Being able to support more cross-functional career interests.
• What she’d do differently if she built a team like this from the ground up again.

Highlights

• [2:28] Combining different disciplines is the best way Danielle has found to actually get that end-to-end view of the product.
• [5:23] Danielle's multi-disciplinary team grew out of a need to understand complex analytics more thoroughly.
• [8:22] Having everyone involved in research from start to finish helped Express Scripts build more representative research panels.
• [10:27] Career development is easier for team members who would otherwise be siloed. 
• [20:08] Working in cross-functional teams means there's more buy-in from stakeholders, since they're working with researchers more often.
• [21:23] If Danielle did it all over, she'd focus on finding more mixed-methods people to help build connections between specialists. 

About our guest

Danielle Smith is a user research leader, most recently Managing Director of Digital Inclusion & Research at Express Scripts. She became passionate about building an end-to-end experience team when she saw there was a gap in her team’s understanding of core analytics. She has previously worked on the User Research teams at Dell and Paypal.