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Implementing a continuous discovery process
- Service design
- Strategy
- Research
Building a research operating system for three product squads — turning a siloed, PowerPoint-based research culture into a shared, always-on discovery practice that scaled with the team.
I was the sole designer across three product squads at Entertainment Partners. Each squad had a product manager, none of whom had strong research skills. Findings weren’t shared between teams. What research existed lived in poorly-structured PowerPoint decks no-one could find.
We were building payroll software used by major studios including Disney, Apple, and Netflix. The stakes were high enough that “we’ll do research when we get a chance” wasn’t good enough.
The problem
Three things were broken across the design and product practice:
- Inexperienced PMs — none of the three had run discovery research independently before
- Siloed findings — insights from one squad never reached the others, even when the underlying problems overlapped
- No institutional memory — research lived in individuals’ heads or in decks no-one could navigate
The compounding effect was simple. The same questions kept getting asked. The same participants got re-recruited. The same insights kept being rediscovered. As the only designer, I was a single point of failure for any work that needed research input.
What each role needed
- Run their own discovery without waiting for design
- Pull on prior research from other squads
- Quote real users in their roadmap conversations
- Stop being a bottleneck on research
- Build on prior insight rather than starting from scratch
- Make the discipline scalable beyond one designer
- Build the right things — not just the things that got asked for
- Reduce the cost of bad assumptions in payroll software
- Defend product decisions to studio clients with evidence
Approach
I worked the problem in two layers: a process the team could follow without me in the room, and a tooling layer that turned every research session into an asset the next session could build on.
The process is grounded in jobs-to-be-done — chosen because it forces the question of outcome over feature, and because it gives PMs without research training a structured way in.
What I designed
Outcomes
What changed for each role
- 100% reported the new process saved them time
- Began running their own discovery rounds without design support
- Cited real user quotes in roadmap conversations
- Promoted to Lead Product Designer at the close of this work
- Stopped being a bottleneck on early-stage research
- Reused insight across three squads instead of duplicating it
- Roadmaps became evidence-backed across all three squads
- Public template adopted beyond EP — extending the practice into the wider community