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

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