Projects

• Business Context: Stakeholders across the Product Org lacked direct and timely access to users, which limited audience empathy and understanding.

• My Approach: I designed and piloted a self-service program that enables program participants such as Product Managers and Designers to deepen their audience empathy and understanding through talking directly with users. I grounded the program in our core audiences and their professional Jobs to be Done, helping participants focus on audience goals that matter most. I also created an interview guide template that primarily focused on observing an audience's natural workflow as they pursued their jobs to be done related tasks to boost awareness of users' actual behaviors. Lastly, I trained program participants on best practices for engaging live with users, such as sharing tips to avoid asking leading questions.

• Business Impact: My self-service program was impactful at scale with 100% of pilot participants reporting better audience understanding and empathy after participating. This program has now been scaled across LinkedIn's entire Product Org.

• Business Context: LinkedIn's Creator Team prioritized three strategic segments of content creators as part of its new business strategy. The strategy had open questions around what would drive each segment to post quality knowledge content more frequently.

• My Approach: Two of these three segments were easily accessible at scale, so I crafted an international, quantitative survey exploring their motivators for posting and barriers to post. While the third creator segment was less accessible at scale, so I collected that segment's data through qualitative 1:1 interviews and visualized it through a multi-media journey map, using AI-generated images to assist with effective storytelling and conveying emotional sentiment.

• Key Insights: This research was effective at identifying the biggest motivators and barriers to post across the three priority segments, as well as pinpointing where they differed across segments.

• Business Impact: I'm in the process of preparing a strategic narrative to recommend changes to LinkedIn's product leadership team surrounding ways in which we can address the top barriers to post and amplify the biggest motivators to post. These changes will support the strategic goal of driving quality knowledge content creation at scale.

• Business Context: The LinkedIn team aimed to better attract, onboard, and retain new LinkedIn members over their first month on the platform.

• My Approach: Because so many product areas influence the new member experience, I worked collaboratively with several other UX researchers across different product areas to conduct a robust, international diary study that followed participants across many key member segments from the guest experience to onboarding and sign up, and across their first month using the platform. We included 11 product areas as part of this study and had over 100 internal stakeholders involved.

• Key Insights: This study resulted in an interactive journey map artifact that followed new members as they explored LinkedIn's guest experience, signed up for LinkedIn tracked their natural behavior and feature exploration over their first month on the platform. It helped us understand value drivers that helped retain new members, as well as pain points that drove new members away from our platform.

• Business Impact: This study drove improvements to LinkedIn's guest experience, sign up and new member onboarding flow, as well as common early features new members use like the LinkedIn Profile. These product changes boosted new member sign up and retention rates.

• Business Context: I've worked on several LinkedIn teams that have operated more as internal startup accelerators on venture bet growth products, due to my ability to conduct quick turnaround, scrappy research when necessary. Some examples of these features are audio and short form video experiences. These new features are often looking to achieve product market fit and drive next day retention to their products.

• My Approach: I always work within the venture bet teams' timelines and get creative with approaches to meet their needs. For example, I use async dScout media surveys to quick async feedback on prototypes. I also suggest and lead usability heuristic reviews in place of more lengthy usability testing. And I partner with engineers to collaborate on relevance matching designs, rooted in a robust synthesis I did of recurring (evergreen) relevance matching factors, that's typically applicable to new features teams are exploring as well.

• Key Insights: My findings have spanned ways to improve new feature discoverability and understanding, surface credibility indicators for video content creators, and power the relevance distribution and matching in logic that resonates with members' needs/ Jobs to be Done.

• Business Impact: My findings helped drive the success of the venture bet features. For instance, my video metadata research informed which metadata we surface under short form video, to aid in video discovery and video creator trust perceptions. And the experiments that I worked on with the engineering team for video relevance distribution boosted next day video retention by 12%.