Research Leadership and Capability Building
Some of my most useful contributions at Tripadvisor started from a loose intent without any plan attached. Others came from noticing a gap the team or our practice had and acting on it. While the starting points were different, the direction was mine to define and the delivery was mine to own.
A pulse check programme built from scratch
When I joined the Global Markets team, there was an intent to keep the Marketing organisation regularly connected to how travellers from different markets planned and made booking decisions. But nothing concrete had been defined. I built and ran a monthly programme of short interviews designed to be lightweight enough to run consistently and specific enough to be useful.
I shared each month's findings at the Marketing townhall. They also fed directly into a Global Markets newsletter that went out across Tripadvisor. It was not a flagship research project. It was infrastructure, and infrastructure is what makes research sustainable.
A shared standard for how insights landed
Research findings only drive decisions when stakeholders can see clearly what the findings mean and why they matter. For a while, how researchers at Tripadvisor structured and presented their work varied considerably across the UXR team, and that variation had a cost. The team shared an ambition to address this, but no one had worked out how.
I co-developed the UXR Slide Stack with our team's Research Ops specialist: a shared set of practices and reference points that aligned the team on how to communicate insights with greater clarity and impact. It gave everyone a common starting point and raised the floor on how findings reached stakeholders and what they meant for decision-making.
A better tool for virtual workshops
I introduced Mentimeter to the UXR team as a tool for running virtual workshops and facilitating group discussions at a time when most research was happening remotely. The difference it made was practical and immediate.
More participants and stakeholders felt heard. Discussions were easier to run and engage with. The UXR team adopted it, and it became part of how other researchers ran their own North Star research when they reviewed initial concepts with different stakeholder groups.
The first AI prototyping framework at Tripadvisor
When the Community team began exploring AI-powered features, I was the first researcher at Tripadvisor to work directly with Design and Product on AI prototyping. There was no existing guidance for how to do this responsibly or evaluate when to even prototype with AI.
I developed the guidelines and decision framework from scratch, drawing on what the prototyping work itself revealed about where the risks and opportunities lay. Sharing it broadly with the organisation was my initiative. That was not part of anyone's brief, but it was exactly the kind of work that needed doing.