Case study 1: Scaling Design Research and Leading Through Change.
When I joined Travelport in 2022, research was fragile—just two people left after eight months without leadership.The function's reputation across the organization had taken a hit. I was brought in with two clear goals:
Scale research across the company to foster customer centricity and establish design OKRs by democratizing tactical methods, offering training, and establishing the foundations of behavioral analytics and CSAT.
Grow and strengthen the team: rebuild a team that could deliver strategic, high-volume insights while growing their own careers, providing career development for existing members, hiring new researchers, and building a culture of collaboration with Product and Engineering.
What We Did Together: Growing People, Not Just Headcount.
Built a team that reflects our users' complexity. Working closely with our UX Director and Talent team, we grew from 2 to 7 researchers across different specializations—qualitative, quantitative, and research operations. More importantly, we built a culture where asking "how do we know this?" or "how are we going to measure this?" became normal, even celebrated.
Over time, the team evolved significantly:
Career progression became real, not theoretical: One junior grew into a Senior Researcher, while another transitioned into a new role created as Research Operations.
I created the position and hired our first Quantitative Researcher to strengthen analytics, and a US-based Qualitative Researcher to increase our reach with local stakeholders.
Two interns in Mexico joined and developed their careers from scratch under our mentorship.
Later, following an acquisition, we integrated a new Research Lead into the team, while I assumed responsibility for overall team direction.
My manager prepared me for succession into a Director role, but after a company layoff, he was let go, and I stepped in as Interim Director.
Leading Through the Hard Parts
Layoffs are brutal. We went from 7 researchers to 3. The easy path would have been to retreat, protect what was left, and keep our heads down. Instead, we focused on resilience and impact. The smaller team doubled down on strategic work—prioritizing research that moved the needle on business goals while maintaining the culture of curiosity and support we'd built.
What kept us going:
Transparency: I shared what I knew (and what I didn't) about organizational changes
Focus: We said no to low-impact requests and protected the team's energy for work that mattered
Celebrating small wins: Every insight that influenced a product decision, every workshop that shifted a conversation—we acknowledged it
Despite the turbulence and layoffs, we maintained team focus and resilience, managing a smaller group of three researchers while continuing to deliver strategic impact. I stepped up to lead large design and research teams during times of transition, ultimately managing full departmental budgets, tools, and OKRs.
What Changed
The Culture: That shift from research being something that "happened to" teams to research being how teams work? That's the transformation I'm most proud of.
Research requests increased 300% (but we didn't become a bottleneck—we enabled teams to do more themselves)
Product and engineering teams now reference research insights in 65%+ of roadmap discussions
Design OKRs—CSAT, ease of use, task completion—are now tracked and presented in All-Company calls
Product teams regularly share clips from user interviews that spark new product initiatives
What I Learned
Leadership during change isn't about having all the answers. It's about showing up consistently, being honest about uncertainty, and protecting your team's energy for work that matters. When my manager was let go and I stepped into the Interim Director role, I didn't pretend to know how everything would turn out. I just focused on what we could control: delivering impact, supporting each other, and staying true to our values.
You can't scale yourself, but you can scale a practice. Early on, I tried to be in every research project. Burnout came fast. Learning to coach others, trust the team, and focus on systems over individual heroics was hard—but it's what made us resilient when headcount dropped.
ResearchOps is a form of care. When you remove friction—bad templates, confusing processes, unclear recruitment rules—you're not just being efficient. You're showing teams you respect their time and want to set them up for success.
Career development can't wait for perfect conditions. We created new roles (ResearchOps), promoted people (Junior to Senior), and mentored interns during layoffs and transitions. Growth doesn't stop because times are hard—sometimes it's even more important then.
Key Takeaways
This journey demonstrates resilience, leadership through organizational change, and the ability to scale research from a fragile function into a trusted strategic partner. But more than that, it's a story about building something durable—a practice, a team culture, and an infrastructure that could weather the storms and come out stronger.
Research at Travelport isn't just a team now—it's how the company makes decisions. And that shift happened because we focused on systems, people, and impact, even when everything around us was changing.