A retro, a realisation, and a repo

Seven designers sat around a retro table, sticky notes digitally flying. A theme emerged: “Google Drive is chaos”, “We need a central research hub”, “Where even is that insight about tutor consistency?”

I saw more than frustration - I saw an opportunity.

Context

Years of valuable qualitative research conducted at MyTutor was scattered across Slack threads, hidden in personal folders, or buried in siloed systems. There was no consistent approach to how research was conducted, stored, or shared. Stakeholders lacked a clear path to trusted insights, making it hard to make informed, confident decisions.

Role

I led a team of two to uncover the wider problem, decide on the solution, drive implementation, and champion adoption of the repository across the company.

We worked closely with a market researcher and key stakeholders in Design, Product, Market research, B2B and Tutors teams.

Impact

Researchers worked smarter. Stakeholders made better decisions. Knowledge became a strategic asset.

Returned 27% of our third party tool, Condens’, total cost in the first month due to improved operational efficiencies.

The problem

Through a series of conversations with relevant team members we uncovered three key insights:

  • Research was everywhere - and nowhere
    Valuable insights were scattered across Google Drive, Slack and personal folders. Everyone agreed: we needed a single, central place where the whole company could access research.

  • Processes were inconsistent, but researchers were ready to align
    Each researcher had their own approach to planning, scripting, recruiting, and reporting because they had to figure things out solo. They were keen to standardise these practices to save time and effort.

  • Stakeholders couldn’t access insights when they needed them most
    They often recalled useful research but had no clear way to find or validate it. They wanted to both reference insights easily - in meetings, decks, or new projects - and proactively check what already existed.

At a time when the company was focused on becoming profitable, enabling teams to self-serve insights efficiently wasn’t just helpful, it was essential.

Our goals were clear:

  1. Make research easy to find, use, and trust by everyone across the business

  2. Simplify and streamline research operations

As were our constraints; this project had to happen alongside our normal workload.

The approach

We began by defining what we actually needed from a research repository. That list became our framework for evaluating both new and existing tools. After weighing up our options, two front-runners emerged: Dovetail and Condens.

We took our findings to key stakeholders and with their input, we aligned on Condens as the best fit and built a business case for final approval. Once Condens was greenlit, the real work began. We collaborated with designers and market researchers to shape a shared taxonomy, ensuring insights would be consistently tagged and easily searchable. We ran a card-sorting exercise with stakeholders to validate how they thought about finding information.

To support long-term success, I created a suite of templates for research plans, scripts, and reports to help researchers run consistent studies and make it easier to upload existing work. I also wrote how-to guides to onboard teams into the platform smoothly.

We established a Library Champions taskforce: one representative from each team who helped migrate research, supported their colleagues, and acted as internal advocates for Condens. These champions were key to embedding the tool into everyday workflows.

We introduced Condens to the wider company at an All-Hands, where it received rave reviews. To build ongoing momentum, we spotlighted new or relevant research each month via Slack.

…and no stakeholder engagement happens without a bit of music, right? We asked a musically gifted colleague to create a ‘jingle’ we could use in meetings when talking about Condens. You can check it out below:

The Impact

By launch, we’d migrated 142 existing research reports into Condens. The overall number of reports has since grown to over 200.

In just the first month, we covered 27% of Condens’ annual cost through operational efficiency gains alone.

Researchers were spending less time recreating work, and stakeholders were accessing insights faster and with more confidence.

The learnings

I’ve learned how much people value being able to read and build on past research. When you get buy-in and bring people along with you, they don’t just contribute - they get genuinely excited. Insights don’t exist in isolation, and building good products (and good companies) is all about evolving together. But that’s hard to do when some of your most valuable knowledge is buried or forgotten. My takeaway? Wherever I work, I’ll always make sure research is centralised, easy to find, and part of the way we work…not just a phase we do once.