Scott Guirlinger
Product Design & Organizational Leadership
Product Design & Organizational Leadership
Challenge
In many enterprise software organizations, UX research lives at the margins — a few studies per year, disconnected from the roadmap, and largely invisible to decision-makers. At Octave, the UX organization had research capability, but it wasn't systematically embedded into how product decisions got made.
Insights were generated but often didn't travel. Customer feedback from support, services, and customer success sat in separate systems and rarely made it into design or product conversations. As a result, teams were making decisions with incomplete information, duplicating research efforts, and missing opportunities to learn from existing customer knowledge.
Approach
What began as an effort to improve research execution ultimately became an effort to improve how the organization learns.
Building the infrastructure for organizational learning
As our research practice matured, it became clear that our existing tools could not support the way we wanted teams to learn from customers. Research findings were scattered across presentations, documents, and individual hard drives, making insights difficult to discover and nearly impossible to reuse. At the same time, our only moderated testing platform was built on aging desktop software that was no longer supported by the vendor, and we lacked any capability for unmoderated testing.
I led the evaluation, procurement, and rollout of two foundational platforms: Dovetail for research management and Lyssna for rapid usability testing. Rather than treating these as UX-only tools, I positioned them as organizational capabilities that could improve customer understanding across teams and business units.
The impact extended well beyond my immediate organization. I led Lyssna procurement and governance across six divisions within Hexagon and continued in that role following the Octave spin-off. Dovetail became our central repository for customer insights, accessible company-wide through single sign-on, creating a transparent and searchable knowledge base that transformed individual research findings into shared organizational memory.
Connecting siloed sources of customer insight
I built channels between the UX team and customer-facing functions — support, services, and customer success — that had been sitting on rich qualitative data without a mechanism to route it into design decisions. This created a more complete and continuous picture of the customer experience.
Shifting research from validation to learning
Many research requests began with a predetermined outcome: validate a design, confirm an assumption, or justify a release decision. I partnered with product leadership to reframe research as a tool for reducing uncertainty rather than confirming existing beliefs.
Instead of asking, "Can we prove we're right?" teams increasingly began asking, "What's the most important thing we need to learn before making this decision?" That shift helped position research earlier in the product lifecycle and increased its strategic value.
Building research capability across the team
Rather than relying solely on specialists, I created templates, training materials, playbooks, and coaching programs that enabled designers to conduct research more effectively. This expanded research capacity throughout the organization while increasing consistency and confidence in the insights being generated.
As adoption grew, several team members developed deep expertise and interest in research, helping lay the foundation for a dedicated research function.
Establishing a dedicated research function
For more than a decade, leaders within the organization had discussed the potential value of a dedicated user research capability. Despite broad agreement on its importance, competing priorities and uncertainty around ownership prevented those conversations from translating into action.
Rather than waiting for the perfect moment, I chose to start small. By building research capability within the design team, demonstrating measurable value on high-impact products, and creating visibility into customer insights, we were able to establish credibility and generate demand organically.
As interest grew, several team members demonstrated exceptional aptitude for research and increasingly focused their efforts in that area. And what began as a capability-building effort ultimately created sustained demand for research expertise across the organization. This momentum ultimately led to the creation of a dedicated research function—one that continues to expand today as product teams actively seek research support for critical initiatives.
Challenge | Action | Outcome |
Research insights trapped in silos | Dovetail repository and governance | Shared organizational memory |
Slow access to customer feedback | Lyssna rollout across divisions | Faster learning cycles |
Limited research capacity | Research enablement program | Expanded team capability |
Disconnected customer-facing functions | Insight-sharing channels | More complete customer understanding |
Validation-focused mindset | Learning and risk-reduction framework | Earlier strategic influence |
Results
- Shared organizational memory established through a company-wide research repository
- Dovetail adopted across ~90% of the UX organization
- Lyssna adopted across six divisions within Hexagon (prior to Octave spinoff)
- Dedicated research function established after more than a decade of discussion
- Research turnaround time reduced by approximately 80%
- Growing demand reflected in an expanding backlog of research requests
- Research informed roadmap and design decisions across multiple product lines
When customer insight becomes accessible, actionable, and shared, organizations make better decisions. That's the goal.
Leadership Reflection
This experience reinforced a lesson I've seen repeatedly throughout my career: organizations improve when knowledge can move. Customer insights have little value when they remain trapped within teams, tools, or functions.
What began as an effort to improve research execution ultimately became an effort to improve how the organization learns. By making research easier to conduct, easier to find, and easier to share, we increased the organization's ability to learn from customers and make better decisions at scale.
Continue the Story →
How customer insight began influencing planning and prioritization.