Building a research system that outlives you
Turning scattered research into a shared practice for a federal policy team at the Centers for Medicaid and CHIP.
Challenge
The Medicaid & CHIP eRegulations team had completed valuable discovery research, but the insights were locked in one person's head and file structure. When that researcher moved on, the team risked losing months of work and stalling entirely.
Solution
I mapped the team's research practice end to end, then designed a connected system using tools they already had (Notion, Dovetail, Google Docs, Mural) plus templates that embedded good research methodology into everyday workflows. I trained designers, the product manager, and subject matter experts to run and document their own research.
Outcome
Research became a shared team capability instead of a single specialist's job. The system outlasted my tenure (solidly enough that the team could backfill with a junior researcher instead of a senior one) and later, when they lost access to users entirely for a period of time, two years of organized research kept the work moving.