Building a craft and team at Mollie

I joined Mollie, an Amsterdam-based payments (fintech) company, as the first user researcher. My mission was two-fold: to encourage a culture of insights within the product development department, and to grow an impactful user research practice.

  • I began with socialising a vision for user research at Mollie. That vision was to increase the quality of evidence-based decision-making in product development with deep, actionable insights from user research. This was the mission we (the department and other researchers) rallied behind and strived towards, a collective agreement.

  • Being the start of this practice, a lot of my time was spent on enhancing our operations to deliver both evaluative and exploratory insights with efficiency, in collaboration with our product colleagues. I established a model where research was contributing to roadmap decisions and product direction as a strategic partner.

  • Quality over quantity was my aim for insuring our craft scaled with a high degree of value. I hired additional researchers to not only conduct necessary research, but also to grow a craft that consistently saught ways to improve, professionalize, and build for the future. I also led the adoption of research tooling, setting up a research repository, and a research panel.

Team building at Lobster Ink (Ecolab)

Lobster Ink was my first job in the Netherlands. I started as a Senior User Researcher, and shortly after transitioned into being the UX Team Manager. I helped the team maintain quality design and research processes whilst the company underwent an aquisition by Ecolab and the global coronavirus pandemic.

  • When I joined the company, design had been a function for several years. As we prepared for an aquisition, I saw to the team’s resiliency by implementing collaborative design-thinking practices with our colleagues in other departments, establishing design principles, inplementing strategic research projects to help set roadmap decisions, and advocating for user-centric product development at the product leadership level.

  • My time at Lobster Ink was a time of immense change. While we navigated both an aquisition and the shift to working from home during the global pandemic, I focused on highlighting our organisational impacts to leadership, and advocating for and empowering the individuals on my team.

  • During my time at Lobster Ink, I created an internship program for junior designers and researchers to explore their interests while having impact. Through the creation of team rituals, and by fostering a team culture of support and transparency, we were known as a team that was highly collaboartive, sensitive to both business and user needs, and thorough in our problem-solving.