Unifying research and design operations across four acquired companies into a cohesive, scalable practice.
Bounteous grew rapidly through acquisition, merging with four companies over three years. Each brought their own methodologies, templates, quality standards, and definitions of success. There was no "Bounteous way"—no unified approach to discovery, no consistent deliverable quality, no shared language for how we talk about research and design.
Without unified processes, we couldn't scale. Senior practitioners were reinventing the wheel on every project. Junior team members had no clear path to success. Quality was inconsistent across client engagements, and we were losing institutional knowledge every time someone changed teams or left the company.
The stakes were real: client satisfaction was at risk, team development was stalled, and we couldn't grow the practice without building the infrastructure to support that growth. We needed to create a unified operating system for UX at Bounteous—one that preserved the best of what each company brought while establishing consistent standards and quality gates.
I focused on building from the foundation up, starting with discovery—the phase where methodology matters most and where inconsistency creates the biggest downstream problems.
Built the discovery practice from the ground up—defining what good discovery looks like at Bounteous, creating templates and playbooks, and establishing quality gates. This became the foundation for onboarding practitioners from acquired companies and ensuring consistent starting points across engagements.
Developed an insight-driven design audit methodology and playbook that connected research findings directly to design decisions. This gave teams a shared language and made the research-to-design handoff explicit and traceable—no more insights that disappear into the void.
Created a formal partnership model between UX and Conversion Rate Optimization teams, defining how research informs experimentation and how test results feed back into design iteration. This broke down silos and created a continuous learning loop.
Built a comprehensive template library for both generative research (discovery, JTBD interviews, ethnography) and evaluative research (usability testing, concept testing, preference testing). These templates encode best practices and reduce ramp-up time for new practitioners.
Documented the "Bounteous way" explicitly so that practitioners joining through acquisition had a clear path to understanding our methods, quality standards, and ways of working. This reduced integration time and helped us preserve the best practices from each acquired company while establishing shared standards.
Discovery templates standardizing research planning, participant recruitment, interview guides, and synthesis across all engagements.
Insight-driven design playbook creating a shared language for how research informs design.
CRO partnership framework establishing how experimentation and design work together.
"[PLACEHOLDER: Add testimonial from team member about how unified processes improved their work, or from a client about consistent quality across engagements]"
[Name] — [Title]
Starting with discovery as the foundation was the right call—it's the phase where methodology matters most and where inconsistency creates the biggest downstream problems. Building templates that encode best practices (rather than just documenting them) made adoption much easier. People could start using them immediately rather than reading documentation.
I would have involved acquired team members earlier in defining the unified approach. Some of the best practices we landed on came from the companies we acquired, and we could have gotten there faster with more collaborative definition. Integration works better as co-creation than imposition.
This experience demonstrates building and scaling UX operations across multiple entities with different cultures, methodologies, and definitions of success—arguably a harder integration challenge than scaling within a single organization. The skills translate directly to leading UX across multiple product lines: establishing shared standards while allowing for domain-specific needs, creating processes that scale, and building the infrastructure that lets teams do their best work.