#54 - End-to-End Experience Teams with Danielle Smith of Express Scripts

Understanding your product from start to finish is easier said than done. The same goes for integrating research into every stage of a project. Danielle Smith found that she would often work on foundational projects for a product team, then move right along to the next thing, losing sight of the end-to-end experience. When she was tasked with building the research team at Express Scripts, she knew she wanted to have a better view of the big picture. So she brought data scientists, analysts, pro survey designers, and user researchers together to create a superpowered experience team.

Danielle talked about…

• How combining different disciplines has improved her recruitment process.
• Being able to support more cross-functional career interests.
• What she’d do differently if she built a team like this from the ground up again.

Highlights

• [2:28] Combining different disciplines is the best way Danielle has found to actually get that end-to-end view of the product.
• [5:23] Danielle's multi-disciplinary team grew out of a need to understand complex analytics more thoroughly.
• [8:22] Having everyone involved in research from start to finish helped Express Scripts build more representative research panels.
• [10:27] Career development is easier for team members who would otherwise be siloed.
• [20:08] Working in cross-functional teams means there's more buy-in from stakeholders, since they're working with researchers more often.
• [21:23] If Danielle did it all over, she'd focus on finding more mixed-methods people to help build connections between specialists.

About our guest

Danielle Smith is a user research leader, most recently Managing Director of Digital Inclusion & Research at Express Scripts. She became passionate about building an end-to-end experience team when she saw there was a gap in her team’s understanding of core analytics. She has previously worked on the User Research teams at Dell and Paypal.