Hi, I’m Ciara

As a lifelong learner I’m always excited to learn new things from a new hobby, a new research method, or even new insights into my customers. With degrees in social sciences, my undergrad degree focused on studying human behavior and my graduate degree refined my research skills.

As a researcher at the Girl Scouts of the USA I got to explore how girls wanted to learn and what, along with how best to support them. Through focus groups, large scale surveys, and interviews I not only evaluated programs but uncovered areas for future growth. As their programming moved into digital spaces, I stepped up to ensure our same rigor of inquiry was covered. I remember taking a UX course back then and asking the instructor if there were people who just did the UX research, and he basically laughed at the concept. Well it turns out I was an early adopter.

At BUILT BY GIRLS I arrived to a small team of 3, with my presence making the product team a team of 2. In my first year in the role I overhauled the customer service processes and framework, used existing user data to develop user personas, and conducted user interviews for an in progress product build. 3 years later and I had also distributed tri-annual membership surveys, conducted over 100 user interviews, led and evaluated focus groups, and even designed new product features. While always leading with research first, my role on this small team was flexible and multi-faceted responding to what our business needs first.

Most recently at Medallia, I’ve restarted their UX research discipline. I came on the heels of the departure of the previous researchers with very few artifacts left behind to assist me in rebuilding the practice. While Medallia has a complex and vast enterprise product, they have also acquired several new products in the year before I joined and in my tenure. With 15 portfolio products, and 4 product pillars, I had to work fast to find ways to collaborate with fully distributed and remote product teams. I also invested my time in building out a research panel with one of those most elusive of cohorts — B2B users. Through internal networking and scrappy methods I was able to grow a list of over 800 participants. I additionally grew my team with two talented and smart direct reports who help grow our reach as a team across the business. I have created a team culture of learning where we have biweekly learning sessions to which members outside our team are invited. We socialize our findings through newsletters, an insights repository, and in product-wide meetings. We have become one of the only disciplines that sees across products and can provide strategic insight to products.