GitHub was an adventure! I knew relatively nothing about the developer tools space, outside of having used GitHub extensively in a previous role. When I joined, GitHub had no existing qualitative research practice, so the job was to spin one up. I got super lucky and a few months in, an acquisition brought in several talented researchers to the team, as well as making Cindy Alvarez my boss. I was also able to hire a few researchers as well.
A few of the high points from my time at GitHub:
- Grew the research practice from a “team of one” to a team of 6 researchers
- Established an internal agency consulting model to support over 50 research projects in 2020
- Created a research system of templates and trainings to democratize customer research skills across the Product and Design orgs