As a human-centred design practitioner, I've always been amazed at how little time, expertise and resources are often available for customer research - or fully understanding any problem space. As an admirer of the pioneering work done by Kate Towsey and others, and an early member of the burgeoning ResearchOps community, I understood how vital operationalising research is to any business that purports to be customer-centric.
Luno was a company I had been a customer of since their inception. I wanted to move into the crypto space so I approached them with a proposal to establish research operations within Luno.
I approached Luno with a proposal to establish their first customer research team. The vision was to create a world-class research environment at Luno by hiring the right people, and implementing processes and strategies that would empower the business to deeply understand their global customers and prospects, so that they could design, deliver and market constantly evolving products and features that resonate with, delight and, ultimately, benefit their customers by unlocking the power of crypto.
After consulting for many months, the initial team was created and I eventually joined as ReOps Lead (reporting to the Global Head of Customer Research) where I was responsible for creating a $5M annual research budget that included new tooling, prioritised research projects, and external partnerships.
One of the most significant projects I led was identifying a partner, and commissioning a global outcomes-driven segmentation and innovation project - which we conducted with Strategyn - the results of which helped Luno identify unmet customer needs and underpin the product design strategy going forward.
I implemented completely new processes, ways of working, communications channels and documentation to support research at Luno at scale - and socialised them throughout the business. I successfully onboarded new research tools and worked with Legal to create compliant research practices.
Luno 2023.
Cape Town