Amanda Gill, a researcher at Lyft, describes how she built a rapid research program to meet overwhelming demand as a solo researcher in Lyft's New York office. The program trains non-researchers to conduct moderated interviews with real customers, with researcher support at key moments, so multiple product teams can get usable insights in a single session. The talk covers project selection, moderation training, session logistics, synthesis support, and how the program scaled across the company.
Key Takeaways
- Rapid research works best for focused, time-sensitive questions that can be answered with 20-minute moderated interviews, such as design comparison, usability testing, and concept testing. It is not suited for surveys, multi-phase studies, or contextual inquiries.
- Six customers per session is the recommended number, with one or two floaters recruited in case of no-shows. General population recruitment is simpler and less biasing than trying to match participants precisely to each team's criteria.
- Every template, intake form, and training resource should be built and owned by the researcher so that non-researchers are set up to succeed before they ever speak to a customer. The 'Moderate Like a Boss' training and mandatory dry runs are critical gates before live sessions.
- A five-minute break between each 20-minute interview slot, rather than batching sessions with one long break, is necessary for both participants and moderators to reset effectively.
- Sharing insights across the six simultaneous project teams produces cross-pollination that teams would not get from isolated studies. This organic knowledge transfer is one of the program's highest-value outcomes.
- The program creates a virtuous cycle: partners who receive training and synthesis support get better over time, build a research community, and generate sustained demand, leading Lyft to hire dedicated researchers whose sole role is to run rapid research.
Questions & Answers
- Do you see a need for a quantitative self-serve approach similar to this qual program, and why or why not?
- Amanda noted her expertise is primarily in qual with some mixed methods experience. She sees potential for quant elements, such as clear training on how to phrase survey questions, similar to the moderation tips she provides for qual. However, at Lyft the team is cautious about over-contacting riders and drivers, so she keeps tighter control over recruiting and does not extend self-serve access to quantitative data collection at this time. She left the door open to developing quant guardrails with the right constraints in place.
- Is there any ongoing training or feedback after someone becomes certified as a moderator?
- Amanda observes sessions as she rotates between groups and delivers immediate light feedback during breaks if something needs to be corrected for the current study. Fuller constructive feedback is saved for after the session. She also emphasizes that the dry run and practice session before the first live interview help close the gap between zero experience and moderating six back-to-back interviews, though she is clear that one training and one trial run do not make someone an expert moderator.
- How do you recruit and incentivize participants, and how frequently do you run rapid research sessions?
- Amanda started by trying to recruit participants with specific recent behaviors matched to each team's research question, but found this introduced complexity and potential bias. She moved to general population recruitment, which is simpler and works well given Lyft's large and diverse rider and driver base. She lets participants know in advance that they will rotate through six different 20-minute sessions with breaks in between. Frequency varies by team and line of business: some run monthly, some every six weeks, some quarterly, depending on how much researcher involvement is available and how self-serve the program actually is.
- What do you do if one of the six teams drops out or is unavailable for the session?
- Amanda keeps a pool of backup teams who have agreed to join on short notice, sometimes with only one week's notice. Teams that submit an intake form but indicate low urgency are asked if they are willing to be on standby and are given priority placement in the next session. Because demand consistently exceeds capacity, there are always teams ready to fill a spot.
- How do you handle dissemination of findings after the session?
- Teams are asked to complete a standardized insights one-pager and then invited to a lunch-and-learn where they share findings with their broader teammates. Some rapid research programs within Lyft use a three- or five-page template and a presentation where all teams present to each other. When sessions were in person, Amanda would close with a quick all-teams huddle where each team shared a standout quote or moment, which she described as a particularly valuable organic learning experience.
Session Notes
The Problem: One Researcher, Too Much Demand
When Amanda Gill joined Lyft as the first researcher in the New York office, she deliberately built awareness through lunch-and-learns, one-on-one meetings with roughly 60 of the 80 people in the office, all-hands talks, engineering huddles, and a foundational rider journey map. The strategy worked. Requests came in quickly, but they all had short timelines and there was only one researcher to serve them all.
- A designer wanted usability testing on a new pickup notes feature by the next day.
- Data scientists wanted to understand in-ride behavior and needed researcher help within the week.
- A product manager needed pickup pain points uncovered for an upcoming airport rides roadmap.
- Engineers wanted to pressure-test hackathon projects before launch by the end of the week.
Each project was legitimate and time-sensitive. The volume was unsustainable for a single researcher. That pressure became the starting point for the rapid research program.
What Rapid Research Is
Rapid research is a self-serve program built on three components.
- Self-serve infrastructure: The researcher acts as a coach, sharing expertise through templates, intake forms, and documentation so cross-functional partners can conduct their own research.
- Training at key moments: Structured training and mandatory practice before partners speak to a single real customer.
- Synthesis support: Office hours where teams can book time with the researcher to review notes and collaborate on findings, because synthesis was the step partners found hardest to do alone.
Selecting the Right Projects
Early in the program, any team that wanted in was included. That approach was effective for building participation but brought in projects that were not suited to the format. Over time, three selection criteria were established.
- Urgency: How soon does the team need to make a product decision?
- Impact: How will the insights be used, and what difference will they make?
- Research fit: Are 20-minute interviews the right method to answer the question?
Rapid research is well suited to design comparison, usability testing, and concept testing. It is not well suited to surveys, multi-phase studies, or contextual interviews. Owning those boundaries clearly is part of what makes the program credible.
Project submissions moved from one-on-one intake meetings to an asynchronous intake form. The form required teams to articulate what decisions they were trying to make, what their hypotheses were, and how certain they were of those hypotheses before getting researcher time.
How a Session Works
Each rapid research session runs up to six project teams simultaneously. Six general-population customers rotate through each team in 20-minute interview slots, with five-minute breaks between slots. The full session runs approximately three hours and fifteen minutes.
- Each team has at least two members: one moderator and one note-taker.
- Customers rotate through all six teams, similar to a speed-dating format.
- Sessions were originally run in person and have translated well to remote breakout rooms.
- One or two extra participants are recruited as floaters to cover no-shows.
- Backup teams who agreed to join on short notice are kept on standby in case a primary team drops out.
An early version of the session used one 15-minute break in the middle rather than breaks between every slot. Feedback from both participants and moderators made clear that continuous five-minute breaks between each interview were necessary for everyone to reset.
Moderation Training: Moderate Like a Boss
Because non-researchers are conducting the interviews, moderation training is a required gate before anyone speaks to a customer. The training covers core interviewing principles and includes 20 minutes of live practice. A dry run with someone outside the team is also required before the first real session.
Key tips covered in the training include:
- You are in control: The moderator manages the pace and decides what gets covered and when.
- Set clear expectations with your partner: Agree in advance whether notes should be thematic or verbatim, and who takes breaks from moderating.
- Stay interested: Participants deserve full engagement regardless of how the moderator feels in the moment.
- Keep a poker face: Do not signal whether a participant has done the right or wrong thing during usability or concept tests.
- Use the trail off: Leaving a sentence unfinished, for example 'The last time you had trouble with pickups, you...' invites participants to fill in the blank in their own words.
- Mirror participant language: Use the words participants use, not internal jargon, even if their terminology is technically imprecise.
- Let it go: No participant knows what the discussion guide says. If a question lands badly, take a breath and move on without dwelling on it.
To build participation, an internal digital badge was created for completing the training. More than 70 people at Lyft have earned it, including UX writers, technical program managers, and directors of engineering. The training is also offered to teams running their own research outside the rapid research program.
Feedback on moderation is delivered in two ways: immediate light feedback during the session break if something needs to be corrected before the next participant, and fuller feedback after the session once moderators have had time to decompress.
Sharing Findings
After sessions, teams are asked to complete an insights one-pager identifying their top three learnings and supporting customer quotes. Findings are disseminated through team lunch-and-learns, larger presentations where all six teams share with each other, and, when sessions were in person, a quick all-teams huddle where each team shared a standout moment or quote.
One of the program's most consistent benefits is the cross-pollination between project teams. In one example, a product manager studying airport pickup luggage challenges shared findings with a designer working on pickup notes, leading that team to consider the airport use case they would not otherwise have encountered.
An engineer that didn't know what research was three weeks ago is now sharing an insight about the number of usability bugs in a build that she was going to launch the next day.
Results and Scale
The program produced sustained demand, a research community inside the company, and measurable team ownership over insights. Different lines of business adopted the format and adapted it to their own cadences, ranging from monthly to quarterly sessions, with varying levels of researcher involvement. The program's success led Lyft to create and hire three permanent researchers whose dedicated role is to run rapid research.
Transcript
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yeah it looks like about that time so I think we're going to go ahead and get rolling uh welcome to everybody that was a holdover from the prior presentation welcome to any new attendees who have just joined us um yeah we've got our second presentation lined up and I'm going to give a quick intro to Amanda Gill from a lift she's going to be giving us a talk on sharing the power rapid research um yeah I went through the full Spiel of you know what this presentation is all about I think we've all done enough virtual webinars over the past couple years that we've got this pretty much nailed down so this is a quicker half hour presentation um so I'm gonna get out of the way let Amanda do her thing and then I'll Circle back at the end to lead any q a if you have questions for Amanda feel free to throw those into the Q a into the chat and we will make sure that they make their way to her Amanda all yours yeah hi everyone so excited to be here I'm just gonna share my screen with you all as we begin thank you to Bill and everyone organizing for having me all right let's get into it so as researchers we do a lot our roles are complex I'm willing to bet if you're listening in right now your role contains multitudes for example here are just some of the things that I've taken on in my role as a researcher across my career now the beauty of what we do is that it spans disciplines and approaches so some days I'm an anthropologist like Jane Goodall observing people in their natural environments and other days I'm inhabiting the Persona of Sherlock Holmes looking beyond what the pieces say to what's at the heart of the data so I got this new job a few years back at Lyft and I'm gonna be their first researcher in the New York office focusing on this complex space that involves both writers and drivers the pickup part of the experience cool I'm nervous I'm excited and when I first joined Lyft New York the office was small enough to hear every desk conversation and all of us were crammed into one narrow floor now I've been around the research World long enough to wonder where on the Continuum my teammates are so I found prior to research on the scene most teams or companies for that matter fall into one of two camps the cricket side of the scale absolute and total silence just eyes blinking you're a researcher blink what's that blink blink I've never worked with research before The Other Extreme you as a researcher are an absolute celebrity insatiable demand people are elbowing each other to get some of your time and attention when I arrived at Lyft it was definitely more of the Crickets scenario so this is where I went to work um it's really lowly out there as a solo researcher and so truly it was up to me to drum up interest like that was my job so I got out the metaphorical megaphone and started running lunch and learns where I shared what research does I had one-on-one coffee chats and meetings with about 60 of the 80 people in the office I spoke at all hands I went to engineering huddles just to learn what teams we're building and I reminded managers to bring up research and the opportunity to test ideas to their you know everyone that they were managing everyone that they were in meetings with at their respective gatherings I also did a small research project on a mutually interesting space for most of the teams so I built out a rider journey across the Rideshare experience and I included things like users emotions and workarounds they do in their Lyft rides and the requests began to trickle in so a designer had just launched this new feature pickup notes which is a way for writers for us to communicate some information about pickup spots so a rider for example would share a description of themselves or a place like let's say you're standing outside a McDonald's or you're wearing a purple sweater that kind of thing they wondered if I could test it tomorrow then data scientists were noticing some interesting behavioral data that was taking place in the ride itself but they didn't know why and they wanted researchers help determining what happens in the car something our app doesn't tell us and only research can help unpack with riders and drivers themselves was I free next week a product manager was operating in the dark about the biggest pickup pain points and wanted research to help uncover to help with an upcoming road map that the team would be building for these airport rides and was wondering you know could we test this in a few days time and my personal favorite a group of very creative Engineers who had heard the drum beats of research across the office wondered if I might help test their hackathon projects and pressure test some features before they launched how about doing some research together at the end of the week all really interesting projects no all worthy of researchers efforts right except that they all seem time sensitive and it was just me one researcher with all of this demand I wanted to do a good job I had created this demand it was overwhelming and stressful from this place rapid research was born rapid research is a self-serve program with training at Key moments a representative panel of customers and synthesis support so self-serve as researchers we know a lot and this is where we share that knowledge and bolster our cross-functional partners we become coaches counselors Paving the path to research for our teams we have a lot to share so it's important that as we're Paving this path as we're enabling our partners to step into a research role themselves that we're equipping them with the tools they need to be successful and I have found trainings at Key moments of Rapid research do just that we bring in real customers for This research I found six to be the magic number and I'll often recruit one or two as floaters to fill in in case we get a no-show lastly after running this program a few times I got feedback from my internal team that the synthesis part looking at the data determining what's a pattern what's an Insight that was particularly hard for my partners to do and my support was needed there so I started offering office hours so rapid research teams could book a session with me to review their notes and research sessions and together we collaborate on the findings so how does it all work here's how I run it at Lyft and you can take what's helpful for yourself or your teams this became the sound of Rapid research kind of catchy right um it really got people's attention and in trying to get people to submit their projects I would kick off my pitches by sounding this gong okay so once you've got some projects submitted it's about identifying the right projects so I would meet with all interested parties and in the beginning this was a huge unlock to meet people come into contact with them find out what they want to learn hypotheses they had as the program evolved that became way too time consuming for me so we moved to an asynchronous intake form and that form was the perfect forcing function for teammates to have to think through what they wanted to learn and elaborate on goals on their own first in the early days of Rapid research if you wanted to be in the program you were in there were no questions asked and while that was super effective in bringing people into the process some projects simply weren't suited for this type of research either because they required a trade researcher to examine the problem like myself or the method that was needed so for example surveys multi-phased approaches a context interviews those are not great for Rapid research so what makes for a rapid research project I landed on some criteria for project selection urgency how soon does the team need to make a product decision impact how will the insights be used what will the impact be and finally research fit our 20-minute interviews the right way to answer their research questions and when it comes to research fit in particular again it's okay to own what this approach is good for and what It Isn't So rapid research works best for approaches like design comparison usability testing concept testing straightforward approaches that can answer a specific question in a short amount of time okay so each project would kick off with a high energy team working session and I made it mandatory for everyone to have at least one other teammate participate to lessen the load and so someone was available for backups and note taking and this is the exact slide that I would share with them to delineate which items fell to me which items fell to them and which we shared together all the pink dots here are what I'm asking the teams to do and if you look closely you'll see I ask teams to write their own discussion guide how are Engineers or product managers supposed to write a discussion guide they're really hard to write and I do this professionally so everything that can be a template should be a template remember you are the expert and this program lets you share that expertise so it's on you to set everyone else up for Success you can see my intake forms here and this asks questions like what decisions are you trying to make what's your hypothesis how certain are you that it's true and in the middle is the main rapid research template and that links out to mock research plans discussion guides note-taking templates and an Insight one-pager so really everything that you could need to run your research is right there for you to click into and then at the end there in pink that's the insights one pager and so that again when the research is completed is asking the teams to reflect on the top three things that they've learned and pull in some supporting customer quotes reminder it's the non-researchers that are going to be conducting the research it's the team that makes the discussion guide It's that same team that is moderating the interviews so how do they learn to moderate I created a course on the greatest hits of moderation 101 and I call it moderate like a boss it's a training all new facilitators take which gives us some useful tips on interviewing users and has them practice for the last 20 minutes and I find this practice piece crucial and so if you are training people and running their own research don't make that first research session in which they're speaking to a real customer of yours the first time that they are practicing their discussion guide or you know trying to train themselves and asking non-leading questions and of course asking non-linear questions and these kinds of things you know as a moderator are learned over time of course you're just trying to get your teammates some tips and tricks for their first interview or two but essentially what you're trying to do is give them as much confidence and training in advance so that by the time they get to that first session they're feeling really prepared all right so this training gives all those useful tips and it has them practiced like I was saying and what you're looking at now actually is our internal badging system so to build the hype for this training I created an internal digital badge and so far over 70 people at our company have been awarded this badge from ux writers to technical program managers to directors of engineering and sometimes I get asked to give this training to teams that are running their own research you know not part of the rapid research program so many many cross-functional partners have found value in the idea of what it means to moderate well so here are some of the tips I give the teams I'll give you a inside peek the first is reminding them that they are in control very easily and I'm sure many of us on the call are familiar with this you know our participants might be able to you know run away if not guided correctly with the conversation they never know how much information they should be sharing sometimes you get you know a one sentence response from a participant sometimes you get paragraphs and paragraphs and paragraphs so just reminding moderators you were the one that gets to move the conversation along Pace things and decide what is shared when the second is setting clear expectations with their partner so again I mentioned at the beginning there are at least two people per team that are going through Rapid research and that other person is taking notes so if you want someone to take notes you should be clear on what you want them to be paying attention to do you want thematic notes for example that are just summarizing what someone is saying or do you want more verbatim notes that are word for word what is being shared with you do you want to break when you are moderating you know maybe your your co-pilot your teammate there is subbing in and they're moderating a session or two well you get to rest being interested all the time this is a classic one no matter what they are saying even if you didn't get sleep the night before or you're bored or you want to move on this is a participant that is giving their real time and energy and effort to you and so you really want to be engaged with what they're saying but at the same time you don't want to give anything away and this poker face is particularly important when we are running say concept tests or usability tests you don't want to tell anyone if they've done the right thing let's say or the wrong thing if they've clicked into what you had hoped they did or they had difficulties you want to again keep that poker face don't give anything away the trail off so you last had a problem with pickups when you and you had called the driver that was the trail off is really really valuable in getting the participants to fill in those blanks using their own words so we're guilty of this particularly those of us that work in technology or really any industry that has its own jargon which is most Industries you want to use the words that the participants are saying not the jargon themselves even if their words are incorrect you know if they're talking about a button but they call it a a square or a blob or whatever you as the moderator should be calling it a square or a blob as well mindset wise lastly taking a cue from Frozen just let it go right like no one knows what your discussion guide is no one knows what it is that you're trying to learn or get across if you totally butchered a question or asked it beautifully and so as much as you can for the interview just take a deep breath let go of your bias enter that conversation neutrally and try to relax all right so now it is it's on everyone's in the room it's game day and this is what the research sessions look like so we recruit six general population customers those are those orange seas that you're seeing here and they rotate through six different research team projects the green teas and this all Happens Live recently because of the pandemic we've been doing it by a breakout sessions on zoom and it's translated really nicely to remote research so each team has 20 minutes with each participant with a five minute break in between and then you can see similar to speed dating they move on to the next team so the entire rapid research session lasts roughly three hours and 15 minutes so that pickup notes team they're sitting in one location while six different Riders are passing through to weigh in on their feature there is so much energy and excitement in the room and for many partners this is the first time that they are speaking face to face with our customers the second best thing to seeing everyone in action engaging face to face with your customers is to see those learnings forming those research wheels turning so for example an engineer that didn't know what research was three weeks ago is now sharing an insight about the number of usability bugs in a build that she was going to launch the next day a product manager has learned that luggage is a really complex part of the pickup experience at airports and that's something that the team needs to design and build for and they're planning a brainstorm on that the following week sharing the learnings puts my teammates in the research hot seat in the best possible way they own their insights and the best part of six projects getting attention at the same time is sharing those learnings between those groups that cross-pollination that form so that project manager that I just told you about with the luggage they're actually helping that Designer on the pickup notes team think about how to help Riders who have their hands full either with luggage or with groceries so that pickup notes team is now thinking about the airport's use case when they otherwise wouldn't have had exposure to that team or to their research insights my favorite moments are overhearing This research get shared in the wild so let's say an engineer turns to another engineer and says no don't build it that way those three buttons are too close together for our riders or a product manager shares with a teammate in line at lunch that he observed drivers needing more assistance finding a pickup spot and we should think about how to better help them with a brainstorm to kick off that Focus area after running this program I definitely became a research celebrity in lyft's New York office but more than that this program became a virtuous cycle for me so the people that I invested in with trainings and synthesis support got better and better at collecting light feedback the more they participated in Rapid research programs it fostered a learning culture in our office it gave my teams ownership over the research insights and Trust in the process that created a research Community around me and this has been so successful for us as a company that we have created and are hiring for three permanent research teammates whose sole job it will be to run rapid research thank you all right great job man and Rapid presentation too it's pretty pretty solid um let's see looking at our Q and A we have one uh let's see we have one from Heidi uh I love that you can draw excuse me constructed a qual self-serve approach do you see a need for a quantitative approach like this why or why not oh that's a great question my expertise is in qual honestly I dabble in mixed methods but I I definitely sit more firmly in the qual camp um Quant to a certain effect like I have seen you know let's say surveys for example boot camps and trainings and that kind of thing like I think they're in the way that there are clear moderation tips there can be really clear ways that you phrase quantitative questions so I could definitely see those trainings bubble up for cross-functional partners for us at least as a company we're really precious on when we're reaching out to Riders and drivers and we don't want to over sample you know our You Know sample too much or kind of bother people as it were so I for us as a team I would say try to be a little more conservative with sharing that part of the process even the recruiting like I don't have my cross-functional partners do I either partner with a recruiter or I do the recruiting to make sure again that I can control both for Quality as well as for who we're tapping to speak to us so I think in short I love the idea of that I think I need to think through a little bit more and maybe we could do that together what constraints would need to be in place to do that successfully yeah I've seen it done well in some places and poorly in others honestly I mean it's it's but it's quite simple to are quite similar rather to your uh qual approach it's you know taking all these factors into consideration and you know policing to a certain extent um I did have one quick follow-up question for you and this is with regard to your uh your moderator training so once someone is certified as a as an Amanda uh moderator is there any ongoing training or or feedback um you know after the fact after they've become certified as it were yeah I try observe one session like I'm also rotating around with the participants to the different groups and so we have a little break in the middle and I'll often deliver some light feedback if there's something that needs to be changed right away like oh that question is super leading or oh I that phrase was not very polite to our writer so you know if there's something that comes up in the moment that needs to be corrected for that study I'll share that with the moderators live otherwise I save all kind of feedback and critique obviously for after it's done and they've had a breather moderation I'm sure many of us know can be rather exhausting as well and so getting you know even if it's constructive feedback back after you've had many hours of moderation is not always well received um yeah I will I will definitely share uh you know some more tips or some tricks I also find it's one of those things where if you've gone through the training you're not you know entirely protected per se or a expert moderator but having to do that practice and then one thing that I actually didn't mention is that I also really encourage teams to do a dry run so again before they're showing up to that first participant they've practiced for 20 minutes in the session with me I of course have reviewed their discussion guide and you know made changes to it or other researchers or teammates have done that for them as well and then they've gone through it live with someone who wasn't on their team so they understand the pacing they understand you know the answers that they're getting from their questions and again not that that makes them an expert moderator you know 20-minute session and one trial run but it really helps smooth that Gap you know as they're going from zero to one never having moderated before to you know moderating six back-to-back interviews and this is such an uncomfortable concept for many in in our industry especially in you know on teams that have been you know really well established and really we're well staffed um you know the limited resources that you're dealing with it sounds like I mean it's kind of by necessity but what it produces is something um really neat yeah okay we've got a lot of questions rolling in so I will jump to the next one uh from Taylor this is incredible and fascinating I'm curious how you recruit participants and then sent them for Rapid research also how frequently are you able to conduct rapid research sessions yeah thanks Taylor those are great questions um okay so the first piece was recruiting and incentivizing for that when I first started I don't think I included this but I tried oh gosh this is wild I tried to get the perfect mix of riders or drivers per what we were testing so if it was Airport rides like I gave for my example or pickup notes I would try have at least half let's say three Riders have taken a airport ride that's in the past week to make it super recent but then for pickup notes we were curious how Riders and drivers were communicating with each other and so I tried to get Riders who had either recently you know in the past week or so called a driver or sent them a text message that kind of thing um and then I was like okay but wait a minute does that bias the you know are those writers biasing the other teams because it's a certain type of rider that's reaching out to a driver anyway it just it was very complex I was like okay I'll have two out of the six Riders have recently contacted a driver and I'll have three of the Riders take an airport ride because that you know case study is fine for us so all of that was was really complex and like hair raising for me and I did it out of the love of you know trying to get these teams the best writers for them and then after doing this a number of times I just like went straight to general population and I would say like general population is like what I would underline here if you're recruiting for this type of program just because again we have such a large diverse group of you know riders or drivers in our database or people that are riding with Rideshare they're relatively easy to find so incentivizing them is not a problem tailored to your question in terms of letting them know kind of what's Happening Here I let everyone know what they're getting into in advance so I say hey we'd love to have you in a session just so you know you're going to be hearing six different ideas it's going to be in 20 minute increments I promise I'll give you a five minute break in between to clear your head and when I first did the first few rounds of Rapid research I just had a 15 minute break in the middle so you did three interviews back to back and then a 15-minute break for everyone the participants and the researchers and then three more back to back and then break and everyone came to me and raised their hand was like no no this is this is a no-go like both from a participant and from a moderator perspective we need like time to clear our head regroup maybe do a quick change to a design tweak a question chat with the Note Taker for the and for the participants there to your question it was about that like that debrief time to go to the bathroom or take a breath or kind of clear the mental cobwebs before they saw a totally different concept or design and then I think the last part was about the frequency of Rapid research okay so for that um it's essentially morphed across our company into different formats and and been taken on by different lines of business and organizations which is kind of cool and they all run it differently so there are some rapid research programs you know in a different part of the company that are running with a regular Cadence every month or every six weeks other teams are doing it every quarter other teams are doing it you know with more researcher involvement like I did in the early days where they're really partnering closely but then they're they're again doing it every few months whereas like them I find the monthly ones we either have that dedicated researcher in those sessions and that's the bulk of their role or their entire role or it's entirely self-serve like that first question we were talking about with Quant we're like here are the templates a recruiter will partner with you on general population whoever you need and like you go off and do it kind of thing so I find like depending on how much time the researchers have or how much self-serve it actually is that frequency varies another tactical question from uh Geralyn uh what do you do if one of the six teams dropped out or wasn't available for the speed digging yeah Joan that's a great question I recruit in the way that I recruit floaters for participants so I'll have an extra participant or two sometimes just waiting in the wings in case someone doesn't show up or they're not as you know as quality as we would like I have that for teams as well so when they take that intake form that I ask everyone to fill out in the beginning I will say all right like is this like a primary essential thing that you need to get done right now or are you willing to be kind of like a team in waiting and we'll let you know a few weeks before this happens or like a week or two before it happens and a fair amount of teams say like this isn't urgent for me you know we get way more submissions as part of it we get way more submissions than we're able to have teams for for every rapid research that we've ever run so that's again because I built it up and you know kind of intentionally put it out there once people got a sense of it and this is true not just for Rapid research but for research right like I have found as a researcher people don't know what it is and they're not asking for it and they're not engaging with you but once they get a taste of it like it's Off to the Races and you've got all of that demand so yeah we have all of these teams that are signing up and I tell teams like if you're willing to be kind of waiting in the wings we'll give you priority next time or I I sometimes I sweeten the deal if I need to but yeah in Long answer to your question we do have some teams who have agreed to jump in with sometimes only one week's notice if another team drops out and it looks like we're right up against it on time uh Stephanie had a question that you kind of answered in your last uh with regard to just prioritization and deciding which projects uh real quick 30 seconds what about dissemination of of the work yeah great question we do a lunch and learn so that I ask teams to invite their other teammates and we'll share those findings then again some of the other rapid research teams have a deck they have like a three pager or five pager everyone needs to fill out template and then they have this big presentation where all of the teams learn from each other and you can invite whoever you want what I used to do live when we were doing them in person is I would do just like a quick huddle with everyone which was my favorite part and everyone would just share like a moment of something a quote like whatever it was that was sticking out to them and that was just a really magical moment to hear everyone learning from each other and like organically hear the engineers on one team say wait a minute like we thought we would tackle that but this thing happened to us we also heard that so yeah there are many different ways to bring people together those are the the two that we formalized very cool um all right well I have to kick you out yeah uh that was fantastic uh very engaging appreciate the uh the rapid presentation um got a lot of q a as a result so good well done thanks everyone around on LinkedIn or wherever if you have more questions or want to keep chatting about this
