Clarify the request. When someone up our management chain entrusts us with a directive, we're often compelled to rush to accommodate. In this case, I knew that a seemingly simple request could lead to many wasted days among a significant number of people if we were working towards the wrong objective. So I met with the leader and the product team to fully understand their intentions. First, we disambiguated personas and came to an agreement about what to expect as a deliverable. I then created the workback plan to set expectations about the time, people, collaboration, and investment that would be required.

Build with data and wire it into the work. I collaborated with the SVP of People Operations and Product to define our focus areas, then worked with data science to map how ServiceNow, Workday, and Snowflake each defined the employee segments we served with the products we were prioritizing. From this, we identified 5 personas to focus on and I built a repeatable annual plan for gathering, synthesizing, and delivering persona data to product teams in an actionable format. Each biannual cycle, I ran quantitative and qualitative research on the topics product teams needed most, then synthesized the findings and delivered outputs that addressed their explicit product needs. I then worked with the PMO to embed persona requirements directly into Global People's governance templates (Stakeholder Impact Assessment, Product Initiation Summary, Operational Readiness Checklist), built a self-service discovery guide so COEs without a researcher could still do the work, and ran a roadshow to transfer the capability org-wide.