Scaling ResearchOps & driving 300% insight gains at CMS
I established a scalable, democratized practice for efficiently conducting qualitative and quantitative research and created a centralized insights repository (e.g., Dovetail) to better fuel design decisions and share insights across the enterprise.
Challenge
Business Need:
CMS needed an enterprise-wide approach to organize research and enable insight reuse across products.
Lack of ResearchOps caused inconsistency, compliance gaps, and missed behavioral insights in design.
A centralized system was needed to boost learning, speed delivery, reduce duplication, and guide priorities.
User Pain Points:
Product teams lacked visibility into prior research, often duplicating efforts.
Researchers had no shared tools or standards, leading to inconsistent methods and reporting.
Policy approvals were slow and inefficient, delaying research and reducing agility.
Leadership lacked synthesized user insights to guide priorities and investments.
Users faced fragmented, inefficient products that failed to meet their needs.
Approach
To transform a fragmented and compliance-heavy research environment into an agile, insight-driven design culture, I led a comprehensive ResearchOps strategy that aligned stakeholder needs, regulatory compliance, and modern tooling into a scalable, repeatable framework.
Federal research acceleration
I secured CMS’s PRA Generic Clearance, reducing research approval timelines from months to days and enabling teams to conduct iterative user research without regulatory delays.
Enterprise research repository
I procured and managed Dovetail at the enterprise level, ensuring CMS retained its intellectual property while enabling scalable insights sharing across programs and contractors through structured metadata and tagging.
Participant recruitment engine
I launched a centralized research participant email list and Helpdesk request system to streamline voluntary participation, improving access to diverse voices and real-time feedback loops.
Outcomes
Established a distributed governance framework that enabled teams to manage research independently while adhering to CMS-wide standards for compliance and data privacy. Implemented a Dovetail taxonomy to surface cross-product trends, and integrated ResearchOps into Agile rituals to ensure features were prioritized based on validated user insights—creating a culture of evidence-driven delivery.
300%
increase in research insight gains across CMS business lines and contractor teams.
60%
increase in time-to-approval for PRA-compliant user research, streamlining policy collaboration.
100s
of stakeholders engaged through searchable insight collections to inform product direction and policy alignment.
Selected Works
(240) 455-4586 ● design@faymail.com
Copyright © 2025 Rob Fay