UX Research Team Management for Epidemic Sound

Epidemic Sound is an established Swedish music platform providing royalty free music to content creators.

When I joined the company in early 2022, they had a mature product design organization split into domains, with research newly established as a critical capability. To assist in the scale up and streamlining of the discipline, I was brought onboard to manage the UXR team. With five direct reports, my role as manager encompassed a broad range of responsibilities:

• Responsible for coordination of all research initiatives between multiple business domains

• Oversaw and managed implementation & rollout of research ops (planning, recruitment, testing tools, research repository)

• Coaching of Product Managers, Product Designers and UX Researchers on successful UX Research methodologies (at Epidemic, we called this research democratization)

• Recruitment & onboarding of new team members

• Managing regular feedback cycles of my team

Impact

During my seven months with Epidemic as the UXR Manager, efficiency of project planning was greatly improved, we rolled out the UXR tool stack to empower Product Designers to complete their own unmoderated testing and the team grew from two to five researchers. On a human level, my team felt safe and empowered to execute brilliant research with my support and guidance.