Scaling UX Research in Large Organizations: Playbooks, Frameworks, and Governance

By Philip Burgess - UX Research Leader

When an organization grows, so does the demand for research. Suddenly, it’s not just a handful of product teams asking for insights—it’s dozens of teams, across multiple regions, each needing reliable evidence to guide design and business decisions. Without structure, research becomes fragmented, inconsistent, and hard to operationalize.

Scaling UX research isn’t about doing more studies; it’s about building systems that ensure quality, consistency, and impact at scale. Three elements make this possible: playbooks, frameworks, and governance.

📘 Playbooks: Codifying Best Practices

Playbooks help transform individual researcher expertise into repeatable, shared knowledge.

• Standardized Research Plans: Templates for goals, hypotheses, methods, and KPIs ensure every study starts with clarity.

• Consent & Ethics Guides: Pre-approved consent forms and IRB-aligned guidelines protect participants and the business.

• Reporting Formats: Consistent deliverables—executive one-pagers, slide decks, or dashboards—make insights easier to digest across the org.

✅ Tip: Keep playbooks living documents. Update them quarterly with new methods, case studies, and lessons learned.

🏗️ Frameworks: Driving Consistency and Scale

Frameworks help teams prioritize research and measure outcomes consistently.

• Decision Frameworks: Align each study to a clear decision. Is this research informing strategy, validating design, or measuring outcomes?

• Method Frameworks: Provide guidance on when to use discovery vs. evaluative methods, qualitative vs. quantitative approaches.

• ROI Frameworks: Track business impact with metrics like time-to-insight, conversion improvements, reduced support costs, or increased retention.

✅ Tip: Use frameworks to democratize research. Designers and PMs can self-serve lightweight methods while researchers focus on complex, high-stakes studies.

🛡️ Governance: Ensuring Quality and Alignment

Governance is the guardrail system that keeps research credible and aligned with organizational goals.

• Approval Gates: Require peer or lead reviews for research plans and reports before they’re finalized.

• Repositories: Centralize insights in platforms like Dovetail, Confluence, or Airtable so knowledge compounds instead of disappearing into decks.

• Research Councils or Ops Teams: Establish cross-functional groups to maintain standards, evaluate tools, and support researcher growth.

✅ Tip: Governance should enable, not stifle. The goal is consistency and credibility, not bureaucracy.

🎯 The Payoff: From Chaos to Clarity

When playbooks, frameworks, and governance come together, large organizations move from ad-hoc research to systematic insight generation.

• Teams get faster answers without reinventing the wheel.

• Stakeholders trust research because it’s consistent and traceable.

• Research scales sustainably, driving measurable business outcomes.

Scaling UX research is less about growing the team headcount and more about building a research engine that empowers everyone to make evidence-based decisions.

👉 Question for readers: If you’ve tried scaling research in a large organization, what was your biggest challenge—getting adoption, keeping quality high, or demonstrating ROI?

Philip Burgess | philipburgess.net | phil@philipburgess.net