How Braze streamlined Research Operations and increased impact with Rally

The UXR team at Braze is a hybrid model of eight members, including a Director of Research and two Research Managers, working across multiple teams to support both specific and strategic, business-critical projects. They are embedded within the UX team, which is led by the VP of Design.

Keep reading to hear about the challenges their team faced and how they’re using Rally to increase the collaboration, visibility, and impact of their research. 

What challenges were the Braze team facing? 

Inconsistent and manual processes 

“Our recruitment and participant management processes were pretty inconsistent and somewhat chaotic,” said Kait Schell, Senior UX Researcher. The rapid scaling of the research team at Braze only added to the complexity, as each researcher had their own process and tracked everything in Google Sheets housed in their individual Google Drives. “I had to manually update [the spreadsheet] whenever there was a new step of the recruitment and participant management process,” Kait explained. “It was difficult to remember to update everything.”

Lack of visibility into Research

Not only was this process time-consuming, it also greatly restricted visibility of Research to the team and the organization overall. It was challenging to track Research happenings, and communicating the scope of research projects to the broader organization was near impossible. “I would have no idea if my colleagues were reaching out to the same users I was,” said Kait.

There wasn’t a good way to keep track of who reached out to whom. Tracking communication was difficult since emails were sent using each researcher’s individual email. “You would have to search through your email for the customer’s name to see a full list of all the communication you’ve had with them, and things just get lost sometimes,” she said. 

Inaccessible customer data and governance risks

This impacted governance since the same participants may have been contacted for multiple studies, decreasing diversity of Research findings and putting Braze’s brand reputation at risk. Manually updating spreadsheets increased the risk of errors. “Sometimes, a few days might go by, and I'd forget to update the sheet – when did I contact that customer? I'd have to go through my emails, check, and then update it in a Google Doc. There was so much room for error that it caused me anxiety,” said Matthew Morrison, UX Research Manager. 

Additionally, knowledge about their users was distributed throughout the organization, living in disparate tools like Salesforce that the Research team couldn’t easily access. This made it challenging for not just Researchers, but also Designers and PMs to have a complete view of user interactions and fully utilize comprehensive user data.

Recruitment delays and limited user pool

As with many B2B companies, Braze’s pool of users is niche and somewhat limited. To access their users for research, the team always had to go through Customer Success, which often created a blocker and unnecessarily extended recruitment, causing a domino effect on the entire Research process. These delays limited the Research team’s ability to take on a greater project load, potentially contributing to lower feature adoption and user satisfaction. 

All of these challenges made it difficult to democratize research across the organization, complicating the ability to enable effective research practices. The Braze team needed a solution that would streamline their recruitment and participant management, provide centralized visibility into their research process and activities, and help them find the right users, faster. 

Enter: Rally’s User Research CRM

Matthew and his team were one of Rally’s early design partners, sharing their insights and feedback from day one. “It was clear that Rally was built from the ground up with researchers and for research,” said Matthew. “It was very usable, very seamless, and very impressive. We really did want a tool like this and I hadn’t seen anything like it before. So, by the time the product was available, it was a no-brainer. We were seeing our biggest pain points solved from the very beginning.” 

Here’s how Rally has transformed research at Braze:

Research is self-serve & democratized.

Rally ensures that research is not a chore, but ingrained throughout the product development process with the research team serving more as enablers than blockers. “Limiting roadblocks to participating in and conducting research benefits everyone,” said Matthew. PMs and Designers can safely and compliantly continue their research efforts under the research team’s oversight through Rally, allowing researchers to focus on higher-level studies that impact strategic product decisions.

Through Rally’s powerful workspace settings, customizable templates, and intuitive interface, research has become more self-serve. Non-researchers at Braze are guided through the research process with Rally’s step-by-step study builder, and empowered to do more quality research with the correct guardrails in place.

Governance features enable secure and compliant research.  

Rally’s Governance features like consent form templates and cool-down periods empower both researchers and non-researchers to practice secure and compliant research. The research team can configure opt-out links, invitation and participation limits, blocklists, and automatic custom governance rules based on any database property to ensure their customers are protected and not over-contacted. 

Customizable templates speed up the study building process.

“We’ve built in templates for things like consent, emails, and screeners,” said Matthew. “PMs and Designers know the customers they need to reach out to and can confidently use Rally.” These templates simplify the process for non-researchers, ensure best practices are followed, and make them more likely to run their own research without requiring the research team to guide them every step of the way.

Rally’s intuitive interface empowers non-researchers to get started quickly.

“Because of how easy Rally is to use, we’ve quickly integrated it into our Research Ops practice and empowered others to use it to set up studies and participate in interviews,” said Linda Nguyen, Senior UX Researcher. Cross-functional partners have onboarded to Rally quickly, making it more likely they will run their own research. “This is helping us democratize research across the organization and increase the amount of research being conducted and involved in the product development process,” said Matthew. 

Research is more centralized and visible to the organization. 

Rally’s powerful two-way integration with Salesforce has been key to reducing silos and centralizing research insights and customer data. “The Salesforce integration has definitely accelerated our research process,” said Kait. It allows her to access up-to-date customer data, efficiently filter within Rally during the recruitment stage, and quickly find potential participants – eliminating the need for cumbersome Google Drive searches and requests to Customer Success. The Braze team is confident that participant data in Rally is always current and synced with updates from the Customer Success team. 

The research team now has greater oversight into research efforts and customer interactions of cross-functional partners, and can build richer participant profiles using the data from these teams. “We’re able to see research studies that we may not have been able to see before,” said Matthew.

This visibility goes both ways – cross-functional partners like CS can view and utilize the research participant data automatically recorded in Rally by the research team. “We now have fuller profiles on our customers, including details we hadn’t considered before, like research participation.” This capability allows Matthew and the team to recruit the right people faster.

Rally’s Observer Room feature further increases visibility by allowing the research team to invite team members and stakeholders to watch live streamed user interviews without intimidating or distracting the participant. “Observer Rooms are an easy win,” said Kait. “It’s really beneficial for team members to see what an interview looks like and hear from actual customers.” Recently, the Senior VP, Global Customer Success at Braze joined an Observer Room for one of Kait’s interviews. “That’s the kind of visibility we would never normally have in an interview.”

Research is more streamlined and efficient.

Before Rally, the research process was disjointed, inconsistent, and extremely manual. “Rally has played a key part in helping us scale up our research recruiting practices,” said Linda. Now, the entire recruitment and participant management process is automated and managed in one place. “Through Rally, I’ve significantly decreased the amount of time I spend on this process, cutting it down by at least half,” said Kait. 

Without a dedicated Research Ops specialist, each researcher has to manage the operational side of their research by themselves. Rally’s Research Operations Platform takes this mental load and extra work off their plate. “Even if I forget to reach out to someone or send an incentive, Rally makes sure nothing ever really falls through the cracks. It’s Rally's superpower,” said Kait. 

When it comes to managing Research Operations and enhancing the UX Research team’s efficiency, “Rally has helped us reduce costs,” said Ki Choi, Director of UX Research at Braze. “We’re able to address more of our Product department’s learning agenda and research needs while doing so more effectively.” 

The reduced operational burden not only benefits the UX Research team at Braze but also extends its impact to other functions like Product Management and Design. “As we’ve rolled out Rally access to these functions, stakeholders can now focus more on their core, high-value activities, supported by more organized and streamlined research studies,” said Ki. “This in turn leads to better product development outcomes.”

This streamlined process has also made research more accessible to the rest of the organization. “People who haven’t done research before are experiencing how easy it is with Rally,” said Matthew. “Recruitment was previously seen as an all-over-the-place process, but now it’s much smoother and simpler. This makes it more likely for non-researchers to take on their own projects rather than just blindly building something.”

Rally is enabling a future of growth and impact for research at Braze. 

“Rally is allowing the UXR team to have more impact at Braze by helping to drive greater research execution velocity and quality,” said Ki. “Researchers are doing more strategic projects that are important to the whole business,” said Matthew. These projects involve multiple teams throughout the organization, increasing the impact and utilization of customer insights. “Without Rally, we’d be taking a step in the wrong direction, moving from a mature research team to a less mature research team.”