How Contentful scaled self-serve research with Rally

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Contentful, a leading content platform, faced a challenge familiar to many organizations: demand for research was outpacing the capacity of the research team. With product managers, designers, and marketers needing direct access to user insights, the company needed a structured way to enable non-researchers to conduct studies without sacrificing quality or governance. Rally’s User Research CRM helped Contentful centralize Research Operations, create scalable processes, and empower teams to run research independently.

The challenge: scaling research beyond the core research team

Lauren Law, Research Operations Manager at Contentful, described the challenge:

‍“At Contentful, we have a really great group of researchers, but sometimes they hit capacity. Self-serve research allows people in roles like design and product management to gather the insights they need without overburdening the research team. With the right tools and guidelines, teams can move faster and make more informed decisions.”

The company was experiencing a familiar bottleneck: research demand was growing, but there weren’t enough researchers to support every request. As a result, PMs and designers were running their own studies informally, often duplicating efforts or working without best practices.

‍“We saw that research was happening all over the place, but without a self-service structure. We needed templates, tools, and training to centralize efforts and ensure better-quality insights,” she said. 

Bringing structure to self-serve research with Rally

To bring structure to self-serve research, Contentful implemented Rally’s research CRM, which provided:

✅ Centralized participant management – Making it easier for teams to find and recruit the right users.

✅ Role-based permissions – Ensuring governance by controlling who could access participant data and launch studies.

✅ Pre-built templates – Standardizing research workflows and reducing inconsistencies across teams.

✅ Training and onboarding support – Helping non-researchers feel confident conducting studies.

The implementation process

Lauren and her team took a phased approach to rolling out self-serve research at Contentful:

1. Assessing research needs – Identified bottlenecks and key teams that would benefit from self-serve research.
2. Defining guardrails – Created templates, governance policies, and a research decision tree to guide teams.

3. Training and empowering teams – Provided hands-on training, a knowledge hub, and sandbox environments for testing.

4. Iterating and scaling – Gathered feedback, made improvements, and expanded access to more teams.

‍“The hardest part is just getting started. We always encourage teams to launch a small study – even a two-question survey – just to see how it fits into their workflow.”

The Impact

Since implementing Rally, Contentful has seen:

• Faster research turnaround times: Teams don’t need to wait for research support.
• Higher research volume: More studies are conducted without adding to the research team’s workload.
• Improved data quality: Standardized templates and governance ensure best practices are followed.

‍“For a self-serve research program to succeed, it needs to be ingrained in how the team operates. It’s not a one-off thing; it’s about changing the way your organization makes decisions.”

Key takeaways for other teams

If you’re looking to scale self-serve research, take a page from Contentful’s playbook:

✅ Start small – Pilot self-serve research with a few teams before expanding.

✅ Create templates – Standardized workflows help maintain research quality. 

✅ Set clear guardrails – Role-based permissions and governance ensure compliance and efficiency.

✅ Train and support teams – Onboarding, sandboxes, and internal champions drive adoption. 

✅ Iterate based on feedback – Continuously refine processes to improve self-serve research.

Wrapping up

With Rally, Contentful successfully scaled research beyond the core research team, allowing PMs, designers, and other stakeholders to collect insights independently, without compromising quality. 

If your team is facing similar challenges, consider how a structured self-serve program could unlock faster, more impactful research across your organization.