Summary

Role: UX Operations Manager, lead Program Manager
Team: 600+ UX professionals globally, partnered with UX Leadership, Data Science, Product Science
Tools: Qualtrics, Google Sheets, Google Docs
Timeline: 2022–2024
Methods: Surveys, longitudinal analysis, stakeholder interviews, surveys

Impact:

• 19-point increase in survey response rates through strategic engagement

• Quarterly insights guide resource allocation for UX organization

• Created sustainable measurement system across 4 core health pillars

Key Takeaways:

1. Data without action is just noise, the real value comes from translating insights into strategic recommendations

2. Building trust through transparency and consistent communication transforms data collection from obligation to opportunity

3. When you measure community health systematically, you can finally prove the ROI of culture investments

The Challenge

When I joined Indeed's UX Operations team, leadership faced a critical blind spot: they had no systematic way to understand the health of their 600+ person global UX community. Decisions about initiatives, resources, and investments were based on anecdotal feedback and gut feelings. With a distributed workforce across multiple time zones and disciplines, this approach wasn't sustainable.

Problems to solve:

1. Leadership lacked data to make informed decisions about community investments and couldn't measure the impact of UX Operations initiatives

2. UX professionals felt disconnected, with varying experiences across disciplines and locations, but no unified way to voice concerns

3. Existing ad-hoc surveys provided snapshots but no longitudinal view, making it impossible to track progress or identify trends

Approach

Understanding what "health" means in a UX community context

I began by auditing our existing data sources and interviewing key partners across the organization to understand what community health meant to different groups. My methods included:

• Partner interviews: Spoke with leaders to understand decision-making needs

• Existing data audit: Analyzed available historical survey data to identify patterns

• Key Insights The patterns that shaped our measurement strategy

A holistic approach to measuring community vitality

I developed a comprehensive measurement system centered on four core pillars that work together to provide a complete picture of community health. Unlike traditional employee satisfaction surveys, this framework connects behavioral data with sentiment analysis to identify not just problems, but root causes.

Balancing comprehensive data with survey burden

I chose biannual measurement over monthly pulse surveys or annual deep dives to balance insight frequency with action time. This cadence gave initiatives time to show impact while maintaining momentum, resulting in higher quality responses and sufficient time between cycles to implement meaningful changes based on the data.

Increasing response rates

When facing declining response rates for each survey, I brainstormed ways to improve engagement and outlined a full communications plan. This plan detailed the cadence of messages, target audience, desired response, and channel. The combination of targeted communications and friendly team competition led to a 19-point increase in response rates. This significant improvement enabled more comprehensive and reliable data about our community's health, strengthening our ability to make confident, data-driven decisions.

Recommendations and Reporting

Used the trends coming out of analysis and the additional health metrics, I put together a report each quarter that focuses on trends within each of the main areas of the framework. Using the data, each report outlines trends and recommendations based on how the data was evolving over time, complemented with several branded data visualizations I custom designed. Additionally, I designed a “report card” for each quarter to highlight key changes or metrics. View a sample report here.

Impact

The framework transformed how Indeed's UX organization understands and responds to community needs. Leadership had clear visibility into sentiment trends, enabling data-informed decisions about resource allocation and team support. Most importantly, the metrics and resulting recommendations actively guided the where the Operations team focused our efforts.