Jen Cardello Q&A: Advancing design research and operations

Jen Cardello, MVP, joined Capital One’s Experience Design team in September as the Head of Research and Design Operations. With her more than 25 years of experience in establishing frameworks and systems that multiply design and research impacts to drive customer and business value, Jen is focused on accelerating learning velocity to help inform critical decisions and deliver industry-leading products and experiences. 

By fostering a culture where curiosity and learning are deeply integrated into every step of the design process, her team aims to streamline how research is collected, analyzed and applied across their partner teams. The following Q&A with Jen dives deeper into her vision for scaling research and design operations. 

In my most recent experience prior to Capital One, I led UX Research and Operations to develop ways of effectively and efficiently accelerating the learning velocity of hundreds of product development teams. It's critical, when teaching, to create models that are easy to remember and apply. It forces one to seek out patterns and similarities versus treating every assignment as a bespoke effort. Capital One is known for fueling business decisions with data. That same mindset and approach is critical to informing design decisions in order to build winning customer experiences. Learning velocity is key to that.

First, I am building an understanding of Capital One – embracing the culture and building relationships. Second, I’m identifying internal partners to accelerate learning velocity - finding those people focused on this objective, learning the data and information we already have and joining forces to multiply impact. Finally, I will identify the best opportunities to simplify and streamline discovery and feedback throughout the product development lifecycle.

The goal of our multidisciplinary teams is to consistently deliver value to customers. This requires tight integration, collaboration and, most importantly, trust between the business, product management, engineering, design and other key stakeholders. That’s the culture I seek to contribute to and enable across the business.

The core value of design and research is to ensure the company creates experiences that are both useful and usable. Useful - meaning that discovery research identifies underserved needs where we can improve and / or innovate. Usable - our design testing is applied throughout solution ideation and prototyping to ensure we create effective, efficient and intuitive experiences. 

Design Operations is the essential scaffolding by which design and research teams deliver useful and usable experiences by optimizing workflows, processes and tools that support cross-functional delivery.

As expected, many of the interesting developments are AI-powered. Some of the more interesting are the ability to query large collections of research studies to get answers to new research questions and AI-powered interview synthesis. It’s early days for these capabilities and, as with other AI-related technologies, it will be important for design research and operations to be dialed into the risks and approach this space in a way that keeps humans at the forefront. 

In order for a product to succeed in the market, it must be valuable to customers, viable for the business, feasible to build and easy to use. Research and design is key to ensuring we find the opportunities to deliver value and we do it in a way that is efficient, effective and intuitive. I highly suggest digging into User Experience resources to learn more about UX practices and careers.

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