When A'verria Martin joined ServiceNow seven years ago to build their research operations practice from the ground up, she started with a UX research organization of just 9 people.
Today, she leads a 17-person Research Operations, Intelligence, and Strategy team supporting 165 researchers across the organization.
Jana Rieger, Noel Lamb, Miguel Santiago, and the rest of the team drive the day-to-day platform operations that enable ServiceNow's researchers to self-serve on Great Question.
That kind of impressive growth can come with serious growing pains.
"What's interesting about building a research operations practice from scratch is we were just always solving the problem that was right in front of us," A'verria explains.
“We came up with amazing processes and onboarded some amazing tools, but what worked for a 20-person, 40-person, or 60-person organization didn't really work at scale for a 165-person organization.”
The solution? Consolidating their fragmented tool stack into a single UX research platform that could handle everything from participant recruitment to analysis, with governance in place to help them scale.
Before Great Question, ServiceNow's research team was juggling roughly 15 different tools just to run the end-to-end research process. Researchers had to hop between platforms for planning studies, recruiting participants, running interviews, analyzing data, and managing incentives.
The recruitment process proved far more complex and time-intensive than anticipated. ServiceNow had built a homegrown panel management solution, but there was a catch: only the research operations team could access it. Every time a researcher needed participants, they had to submit a request and wait for the ops team to pull lists manually.
“It used to take us 118 days on average to recruit research participants,” A'verria says.
Read that again. Nearly four months just to find the right people to talk to.
ServiceNow's research team now conducts roughly 300 studies per year and interacts with about 10,000 end users, which simply wouldn’t be possible with an inefficient tool stack. For a company moving at the speed of AI, where products evolve weekly instead of quarterly, waiting months for research insights simply wasn't going to work.
ServiceNow had known about Great Question for about four years, watching the landscape of user research tools evolve and mature. When they finally brought Great Question on board in 2024, the transformation was immediate.
Great Question became their central research solution, allowing researchers to handle the complete workflow in one place: conceptualizing studies, planning research, recruiting participants, running sessions, analyzing data, creating highlight reels, and managing incentives.
This led to ServiceNow deprecating three tools right away, with five to seven more on the horizon. But the real breakthrough was what happened when researchers and people who do research could finally self-serve.
“Now our researchers can actually self-service and do their own recruitment, which really opens up our research operations team to focus on continuing to build our panel of enterprise users instead of doing the day-to-day recruitment,” A'verria says.
That 118-day recruitment timeline dropped to 6 days thanks to the built-in participant recruitment features in Great Question.
The time savings extended across the entire research process. With Great Question’s AI features, time spent on research planning has been cut in half, and the time saved on research analysis and synthesis was even more impressive.
“Since adding AI technologies across our tooling stack, we've seen major efficiency gains,” A'verria notes. “Things like research analysis and synthesis, which used to take a week, maybe longer, can be done in days.”
For ServiceNow, speed alone wasn't enough. They needed to expand who could conduct research beyond the core UX research team, bringing designers and product content creators into the mix. But democratizing research is risky if you can't maintain standards.This is where Great Question's governance features saved the day. ServiceNow sets guardrails that keeps research quality high even when non-researchers are running studies.
“The reason we went with Great Question is because of its ability to set guardrails and have governance in the research process. Research quality is incredibly important to us, and so that ability, almost alone, was the reason that we decided this was the platform for us,” A'verria explains.
The platform's integration with Qualtrics added another layer of flexibility, allowing teams to set up studies in Great Question, run surveys through Qualtrics, and bring everything back into Great Question to close out the study.
The impact is obvious for ServiceNow. Six-day recruitment timelines. Research delivered in weeks instead of months. Cost savings from tool consolidation.
But the real impact runs deeper. ServiceNow can now make informed product decisions more quickly, more rigorously, and with proper governance in place. The ability to get to end users quickly and funnel their insights directly into product development has fundamentally changed how the organization operates.
“Our customers are everything here at ServiceNow,” A'verria says. “The ability to get to those end users very quickly and be able to get their insights to drive it directly into product has been an absolute game changer, and is allowing us to deliver research at the velocity that we need in the AI era.”
The research team is also faster and happier. By eliminating the constant tool-switching and reducing administrative overhead, Great Question has improved day-to-day job satisfaction for researchers who can now focus on what they actually love and are best at: talking to users and uncovering insights.
ServiceNow's transformation offers three important lessons for research leaders thinking about their own tool stacks:
For A'verria and her team, the transformation required courage:
“True transformation requires that we break things, and so we need to break the systems that we have currently in place, and really take the lead, because the gains are just unbelievable,” she says.
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