A Day in the Life of a Qualitative Insights Professional with McKenzie Lawton, Director of Qualitative Operations at Suzy

As the Director of Qualitative Operations at Suzy, my work falls into two buckets: client-focused and organizational. I currently lead a team of nine, so I spend a lot of my time supporting other Suzy team members to help them scope and work qualitative projects through Suzy Live, including live in-depth interviews and focus groups, on behalf of our clients. Our daily work includes understanding client objectives, target consumers, and timing to then translate that into a recommended project.

Our research process at Suzy is a little bit different from other research providers. On the quantitative side, our platform is optimized for mobile participants doing fast and easy surveys to keep them engaged and avoid survey fatigue. So we keep that piece in mind on the qualitative side as well. When we design surveys and qualitative research plans on a daily basis, we work to keep consumers interested and engaged and make research very easy for them to participate in. That means we want to make it easy for anyone to spend five minutes answering a couple of surveys, then receive an interview opportunity through Suzy Live that is tailored to them.

My goal each day is to make sure that my team is set up for success to execute client projects, especially by sharing best practices, use cases, and real-life examples. I also love to highlight the team members who are doing exciting new stuff on different client projects internally to encourage the whole team.

Our team takes on projects on an ongoing basis and for a variety of use cases, working across all of our clients and verticals. Whenever I can, I like to assign projects where my team members can work with their passions. For instance, one of the project managers on my team is a golfer and was excited to work on interviews with highly active amateur golfers. The resulting project went above and beyond the expectations of our client because of his enthusiasm.

Organizational and Product Work

Organizationally, my role is to develop processes to scale the qualitative part of our organization and work closely with our product team to develop features and improvements for our clients. Running qualitative research at Suzy is cross-functional. Our product team works in lockstep with our research and customer success teams, so we can get multiple perspectives on what our clients want from Suzy Live.

What’s really important to me is helping our clients become more curious about the “why” behind the “what”. Qualitative research is critical for our clients to add context and color to their research, which helps them continue the process of iteration. At Suzy, we want to offer more to our clients—so we must continue to develop and diversify the qualitative methodologies at Suzy. We originally launched Suzy Live with IDIs only. Since then we have delved into focus groups, dyads, triads, usability testing, IHUTs, and video responses, and there is even more room to grow.