The Easiest Way to Do User Research Across a Whole Company
Every role I have been in for the last 10 years I have made it an effort to have 1:1s with everyone in my entire company. At Whereby, a team of 120 folks at it’s peak and 45 when I first joined, this was easier. At Talentful, with almost 400 people globally, it was more difficult. Regardless, I always made the effort and publicly shared that it was something I made an effort to do every week, meeting with at least 2-4 people to talk through a structured set of questions with an unstructured outcome: qualitative feedback and an idea of where the unseen or undiscussed problems may be hiding away.
On my first week at Leapsome I told the company I would be doing the same, but trying to reach as many of our 150 folks across the first four weeks as possible.
There is a version of this story where I tell you I spent my first week at Leapsome carefully sending bespoke meeting invitations to every single person on the team, researching their calendars, considering their time zones, and handwriting agendas.
That version is fiction.
The real version involves Leapsome as a platform, Gemini, a .ics file, and about forty-five minutes of moving calendar blocks around like a particularly detailed game of Tetris.
And it works brilliantly.
When you are joining a new company as a People leader: everyone expects you to listen, but nobody builds you the infrastructure to actually do it easily. You’re dropped into a Google Calendar full of strangers’ names, access to a HRIS, engagement surveys, and given a laptop to kick off your user research. The only way to form a real view (not the curated town-hall version, but the actual texture of what’s happening) is to talk to people. A lot of people. Individually.
So I book 1:1s with everyone. Not just my team. Everyone. Once a year, roughly 30 minutes, no agenda, no prep required. It sounds like a logistical nightmare. And it kind of is, briefly, and then it isn’t.
The Setup: Don’t Do This Manually
The first mistake most People leaders make is trying to schedule these one by one. You open your calendar, search for someone’s name, check their availability, draft an invite, send it, then move on to the next person. Multiply that by however many people are in your organisation and you’ve just spent two days doing something a moderately capable spreadsheet could do for you.
Here’s what actually works:
