How do you scale research without burning out your top contributors? 

James Villacci, Head of Global UX Research at HelloFresh, joined us on July 8 for a Rally AMA to share how his team transformed UX Research from a bottleneck to a backbone – a scalable, productized system that supports teams across the company without exhausting his own.

Missed the event? Or want to revisit the key takeaways? Read the full recap below or watch the live discussion here. 

Who is James? 

I’m James Vallaci, and I lead the HelloFresh U.S. research department. HelloFresh is global, in 30 different countries, but my focus is here in the U.S.

My background is in something called human factors and applied cognition. It’s basically psychology and engineering in this one space. I did a lot of government contracting for the Department of Education here in the U.S., and a lot of that focus was on how humans interact with and trust agents.

I joined HelloFresh back in about 2018 as the sole UXR for the company. At the time, UXR specifically was kind of viewed as a waste of time.

Within a period of about three months, I was able to really turn heads around. How? By speaking the product team’s language and turning research into a product. I also want to chalk it up to some luck, every success story you hear has some of that.

At HelloFresh, beyond studying how people consume food globally and how we deliver meal kits, my major focus has been on ensuring that our research recommendations and outputs are actually utilized, not just sitting on a shelf.

Right now, my main focus has shifted from personally driving around 100 research projects a year to enabling teams across the company to run their own research. I’m focused on making sure everyone has access to the knowledge and tools they need to keep this research machine I’ve built running efficiently and effectively across the organization.

Within three months, you turned around how the company viewed research. How did you do that?

When I started at HelloFresh, there wasn’t any established research. It was really from scratch and the ground up.

In ecommerce you want to make sure you have a frictionless funnel; people need to be able to sign up easily. So I ended up running a quick usability test. I pitched it as an “expensive sales call,” so to speak, because there was no budget. I was able to secure a very small amount to run the study.

After running the study, we found that people couldn’t complete a really important step to actually get HelloFresh. I framed that recommendation in terms of an A/B test. In the ecommerce world, we’re all about A/B tests and I see A/B tests as just another kind of research method that we’re helping to implement.

We ran the A/B test and it led to a very large financial impact. It showed that doing research, – and framing recommendations in terms of A/B tests and actionable implementations, rather than just doing research for the sake of it – was key for advocating for its value.

Once we found the problem and identified a solution, I marketed it out. I wanted to make sure the research we conducted was consumed, not just by my core audience, but by other teams across the company who had similar issues.

So I leaned into the question: how do I turn this research into a product across our product organization? And it completely transformed how we consumed and conducted research at HelloFresh.

You mentioned you were hesitant about democratization early on. Can you share what changed your mind?

My background is in research. I’m a researcher through and through. Research is near and dear to my heart.

When I started out career, I actually gave a keynote about how democratization shouldn’t be a thing. I said it should only be done in very certain cases and very small segments. I was very opposed.

I’d even say things like, “Hey sales team, how would you feel if engineers came in and started selling the product?” That would spark some tough conversations: they’re not as good at it, they wouldn’t hit the right numbers, it wouldn’t be efficient.

It took me a very long time to get out of this mindset. The shift really came from realizing it’s not about turning the faucet on for everyone. It’s about establishing guardrails. More importantly, it’s about empowering others across the team to drive research.

I have this analogy about a research restaurant and franchising things out. That’s really the idea: broaden your impact. You’ll hit a wall otherwise. There’s only so much headcount to go around. So, think: how can you be as effective as possible and have maximum impact, especially when budgets are tight?

Any advice for those who feel curious or cautious about democratization?

You need to start out strong: being more involved, creating rigor, setting up what research actually means at your company. Lay the foundational operational layer before turning on the faucets.

Along the way, you’re going to trip. People will abuse the system or things will come out wrong. It’s all about aligning with your leaders first: these are our goals for the year, this is what we want to do, this is how we want to empower customer centricity.

Something I’ve learned more recently is that broader impact can actually be more effective than just trickling down. You have multiple teams and multiple departments consuming research and enablement systems.

What we’re building at HelloFresh now is essentially a research platform for the whole company to jump on. 

Can you explain your “research restaurant” analogy?

At HelloFresh, being a meal company, it comes naturally to think of research as a restaurant.

You have cooks and chefs, your researchers, and customers, your stakeholders. The chefs serve dishes (projects) tailored to customer preferences and avoiding “allergies” – those hard roadblocks where you have to substitute something to meet the need.

Running a high-quality restaurant is great, but expensive to scale. Franchising allows you to enable others (cooks) to use your recipes and serve customers consistently, even if it’s not fine dining.

You always want your main research restaurant running because that’s the bread and butter. But opening multiple locations is expensive and not every location works. With the platform, we’re franchising: enabling others to replicate tried-and-true recipes while maintaining quality and consistency.

The idea is to figure out what you can sacrifice, how you can make things quicker, and where to say: “that’s not on the menu.”

What are some of the key ingredients that made democratization work at HelloFresh?

#1: Document your menu. Write down what dishes you’ve served before, what projects have been run, and what worked.

Strong documentation upfront is what I’d chalk up to my success. Without that data, you can’t replicate, you can’t scale, and you can’t futureproof.

#2: Establish recruitment pipelines. Where are you pulling from? Do you have access to users? What are the roadblocks?

Instead of trying to document every micro-insight, focus on an insight catalog: what projects you ran, what the outcome was, and where to find more details.

#3: Partner with your CRM, marketing, or whoever owns access to customers. Show what you can do and build those relationships.

How do you measure the success of the research platform?

We track:

• How many people are using it
• What methods they’re using
• What decisions are being driven
• What teams are engaging
• What tools they’re using

We also interview stakeholders regularly, just like we’d do IDIs with customers. And we still maintain a focus on core research while balancing enablement.

How do you measure the success of the research platform?

On the platform side, it really comes down to how many people are actually using it. How many people across the company are engaging, doing it themselves, what topics are being studied  and really what you’re doing there is championing the organization. Like I mentioned before, it’s not just about going high, it’s also about going broad. That’s really where our focus is now.

We track:

• How many people are using it
• What methods they’re using
• What decisions are being driven
• What teams are engaging
• What tools they’re using

More broadly, we also look at how we can gather testimonials and feedback. One of the biggest things we’re doing now is interviews but not necessarily with our customers. We’re doing interviews with our stakeholders.

I can’t stress that enough. Everyone has this skill set. You can do IDIs with your stakeholders. Check in. Where are they? What are they thinking? Talk to them, see where they’re going.

We also provide consultation and support to help make sure these things actually launch. So it’s really all about reporting now. How are people utilizing your product? You’re essentially creating your own product reports and analysis, and measuring how effective the different programs you’ve set up have been.

I also don’t want to lose sight of the fact that you still need to focus on the core research team. The main researchers are still doing high-impact work, and that has to continue alongside the platform.

It’s important to balance both. You might even find opportunities and overlap. Something discovered through the enablement program might apply to someone else’s study, and vice versa. That’s really where knowledge management comes in. We strongly document all the enablement pieces as well, and that’s absolutely vital.

How do you balance scale with quality?

Balancing scale with quality really starts with strong alignment with your senior leaders up front. Where do you draw the line between blocking something and letting it proceed? What we’ve been finding more recently is that speed has become more important, at least with the methods we’ve enabled so far.

The big thing here, and I want to emphasize this, is methods. You have to decide: what methods are you going to enable? Who is aligned on who can do what — or rather, who should do what? That’s really what it comes down to.

You also need clarity on who is responsible for flagging issues, who is checking for quality, and what channel they should use when a conflict comes up. Those are all important considerations, and that’s what we’ve uncovered so far in trying to balance scale with quality.

You still need to maintain high-quality research happening alongside everything else, even as you balance the broader platform.

How do you “market” research internally?

To start, you need to understand the three things a good product does. 

First, it solves a problem. There has to be a clear problem that your product, in this case, research, is addressing. What I found at HelloFresh was that people across the business had to make very risky decisions, and they wanted to feel confident in those decisions. But we didn’t have a mechanism for building that confidence outside of experimentation or A/B tests, which were expensive. There was no lower-cost solution.

Second, once you’ve identified the problem, you come up with the solution. For us, that solution was conducting research ourselves so we could craft recommendations and deliver them. If you’re a researcher, you already know how to do this part.

Third, you need a go-to-market strategy. You see this all the time: there are products out there that solve real problems, but they’re not marketed well, and people don’t know about them. Research is no different.

If you think of research as a product – or as I like to say, a research restaurant – how are you pitching it? How are you advertising it? You have to invite people in. Make it interesting. Make them want to “come and dine with us,” so to speak.

We came up with some unique ways to do this. One example is what we call our Insight Shows. In our New York City office, there’s a glass elevator door that everyone uses to come and go. The problem is the handle is identical on both sides, so you don’t know whether to push or pull, which is a classic example of poor affordance and poor signifiers.

So I put a piece of paper on the door that said: “Do you push or pull? Want to learn more? Come to the Insight Show where we’ll talk about affordances and signifiers.” It sparked conversations, people were talking about it around the office, and it got them to come to the show where we showcased our research.

It’s all about creating these fun, memorable moments. We’ve done themed shows – Halloween, for example, where we all dressed up in costumes – and even added intro music. You want to create a brand around your research. What is it? How can people consume it? The goal is to break the everyday monotony, make it fun, make it consumable, and make it memorable.

How do you collaborate with Research Operations?

That’s a big one. What I’d say is, one of the other key flavors of success for me was investing really early in research operations. I was fortunate enough to connect with Kate Towsey back in 2018 or 2019, during the first UXR conference, and what I’ll say is it’s essential.

We’ve had very strong collaborations with Research Operations, and that function is absolutely vital to getting anything moving. They go hand in hand with researchers.

The way I see it, Research Ops is already laying the foundation both for researchers and, to some extent, for non-researchers too. Researchers can then work directly with Research Ops to scale and build on that groundwork.

So yes, we absolutely collaborate. They’re a core part of the team, and I’d even argue that they are the team when it comes to enabling and accomplishing these larger democratization efforts.

What about AI? How do you see researchers staying ahead?

Focus on your knowledge base. Make sure you’re documenting your findings and start thinking about creating ways to search and scrape those findings. That’s something I’m heavily invested in and really looking into.

Before, you had to write Python scripts to scrape data, cluster it, and run PCA (principal component analysis) or exploratory factor analysis to figure out where the trends were and how relationships were being formed. That’s clustering. Now, with the help of AI, all of that can be done very quickly. You no longer need to do it manually.

So I’d say lean into it. Learn prompt engineering too. There are so many platforms and agents you can use, and the better your prompts, the better the results you’ll get.

I don’t think researchers will ever be replaced, but parts of research will be automated. You’ll still need those quality control checks.

Our jobs are gradually shifting: instead of being in the loop, doing the work ourselves, we’re moving to being on the loop – guiding, monitoring, and making sure the process is working effectively.

How can researchers stay impactful without growing the team?

The answer right now is enablement. You want to make sure you’re providing systems for people to do research themselves. Research is a verb, that’s how I see it. I believe the more we can provide scalable systems, templates, and these “meal kits” for others to use, the more you futureproof yourself.

In the current economic climate, that’s essential. You also show that you’re adapting to the business. And businesses notice that. It’s not an easy economy right now. Not every company is scaling. It becomes more about: are you adjusting? Do they see that?

As researchers, we naturally want to provide the future vision, the foresight. And I think by adjusting our practices to adapt to this environment, the better off we’ll be. It’s not easy. It’s tough to say, “It’s not about hiring more researchers, it’s about providing scalable systems.” But I think it’s a smart move to adopt this mindset.

I’ll be honest, I was super skeptical about this before. You wouldn’t have caught me two years ago saying, “Let’s give away the keys to the kingdom.” But the castle is lonely. And I think it’s about inviting more people in.

Connect with James

If you enjoyed James’s AMA:

• Follow him on LinkedIn and say hello!
• Listen to James and other UXR leaders share their insights on building high-impact research practices.

Thank you, James!

Huge thank you to James for joining us for an AMA and sharing such an insightful look into how he’s building and scaling research at HelloFresh. It was an inspiring and energizing conversation. James’s approach to democratization, enablement, and creating a research platform that truly drives impact is raising the bar for what research can look like inside a fast-moving organization. We’re grateful for the time, thoughtfulness, and expertise he shared with our community. If you’d like to watch the full AMA, follow this link.