Scaling one researcher across three squads

WHAT THIS TESTS This probes operational thinking: how a single specialist serves many teams without blocking them. The interviewer wants prioritization, enablement, and reuse, balanced against maintaining research rigor.

A GOOD ANSWER COVERS Accept you cannot personally run every study, so triage. Use an intake process that scores requests by impact and risk, reserving your deep involvement for high-stakes, ambiguous, or strategic questions, and routing low-risk questions elsewhere. Democratize research: enable squad members to run lightweight studies, usability tests, surveys, themselves using templates, discussion guides, recruiting scripts, and clear guardrails on what they can and cannot do safely, with you reviewing for rigor. Build a shared, searchable insight repository so existing findings answer many questions without a new study, increasing leverage. Establish rituals like research office hours, a shared backlog, and regular readouts so all three squads get predictable access. The goal is to shift from doing all research to scaling it, while protecting quality through enablement and review rather than gatekeeping.

COMMON WRONG ANSWERS Trying to personally conduct every study for all three squads, guaranteeing a bottleneck and burnout. Fully delegating research to untrained squad members with no guardrails, sacrificing rigor. Working first-come-first-served instead of by impact. Keeping insights in personal notes so nothing is reusable. Saying you would simply work harder or longer hours.

LIKELY FOLLOW-UPS How do you keep democratized research rigorous. How do you decide which requests you run yourself. How does a research repository reduce your workload.

ONE CONCRETE EXAMPLE Squad A asks to validate copy wording, squad B wants a strategic study on a new market, squad C has a usability question already answered last quarter. You point squad C to the insight repository, hand squad A a vetted usability-test template and review their plan, and personally lead squad B's high-stakes market study. Weekly office hours absorb small questions. Your direct time concentrates on the highest-impact work while the squads keep moving, scaling your impact across all three without becoming their blocker.