Balancing Fan Expression with Platform Principles

The Challenge: The Innovator's Dilemma Inside a Tech Giant

How do you build new, intimate features for fan engagement on a platform built for global scale? This was the core challenge facing the Community, Fan Engagement, and Expression teams at YouTube.

As an embedded UX Researcher, my role was to provide the user-centric foundation for products like Post, Story, and DMs. The team was under immense pressure to innovate quickly, but we also had to operate within the complex ecosystem of Google and YouTube's established platform principles. This created a classic "Applied Insight Gap": how do you build something new and exciting without breaking the system that already exists?

The Work: A Three-Phase Path to Clarity

My approach was to move the team from broad ambiguity to decisive action through a structured, multi-method research plan. This wasn't just about testing features; it was about building a shared understanding of the problem space.

1. Starting with the Human, Not the Feature (Directional) Instead of starting with YouTube-specific features, I began with a platform-agnostic, foundational "Jobs To Be Done" (JTBD) study. Through in-depth interviews and a large-scale survey, we reframed the problem. The question wasn't "How can we improve comments on Posts?" but rather, "What is the fundamental 'job' a user is trying to 'hire' a community feature for?" This strategic move allowed us to understand core human needs independent of any single product, giving us a stable foundation to build upon.

2. Bridging Qual and Quant (Partnership) To understand what users were creating, I partnered directly with Data Science. I developed a framework for studying "Post Creation Intent," facilitating focus groups to understand the "why" behind user-generated content. This qualitative insight allowed us to form sharp, testable hypotheses that guided the quantitative analysis, ensuring our data-driven decisions were grounded in human motivation.

3. Driving a High-Stakes Decision (Delivery) The most critical phase was the tactical M5/6 testing. The team was developing an MVP for a new fan engagement feature and needed to know whether to deprecate an existing one to avoid user confusion. My end-to-end research—conducted in rapid, four-week sprints—provided the answer. The research showed that the proposed new feature was not only causing significant confusion but was also failing to address the core "job-to-be-done" we had identified in our foundational work.

The Outcome: From Ambiguity to Actionable Insight

The result of this integrated research program was not a simple report, but a series of clear, strategic mandates that enabled the team to move forward with confidence.

• A Clear Mandate to Deprecate: My research provided the definitive, user-backed evidence needed for the product team to make the difficult but correct decision to deprecate the confusing feature, saving valuable engineering resources and preventing a poor user experience.
• A Shared Strategic Framework: The JTBD study became a cornerstone for the team's strategy, providing a common language and a user-centric lens through which all future feature development could be evaluated.
• Systemic Impact: By demonstrating the power of a mixed-methods approach, I helped the team build a more robust, repeatable process for validating product decisions, reducing the risk associated with future innovation.

This case study is a testament to the Research Entrepreneur's core function: to act as a strategic partner who uses research not just to answer questions, but to navigate organizational complexity and drive the business toward the right outcomes.