AI Product Research
Building Research as a Strategic Function
Client: Project Management Institute (PMI)
Platform: PMI Infinity — Generative AI platform for project professionals
Project Type: Mixed method product Research, CX Strategy, Insight-Driven Design
Timeline: 13 months (Jan 2025–Jan 2026)
My Role: Lead Product Research and CX Strategist, dedicated to Product team and working with cross-functional teams including design and engineering
Scope: 19 research studies & workshops; 250+ project professionals
Research Methods: Unmoderated usability testing, moderated in-depth interviews, strategic workshops & co-creation, discovery research, design validation, evaluative research, power-user interviews
Strategic & Operational Competencies: Cross-functional workshop facilitation, insight synthesis & thematic analysis, research-to-roadmap translation, repository management (Dovetail), stakeholder communication, research program design, mentorship & knowledge transfer
Background
PMI Infinity is Project Management Institute’s GenAI platform for project professionals. I joined the Infinity team in early 2025 as Lead Product Researcher — a newly dedicated role on a new team, for a product in active development with a new director, and no formal research infrastructure or established connection between user insights and product decisions.
My mandate was to establish product research as a strategic capability — to ensure research was integrated at the beginning of development cycles and that insights actively shaped the product roadmap.
Approach
Starting with Alignment
A pivotal early move was designing and facilitating a 2-day in-person cross-functional visioning workshop for Infinity leadership — the first of its kind for the product. This workshop brought together product, design, engineering, and senior leadership to align on a shared strategic vision for Infinity’s next 1–3 years of development. It also set the tone for research’s role on the team as formative and strategic.
"Hey Jessica - wanted to thank you again for organizing and heading up the workshop - it was incredibly informative. A great starting point to reenergize the project!"
– John Davidge, Director of PMI Infinity
A Year-Long Mixed-Method Research Program
Over 2025, I led 19 studies and workshops spanning the full research spectrum:
9 unmoderated usability tests for scalable, fast-turnaround behavioral data
5 studies with moderated in-depth interviews to capture nuanced mental models and unmet needs
5 strategic workshops for stakeholder alignment and organizational insights
More than 250 project professionals participated, including internal staff, external volunteers, PMO leaders, and advisory team members globally. Research spanned early discovery, evaluative studies, design validation, power-user deep dives, through the full live agentic platform experience.
Synthesizing Findings into Strategic Narratives
Across the year I synthesized findings from multiple studies into coherent product narratives. It was about more than just reporting what users said, but translating patterns into product implications and prioritized opportunities.
The Jan–Sept synthesis—compiled from ten studies and three global field events (150+ participants)—gave the team a comprehensive picture of the pre-agentic user experience. It included both the platform’s strongest assets (communication enhancement, PMI expertise, speed) and its most critical gaps (generic outputs, insufficient context-gathering, lack of visual outputs, missing integrations) — findings that fed directly into the agentic roadmap. I also identified eight cross-cutting themes, including:
Trust is earned progressively — PMI’s brand, source transparency, and consistent accuracy moved users from skepticism to advocacy
Users wanted intelligence, not templates — outputs that surfaced patterns, predicted outcomes, and understood project context
Individual wins weren’t scaling organizationally — collaboration features and enterprise integrations were the missing bridge
Visual structure was imperative — a tabular RACI chart scored 6/6 on usability while a text-heavy stakeholder document scored 3/6, making the case that visual structure was the difference between a document used daily and one ignored
Integration demand appeared in every study — users operating across 5–10+ tools needed consolidation, not another silo
The Q4 synthesis, conducted as the agentic platform launched, validated what was working post-launch as well as gaps that became immediate priorities. I also added new themes including the “Invisible AI Problem” (users saw the folder structure but not the intelligence behind it) and “Collaboration as the Unspoken Need”, which emerged organically across three studies without prompting.
Building Systems for Sustained Impact
I established a weekly research touchpoint with cross-funtional teams, and starting in Q3, I launched a monthly research review — a touchpoint with a living document that tracked all research insights with organized categories and themes, updated continuously. This became the connective tissue between studies and decisions.
I also integrated all studies into Dovetail—PMI's research repository—making findings discoverable and actionable for cross-functional teams.
In Q4, I presented “Insights to Action” during PMI’s Research Excellence Series to build research literacy across the broader organization.
These moves transformed individual studies into a durable organizational capability.
Impact
Product Experience
Research findings directly shaped development decisions across every major product area in 2025 — Agents, Workspaces/Folders, and the full live platform experience. Specific insights drove feature prioritization, interaction design, and onboarding strategy.
Business
Research moved from a supporting function to a strategic asset. The Q1 visioning workshop became the foundational reference for Infinity’s strategic direction throughout the year. The monthly research review became a standing team ritual. The product team began citing research reports in development discussions. The Dovetail repository grew into a comprehensive, queryable library of findings from all the year's initiatives.