The Origin Story of Researchers’ Guide to the Galaxy

Hello! I'm Yokey, one out of the 5 user researchers at Cleo. I research all things related to the core features in Cleo from budgeting to savings and money management.

So what is it?

A space to share user stories

We want to make sure all Cleo employees can empathise with our users, their needs, and user pain points as the company grows. To help with this, we created a bi-weekly meetup called Researchers’ Guide to the Galaxy (RGTTG).

The aims of the meetup:

1. Unite our colleagues from all disciplines to hear our users’ stories first hand

2. Provide a space to discuss questions they might have about Cleo’s user experience.

While we are still a small team of researchers, RGTTG is one of the many ways we feel trusted by the rest of Cleo to put our users at the heart at what we do. Simply doing the research is half the work, but often the more complex part of our work is ensuring that our research insights become actionable and influential.

During each session, different researchers take a short slot to present the latest nuggets of user research insights, recordings of our conversations with users and a showcase of upcoming projects.

‍What’s the impact?

1. We give colleagues who do not work in customer-facing teams the chance to get immersed into the latest research findings and empathise with our users.
2. Our sessions, whilst casual, have a consistent turnout of colleagues from product, engineering, data, design & marketing
3. It’s often a lively discussion to answer bigger questions that cannot be solved by a single team
4. We’ve started to break down silos between teams and disciplines in Cleo, by highlighting that we are working towards solving the same user problems.
5. We’ve made our team more approachable. Colleagues will now readily approach the research team with exploratory user research questions. Ensuring we make user-centred decisions in marketing, data science & product decisions
6. The sessions have kept our team accountable — we take better care over how we plan and conduct our user research when we know the whole company is looking forward to what we’re sharing! We’re laser focussed on making sure we’re sharing the most important research insights.

If you’re interested in learning more about user research at Cleo, stay tuned for more blog posts!