Establishing a Continuous Discovery Cadence at ManyPets

Building a culture of evidence in a stakeholder-driven environment

When I joined ManyPets, there was no digital research team.

There was no recurring discovery cadence.
No shared insight repository.
No structured way to answer the question,

“What should we do next?”

Research happened - but only as large, heavyweight projects tied to major initiatives. It was seen as expensive, slow, and optional.

Everything else ran on instinct, urgency, and stakeholder opinion.

I believed we could do better.

Why Continuous Discovery?

The principles of continuous discovery - pioneered by Theresa Torres - are simple:

• Talk to customers regularly.

• Gather small insights consistently.

• Collate opportunities over time.

• Make decisions backed by patterns, not opinions.

It’s not about one big research project.
It’s about building a long lens on user behavior.

This especially matters in insurance, where customers often don’t articulate their biggest pain points directly.

The goal wasn’t just “do more research.”

It was to:

• Break the cycle of using only stakeholder opinions to prioritise

• Reduce reworks

• Make roadmap decisions defensible

• And maybe most importantly, shift debates from opinion to evidence

My Role

There was no mandate to build this.

I initiated by:

• Establishing a bi-weekly interview cadence with UK insured pet owners

• Alternating between moderated and unmoderated sessions

• Selecting and implementing research tools

• Revamping our on site survey strategy

• Designing a consistent research documentation structure

• Training designers and PMs on lightweight research practices

• Personally onboarding teammates to testing platforms

• Championing research in planning and prioritisation conversations

Over time, my primary PM and I started interviewing 5 people and reviewing the on site survey feedback during every sprint, as well as running ad hoc, testing on new designs. These practices resulted in a much bigger idea pool when planning and significantly increased the number of designs exposed to real users before release.

This was especially impactful because we didn’t have a strong internal design review culture. Previously, many designs were only stress-tested internally.

Expanding Research Ownership During Organisational Change

Partway through this work, our Customer Support Insights team was unexpectedly made redundant, including the team managing Medallia, the feedback platform powering all our claims and customer support feedback surveys, along with our always-on customer sentiment and website surveys.

There was no handoff, documentation, or clear ownership for moving forward.

Rather than allowing that digital customer feedback stream to disappear as the customer support team struggled to take on the new responsibility, I took initiative to up-skill quickly and assumed ownership of the platform across the entire digital experience - not just within my own product area.

This involved:

• Learning and managing the Medallia digital platform independently

• Maintaining and refining live customer feedback surveys

• Ensuring continuous visibility of customer sentiment across the website

• Identifying recurring friction points and surfacing insights to teams beyond my direct ownership area

• Protecting a key stream of passive customer insight during a period of organisational instability

This work complemented our active research practice by adding a continuous layer of in-the-moment behavioural and sentiment feedback at scale.

The Resistance

Defending research is rarely straightforward.

Typical pushback included: 

• “We don’t have time.”

• “We did research x years ago before we launched.”

• “Stakeholders can just go through it after launch and give feedback.”

• “Research is too expensive”

And sometimes, the main objection was not explicitly stated but strongly implied:

• Your research insights didn’t align with stakeholder opinions and we don’t like that.

That’s when trust gets tested.

I found that consistency was the key.

One research doc can be ignored.

Twenty consistently formatted research docs, showing repeating patterns?
Much harder to dismiss.

By pointing to documented, recurring evidence, I was able to shift conversations from:

“I think…”

to

“We’re consistently hearing…”

That doesn’t mean resistance disappeared. It didn’t.
But the conversation changed. We were able to use evidence to make decisions and structure our roadmaps for more impact. For example:

• We deprioritised a massive overhaul of our landing pages as people weren’t interested in spending much time on them anyway;

• We built a way for customers to see the products and prices, which were more important to them than our sales info;

• We accelerated the efforts to make comparisons across tiers easier, building trust across our purchase funnel. 

What We Built

These weren’t just interviews. We built a system by:

• Talking to UK insured pet owners every other week

• Documenting insights in a structured, repeatable format

• Creating a long-standing opportunity solution tree

• Identifying themes across the entire purchase journey

• Linking research insights directly to roadmap decisions

The opportunity solution tree was especially powerful.

It helped us zoom out from “Fix this page” and “Redesign that component”

to:

• Build trust across the entire funnel

• Reduce cognitive overload at key decision points

• Enhance clarity of comparison

• Improve handholding during stressful moments (price increases, claims, renewals)

This system helped start the shift from page-level thinking to systems thinking.

Core Principles That Emerged for the Distribution Area

Through years of bi-weekly conversations, several recurring truths emerged, shaping our product strategy:

Comparison is essential

If we offer multiple tiers, customers must see how they differ clearly.

Simple, but detailed

People don’t want complexity, but they do want clarity about what they’re buying.

Trust > persuasion

Pet insurance is something people want to “set and forget.”

The real issues aren’t always visual

Design was rarely the root cause of conversion friction.
Turns out, issues like pricing structure, product-market fit, policy clarity, and even things as small as page load time were key determiners of customer acquisition and retention.

Continuous discovery gave us the confidence to challenge assumptions and escalate the right problems to the right stakeholders.

It allowed us to stop using UI as a band-aid.

Impact

This practice of continuous discovery:

• Reduced design rework

• Improved prioritisation of A/B tests

• Helped weed out weak ideas before build

• Strengthened cross-functional conversations

• Grounded roadmap decisions in evidence

While adoption varied across teams, the long-term impact of this work fundamentally changed how product decisions were discussed and prioritised, and even started to change the types of requests marketing made.

What This Says About Me

This project wasn’t about running interviews.

It was about:

• Building a culture of evidence

• Creating scalable research systems

• Coaching teams

• Defending uncomfortable insights

• Fighting my own biases

• Ensuring we changed direction based on proof, not preference

I care deeply about designing the right thing, and sometimes that requires changing internal decision making processes before changing customer interfaces.