Polaris — Research Ops by WeWork
If you haven’t been following the recent work of Tomer Sharon (VP of UX for WeWork) you are missing out. First off, since taking on the role of VP of UX he’s been incredibly transparent with the work he’s been doing. Though sometimes he can be a little sneaky.
Most recently, Tomer gave a public viewing of his team’s latest work — Polaris — in an article Called Democratizing Design.
In it, he describes the problems his team and the organization are having, and a very quick description of what polaris does and its main mission.
This type of tool is really important for research teams to be able to capture data from across the organization, give it proper context through metadata, like tagging, and then find the golden nuggets of insights.
I have found that getting insights rationalized through an organization is probably the most difficult part of a research operating model. To me this is the primary goal of a research team. It is their ultimate currency — hopefully more valuable and healthy for the organization than a chicken nugget.
Kudos to Tomer and the entire WeWork team. It is also admirable that WeWork would allow so much resource to be spent on a tool like this. There are some off-the-shelf possibilities out there, but none are mature enough to withstand the onslaught of fully functioning enterprise grade research organization with the goals that Polaris attempts to satisfy.
