How Brex Grew Research Participation by 10x
Nicolás Carey
VP of Product and Design at Brex
If Nicolás Carey were to compare Brex’s product-building process today to where it was three years ago, the differences would be striking. As VP of Product and Design, Nicolás now leads teams that co-design every feature alongside customers.
But first, they had to remove a key bottleneck: access to research.
Brex helps companies spend smarter and move faster with modern cards, banking, expense management, and accounts payable all in one platform. For a company whose customers span startups to enterprise public companies, Nico and his team knew that understanding vastly different customer needs wasn’t optional.
Over the last 18+ months, Brex has been on what they internally refer to as “Brex 3.0”, a major transformation to become more customer-centric and redefine the future of finance. To make that possible, Great Question became their partner.
Problem: research trapped in a bottleneck
Before Great Question, research at Brex was bottlenecked. Only a few people knew how to run studies, recruit participants, and use the tools. Everyone else had to wait in line.
“We used to have a bottleneck where only certain folks knew how to run research.”
For product managers, designers, and engineers with a burning question about customer needs, waiting translates to delays. This meant being in the dark about critical decisions.
Recruitment was the worst part. To run a study, teams first had to pair with data teams to surface the audience. They then manually cold emailed customers, sorted through availability, and tried to sync across numerous disconnected tools. What should have been simple instead took weeks.
“People used to say how hard it was to get somebody on a call about their research question.”
The fragmented toolstack also slowed research and established a culture in which only specialists could own research. For a company that needed to co-design products for multiple customer segments, that simply wouldn’t scale.
The solution: making research effortless for everyone
Brex brought on Great Question three years ago because of a fundamental belief: inspire customer love. Great Question promised to take the complexity out of research, making customer centricity accessible to the entire company, not just researchers.
The effects were structural and immediate. Great Question became Brex’s single research solution, centralizing everything from planning studies to recruiting participants to recording sessions to sharing insights. Self-service was finally possible.
“Bringing on Great Question allowed us to strip away the complexity and make research accessible to everyone at the company.”
Lightweight, repeatable research processes were simple enough for anyone to follow, regardless of background or research expertise.
The participant recruitment platform was game-changing. PMs, designers, engineers, and even operations employees could run their own studies on their own schedule, following established best practices. Research ops wait times? Bottlenecks? A thing of the past.
“Bringing on Great Question has meant that PMs, designers, engineers, and operators across the company can easily run studies following a lightweight, repeatable process that sets best practices.”
That’s independent, self-service research without lowering the bar for quality.
Transitioning from research sprints to continuous discovery was another advantage.
“Great Question has allowed teams to transform their research process from having to schedule a research sprint to being able to truly drive continuous discovery with participants being scheduled every week.”
From 10 researchers to over 100
The numbers speak for themselves. Brex set out to democratize research with one goal in mind: the number of people who felt empowered to run a study.
“In that first year alone, we grew it from single digits to over 100 people at Brex running research. And ever since then, it's continued to grow organically.”
That growth didn’t come at the cost of quality. Brex also moved from its previous research repository, Dovetail, to Great Question, centralizing everything under one roof.
“What we found is that everyone wanted to schedule and access research in just one tool.”
This democratized research approach was a key component in meeting Brex’s unique challenge of serving both startups and enterprise public companies. They refer to it as “simplicity to complexity.” Brex builds products sophisticated enough for Fortune 500 finance teams, but also accessible to startups. That kind of nuance requires constant customer feedback across segments.
Key takeaways
By removing bottlenecks and making research easy to run, Brex empowered over 100 employees to talk to customers directly, turning insights into action faster than ever.
- Infrastructure for democratization. Over 100 people were running studies without waiting for researchers. This was enabled by offering a self-service platform with best practices embedded.
- Self-service creates velocity. Brex moved from research sprints to continuous discovery by having research studies run weekly (not monthly), doubling the speed of validation.
- Consolidation leads to adoption. Brex moved both their recruiting and storage needs to one UX research platform, which then made it frictionless for people to do research without jumping between tools.
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