3 Worlds of Research: Agencies, Corporates, and SMEs

Episode Timestamps

0:00 – Introduction and Welcome Chris

2:34 – Discussion on different client engagements and the role of UX research

7:01 – Variation in client requests and challenges faced by agencies

12:00 – Career advice for researchers and comparison of roles in different organizational setups

17:50 – Handling burnout and maximizing the use of research tools

24:16 – Skills and traits needed for researchers and designers at Nomat

28:55 – Conclusion and closing remarks

Main Insights From The Conversation

“In Australia, we still see a lot of diversity from the most mature digital organizations to those who are still relatively new, even in 2024, on their kind of transformation journeys”.​

For Chris Gray, Founder and Managing Director of Nomad, a boutique digital product consultancy based in Melbourne, this observation shapes how his agency approaches every client engagement. With over a decade running Nomad and experience spanning roles at Coles (one of Australia’s major supermarkets), co-founding fintech startup Nimo, and working with brands like Visa, Kmart, and Shell Energy, Chris has witnessed UX research practiced across three distinct worlds.​

Large corporates with mature design teams and dedicated researchers. Agencies like Nomad that flex up and down to meet client needs. And startups where research is often a luxury, done pragmatically by generalists wearing multiple hats.​​

Each environment demands different skills, offers different growth opportunities, and faces unique challenges. In this conversation, Chris shares hard-won insights on why organizations engage agencies, the resource management challenges agencies face, career advice for researchers navigating these three worlds, handling burnout in large agencies, the stakeholder management imperative, and the personality traits that make great researchers.​​

His core message? Understanding the commercial context shapes everything—from which research methods to use, to how to communicate findings, to when research should be deprioritized.​​

About Nomad: Small Team, Specialist Focus

Before diving into the three worlds, Chris explains Nomad’s philosophy.​​

“We’re a digital product consultancy, and we’ve been running the business for over a decade now. We’ve worked with a range of Australian organizations and government—the likes of Visa, Kmart, Shell Energy. Basically, we help them with bringing fabulous products to the market that lead to great business growth and commercial outcomes”.​​

The Boutique Advantage

“I believe in being specialists and having a team with people who are really focused on human-centered design, research, strategy, and UI design and digital product. And that being—that’s what we do. We focus on that so we can do it really, really well”.​​

“As a result of that, we’re a relatively small team. But yeah, there’s a lot of benefits of that. We’re able to maintain quality. We’re able to do fabulous work and have some really deep, meaningful relationships with clients”.​​

Chris is based in South Melbourne, not far from the CBD, enjoying “the best of both worlds—the cafes and markets here in South Melbourne, but we’re nice and close” to the city.​

Why Organizations Engage Agencies

When asked about client advantages in engaging an agency, Chris identifies three core benefits.​

1. Independent, Objective Perspective

“One of the key ones is an independent set of eyes, a fresh set of eyes at challenges. We’re independent of the politics, the internals of the organization”.​​

“So we tend to be—particularly with research—we can provide a fairly objective view and an objective way of facilitating research and getting to the data and information pretty quickly without the bias of perhaps decision-making or those internal politics”.​​

2. Flexible Capacity

“In the current environment, just having a partner like us where you can flex up and flex down. So if you’ve got an internal team and maybe those budgets are being a little bit constrained in the current environment, being able to go out to an agency who can give you that additional capacity at a fairly—with some—with fairly efficiently—that seems to help a lot of our partners”.​​

This is particularly important given that “particularly in the current market, with tight budgets, often agencies are quite expensive. So the question becomes, yeah, why would you go to an agency?”.​​

3. Specialist Skills

“Probably the final thing is just specialist skills. Within a UX domain, obviously, things like research—particularly things like quantitative research—they are often fairly niche skills”.​​

“So being able to go out to a trusted partner like Nomad where you know that you’re going to get good quality, you’ve got people who’ve done these, used techniques like maybe card sorting or surveys or what have you, and done those types of projects over and over again, means that you’re going to get great results from the engagement”.​​

The Cross-Disciplinary Bonus

Chris adds an often-overlooked benefit:​

“You’ve got different levels of experience, but also you can bring experience from different industries to the clients. Obviously, we do a lot of work in retail with the likes of Kmart and Repco, which is a big automotive parts supplier here. And the people in there are fabulous and they’re really detailed on retail”.​​

“But we can bring experience from finance or from banking or from government or what have you. And that is something that they often don’t get exposure to. So that can be really valuable”.​​

Variation in Client Maturity and Requests

When asked about the variation in requests Nomad receives, Chris describes a wide spectrum.​

The Maturity Spectrum

“Look, in Australia we still see a lot of diversity from the most mature digital organizations to those who are still relatively new, even in 2024, on their kind of transformation journeys”.​​

Less Mature Organizations

“In some organizations, we do a lot of mentoring and support to sort of upskill and educate the organization so that they can be more customer-focused, can start to undertake new ways of working where they’re incorporating research and data and information into the decision-making process and then the design process and then bringing things to market”.​​

Mature Organizations

“But then we work with other organizations that have got big design teams, mature design leaders who’ve been working in the space for years. And often in those instances, they’ll come to us and they’ll say, ‘Can you do a round of usability testing for us?’ or ‘Can you do some discovery work and produce a customer journey map?'”.​​

The Classic Misdiagnosis

“Often in those less mature organizations, they’re coming to us and saying, ‘We’ve got a problem, can you help us to solve that problem?’ Or, as I’m sure you’ve seen on occasion, ‘We need to do usability testing,’ and then you start to scratch the surface and discover that in fact it’s not usability testing that they need—it’s actually maybe some discovery work to inform the product in the first instance”.​​

Chris notes this happens in Singapore too: “People don’t know what they need, because the field is so non-standard in terms of the terminology that people come up with—exactly as you said, with different requests. And it turns out that they need something different than what they think they need”.​​

“So then we help them with the discovery of it and then suggest the right research approach”.​​

The Agency Challenge: Resource Management

When asked about the top challenges Nomad faces as an agency, Chris is candid.​​

The Feast or Famine Cycle

“The big one is really scheduling and resourcing. With an agency, we often feel like you’ve either got one or two problems: you’re either too busy and you’re trying to work out how you’re going to resource a project, or you’re not busy enough and you’re trying to work out how you’re going to get people working and get them billing so that you’ve got that consistency”.​​

“That seems to be the age-old challenge”.​​

The Business Development Trade-off

“And then when we’re busy on client projects, we’re often not doing as much business development work”.​​

The Small Team Philosophy

“We’re a small team here at Nomad. I believe in being specialists and having a team with people who are really focused on human-centered design, research, strategy, and UI design and digital product. And that being—that’s what we do. We focus on that so we can do it really, really well”.​​

“And as a result of that, we’re a relatively small team. But yeah, there’s a lot of benefits of that. We’re able to maintain quality. We’re able to do fabulous work and have some really deep, meaningful relationships with clients”.​​

Career Advice: Which World When?

Chris’s experience across all three environments—startup (Nimo), corporate (Coles), and agency (Nomad)—gives him unique perspective on career trajectory.​​

The Core Difference

“All of those scenarios are so different, and they’ve got—I mean, there’s obviously a lot of similarity in that the broad job description is essentially the same. You might be a researcher within those three environments, but the nature of the work is really quite different”.​​

The Headline Distinction

“Probably the headline amongst those three roles is that in a startup, you’ve got to be super pragmatic, you’ve got to be super efficient, you’ve got to be super aligned to the commercial outcomes”.​​

“Whereas in a corporate and an agency, I think they’re a bit more similar. Corporate and agency, it’s a lot more about stakeholder management, it’s about relationships, it’s about bringing the evidence to the table, creating good arguments”.​​

Chris’s Startup Experience: Nimo

“Just to provide a bit of context there, so five years ago I was a co-founder of a fintech by the name of Nimo. And that’s basically an online—it’s a SaaS product—an online lending platform where we were the first to market in Australia with kind of the digital end-to-end lending”.​​

“So data collection, decisioning, right through to settlement and onboarding. And that was a really cool platform. We helped scale that to get over $5 million annualized revenue, and the platform’s won quite a few fintech awards and the like. So that business is still going really strong”.​​

Chris’s Corporate Experience: Coles

“And then in the past, I’ve also spent some time looking after UX at Coles, which is one of the two major supermarkets here in Australia”.​​

Recommended Career Path

“I think from a career standpoint, in my mind there’s different times that are really beneficial to be in those different environments”.​​

Early career: Agency or big corporate

“I like the idea of a career researcher starting in an agency or in a big corporate where they’ve got fabulous mentors, where there’s systems and process in place, where they can get their reps up. They can get the opportunity to run discovery research, run workshops, run usability testing, observe great practitioners doing those—practicing those techniques”.​​

“See great practitioners working with stakeholders and building rapport and relationships and all of those great things. And I just love the idea of a young researcher getting the opportunity to get a lot of feedback, refine those skills, watch and mirror people”.​​

Nomad’s approach to mentoring:

“And that’s certainly one thing we do here at Nomad—when we bring people into the organization, we give them a lot of support. We do monthly check-ins and mentoring sessions with the team to provide feedback and help to upskill and grow people”.​​

Mid-career: Startup

“But I think that, like, a startup, for example, is a great opportunity for a more mid-career researcher to be able to be that team of one, to be working with the directors of the business, to be much more keyed into the commercial side of the organization”.​​

The Commercial Lens at Nimo

“That certainly was a huge part of the research we were doing at Nimo, which was it was really about how do we get the next client on board? How do we drive revenue? How do we do research in a really efficient and meaningful way?”.​​

“And taking a really critical lens on what are the things that need to be researched and perhaps what are the things that we can—maybe part of the UI is used very infrequently by—they get onboarded once, maybe we don’t need to test that with customers if we’ve got finite time and finite resource to do testing”.​​

“But maybe that part of the interface which is perhaps the loan registration form or the loan data collection form—that might be something where we need to test with customers”.​​

The Importance of Commercial Thinking

“And I think that’s a really important thing in our industry—that commercial side of things”.​​

The Burnout Problem in Large Agencies

Chris addresses a common challenge: researchers stuck in repetitive roles at large agencies.​

The Cog in the Machine

“I’ve seen though, in very large agencies—the researchers, let’s say if a researcher wants to have an experience with an agency because the idea is that a lot of work happens there, it’s intense and so on. And I’m talking about not boutique agencies like Nomad, but agencies which are huge in nature”.​​

“There has been a tendency visible to me by the interviews that I have conducted—that there is significant burnout to some of the people because in some cases they become more like a cog in the whole machine, and they are continuously executing, churning out a specific type of work. So it becomes a routine”.​​

Chris’s Advice: Three Strategies

1. Choose your manager carefully

“I think the first thing is when you’re taking any role, particularly as a junior, you need to be really considered about your manager or the people within the organization, because I think that’s your best opportunity to learn and to grow”.​​

2. Value repetition (to a point)

“I think there’s benefit in doing things a repeated number of times. I think one of the challenges I see in our industry is UXers who are perhaps generalists—they might have done some card sorting three years ago and then they get brought into another card sorting project. Well, if you haven’t done card sorting over and over and over again, it becomes quite challenging to be really good at doing that type of technique. So I think there is value in doing that”.​​

“But if you can pick the right manager that can help, then I think you need to be really proactive within an organization”.​​

3. Be the CEO of your own career

“This idea of like being the CEO of your own career—like it’s your career, you need to take ownership of it. Are there other people in other departments who you could get an opportunity to work with?”.​​

“Is there a—if you’re, say, stuck on usability testing but someone else is doing a lot of workshop facilitation, can you ask to shadow them and just go along and get involved in that?”.​​

“Can you speak to other people? Particularly in big organizations and big agencies, if you’ve got industry teams or if you’ve got technology teams or what have you, it can be a really good opportunity to try and move laterally. And that natural move can perhaps give you access to some new skills, and maybe that can give you an opportunity to move into a new organization”.​​

“But I think it’s important to be proactive”.​​

Tools and Platforms: The Annual Subscription Challenge

When asked about how agencies like Nomad maximize research tools, Chris reveals a significant barrier.​

Client-Driven Tool Usage

“It’s a really interesting question. Over the years, the tools that we’ve used have sometimes been influenced by our clients. So, for example, Kmart—one of the big retailers here in Australia—they had a number of platforms that they would basically sign up to, and we would often come in and utilize their account, their platform for research”.​​

Helping Clients Set Up

“There’s certainly been other instances where we’ve helped organizations set up their design practice. So one of the government departments here, we’ve done a lot of work with them to help them set up their practice. And in that instance, we’ll often make recommendations about tools”.​​

The Annual Subscription Problem

“One of the big challenges that we find with the various platforms is often the need to have an annual subscription. If we have to have an annual subscription, it can be quite challenging to amortize that effectively across a range of different clients”.​​

“And at the start of the year when we’re paying for that subscription, we don’t necessarily know how many of a certain type of projects are going to come our way during that year. We can guess based on the 11 past years of business that we’ve been in, but the next year doesn’t always match the last”.​​

What Would Help

“So I think more flexible billing would be something that would really help us with being able to use tools more flexibly and then recommend them to our clients”.​​

Chris notes that UX Army is “planning to address that need—working and building a way where billing can be simplified and adapted to different user segments”.​

Skills and Traits for Researchers at Nomad

When asked about go-to skills expected for researchers joining Nomad, Chris outlines three priorities.​​

1. Curiosity

“I think the first thing is perhaps a personality trait around curiosity and a desire to learn and to understand. I think the best designers I’ve worked with over the years are the ones who are naturally curious and want to pick things apart and understand things. I think that’s a trait that good designers need”.​​

2. Scientific Method and Psychology Background

“I think ideally, people come with some understanding of the scientific method. I personally studied psychology at university, and I feel like that gave me a really good grounding for research, for minimizing bias, for understanding human behavior, and sort of coming at research in a way that I’m going to be able to be confident in the findings that I’m able to obtain from that research”.​​

“And that’s probably one of the flaws I see at times in the research that gets done in the broader digital domain”.​​

3. Stakeholder Management (The Most Critical)

“And then I think probably the most critical one is really that we’ve already touched on—just that stakeholder management side of things. Because at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how great your research is if you can’t convince other people that the research can be trusted, can be relied upon, and actually helps to influence the decision-making in an organization—then the research really doesn’t matter”.​​

“So I think that stakeholder side of things is really critical. And the team here get barraged with me saying to them, ‘Go back and ask another question. What does the stakeholder think? How are we going to explain this? What’s the narrative around this research?’ A lot of those things that kind of come back to stakeholder management”.​​

The Thick Skin Story: Market Research Lessons

Chris shares a formative experience that shaped his approach to stakeholder management.​

Early Career: Ad Agency Work

“I was quite lucky in that in one of my first jobs, straight out of university, I was working in market research, and we did a lot of work for ad agencies and marketing agencies”.​​

“I was on a plane heading off to Shepparton here in Australia by myself, and having discussions. And when I’d come in and I’d say that the numbers were up, awareness is up, and things are going great, they’d say, ‘Thanks, yeah, this is fabulous, you guys do such great work'”.​​

When Numbers Go Down

“But then come back the next month and the numbers would be down, and they’d turn around and say, ‘Oh, these numbers can’t be believed, this is rubbish'”.​​

Building Resilience

“And it helped me to develop quite a thick skin of being able to just go back to the numbers, go back to the research, be well-prepared, and be able to speak to statistical significance, speak to the research method, and be confident in the information that we had”.​​

“So I think whilst that was a challenging experience for me, it did help me to develop a thick skin and the ability to see things from other people’s perspectives”.​​

Understanding the Psychology

“They’re concerned, but they’re challenging the numbers because maybe it impacts a bonus, or maybe it just makes them look poor at their job. But how do we develop that relationship so that we can ride those bumps of the numbers going up and down?”.​​

Junior Researchers Need Support

“But I think you’re right—junior researchers would benefit from some of those experiences and working with people to help them through that process. I think I certainly would never send one of my team on a plane to go off and be thrown into the lion’s den, but how do we have those conversations and how do we be confident in those findings?”.​​

Key Takeaways: Navigating Three Worlds

Chris’s journey across startup, corporate, and agency environments offers several crucial lessons:​​

1. Context shapes everything​

Startup research demands pragmatism and commercial alignment; corporate and agency research demand stakeholder management and evidence-based persuasion.​​

2. Agencies offer three core values​

Independent perspective free from internal politics; flexible capacity that scales up and down; specialist skills refined through repetition across clients.​​

3. Cross-disciplinary experience is an underrated advantage​

Bringing insights from finance to retail, or government to banking, offers fresh perspectives that internal teams rarely access.​​

4. Client maturity varies wildly​

Even in 2024, some organizations need mentoring on customer-focused ways of working, while others have mature design teams requesting specific research deliverables.​​

5. Resource management is the eternal agency challenge​

The feast-or-famine cycle of being too busy or not busy enough, combined with the trade-off between client work and business development.​​

6. Career timing matters​

Early career researchers benefit most from agencies or corporates with mentors and systems; mid-career researchers thrive in startups where they’re keyed into commercial outcomes.​​

7. The commercial lens is critical in startups​

When resources are finite, research must prioritize high-impact areas (loan application forms) over low-frequency interactions (one-time onboarding).​​

8. Be the CEO of your own career​

When stuck in repetitive work at large agencies, proactively seek cross-functional exposure, shadow other specialists, and move laterally to access new skills.​​

9. Annual subscriptions constrain agency tool adoption​

When you can’t predict project mix a year in advance, flexible billing models would enable agencies to use and recommend more research platforms.​​

10. Three essential traits for researchers​

Curiosity to pick things apart; scientific method understanding (psychology background helps); stakeholder management skills to make research matter.​​

11. Develop a thick skin early​

Research gets challenged when it threatens bonuses or makes people look bad; confidence in method and statistical significance enables you to ride those bumps.​​

12. Repetition builds mastery​

There’s value in doing card sorting, usability testing, or workshops repeatedly until you’re truly expert—generalists who’ve done something once three years ago struggle to deliver quality.​​

Final Thoughts: Commercial Context Is Everything

Chris’s decade running Nomad, combined with his fintech co-founder and corporate UX manager experiences, reveals a fundamental truth about UX research across different organizational contexts.​​

The methods might be the same—workshops, usability testing, journey mapping, card sorting. But the priorities, pace, stakeholder dynamics, and commercial imperatives differ radically between startups, corporates, and agencies.​​

In startups like Nimo, research serves immediate commercial goals: how do we acquire the next customer, drive revenue, and allocate finite resources to high-impact areas? You can’t spend weeks perfecting one-time onboarding flows when the loan application form determines conversion.​​

In corporates like Coles, research navigates internal politics, builds relationships across departments, and brings evidence to decision-making processes that involve multiple stakeholders and layers of approval. The challenge isn’t resource scarcity—it’s stakeholder alignment.​​

In agencies like Nomad, research provides independent perspective free from internal bias, delivers specialist skills refined through repetition, and offers flexible capacity that scales with client needs. The challenge is the feast-or-famine cycle and unpredictable project mix that makes annual tool subscriptions difficult to justify.​

For researchers building careers, the sequence matters. Start in environments with mentors, systems, and opportunities to observe masters practicing their craft. Move to startups mid-career when you’re ready to be the team of one keyed into commercial outcomes. And if stuck in repetitive work at large agencies, be the CEO of your own career—shadow other specialists, move laterally, and proactively expand your skill set.​

But across all three worlds, one skill matters most: stakeholder management. The best research means nothing if you can’t convince people it’s trustworthy and should influence decisions. Whether it’s ad agency clients challenging your numbers when awareness drops, fintech directors deciding which features to prioritize, or corporate stakeholders navigating internal politics, the ability to bring evidence to the table with confidence separates researchers who deliver impact from those who produce reports no one reads.​

Chris learned this the hard way at 21, flying solo to face skeptical ad agency clients who praised his work when numbers rose and dismissed it as “rubbish” when numbers fell. That thick skin—developed through understanding that challenges often stem from threatened bonuses or bruised egos rather than methodology flaws—remains one of his most valuable assets.​

For Nomad, the boutique specialist model enables deep client relationships, quality work, and the flexibility to bring cross-disciplinary insights from retail to finance to government. But it requires accepting the eternal agency challenge: you’re either too busy figuring out how to resource projects, or not busy enough figuring out how to keep people billing.​

And when researchers ask about the best environment for their careers, Chris’s answer is simple: it depends on your stage, your goals, and your willingness to be pragmatic about commercial context. Because in the end, great research isn’t defined by method perfection—it’s defined by commercial impact.​

Thank you for reading!

If Chris’s insights on navigating UX research across agencies, corporates, and startups resonated with you, share this article with researchers making career decisions or seeking to understand different organizational contexts.

Have questions about agency partnerships or building research practices? Connect with us at hi@uxarmy.com.

Special thanks to Chris Gray for sharing lessons learned across a decade running Nomad and working with organizations from Visa to Kmart to his own fintech startup.

And thank you to all of you for being part of the User Insights community.

⚡ This podcast is brought to you by UXArmy, an all-in-one UX research tool.