Meet Jessica Pavia. Jessica leads both UX Research and UX Operations at BMO, where she supports a research team of 25 and an operations team embedded across a broader experience practice of over 110 people inside one of the more regulated, higher-stakes environments out there. Before BMO, she built her career at IBM and helped establish a design research discipline at Loblaw Digital, taught applied research methods at Seneca and Sheridan, and has spent most of her career, by her own account, in the business of patterns, which she traces back to being a kid obsessed with Where’s Waldo.

Jessica came to us with a mandate that’s been following her around for most of her career: “do more with less.” She’s got a lot to say about what that phrase actual ...