In this episode of the Happy Market Research Podcast, Dan Fleetwood speaks with Alex Gardner, former VP of Research, Payments Insights, CX, and Enterprise Analytics at U.S. Bank, about how research teams can move beyond project intake and become true strategic partners inside organizations. Alex shares her journey from design and UX into research leadership, explaining why researchers need to understand the broader business landscape, collaborate across disciplines, and communicate insights in a way executives can act on. The conversation covers internal research consultancies, vendor spend, AI-powered insight repositories, fake AI survey responses, prompt design, and why researchers need to stop being “task takers” and start owning their expertise.
In this episode, Dan Fleetwood and Alex Gardner explore what it takes for researchers to become more strategic inside complex organizations.
Alex explains that while many researchers are pulled across market research, UX, CX, product research, analytics, and data science, the goal should not be to master everything. Instead, researchers need to know their strengths, understand adjacent disciplines, and collaborate well with specialists.
A major theme of the episode is the idea of building a strategic consultancy inside an organization. Alex explains how her team at U.S. Bank began supporting vendor-led projects, identifying where internal researchers could deliver similar work, and showing ROI by reducing external research spend. She also talks about the importance of following the money, understanding where research budgets sit, and proving capabilities to teams that may not even know internal research resources exist.
Guest:
Alex Gardner – Former VP of Research, Payments Insights, CX, and Enterprise Analytics at U.S. Bank, with a background spanning design, UX, market research, product research, and customer experience analytics. She specializes in helping research teams operate more strategically by connecting insights across functions, building internal consulting capabilities, and translating complex research into clear business direction.
Useful links:
Alex Gardner on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gardneralexandra/
Dan Fleetwood on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danfleetwood
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