Researching Five Roles That Share One Screen

When I joined Menora's sales system as an outsource designer through code-oasis, the hardest research question wasn't "what do users want" — it was "who exactly is the user?" The same data set is consumed by five roles: agent, marketing, district manager, team lead, and underwriter. Each one looks at the same records through a completely different lens and asks different questions of them. For a PM, that's the crux of prioritization. I couldn't research a single persona and ship; I had to map where the roles overlap and where their goals diverge, then decide what to standardize versus what to specialize. So my research focused on jobs-to-be-done per role inside the Agent Zone — what a district manager scans for versus what an underwriter must verify before acting. The payoff was a clearer product spine: a shared data model with role-aware framing, instead of five disconnected screens fighting for roadmap space. Research here wasn't about novelty. It was about disambiguating an audience that looks like one user and behaves like five — and giving the roadmap defensible reasons to invest where the lenses genuinely differ.