Researching a portal that speaks to a whole nation

For the Ministry of Defense public portal, the research challenge wasn't a niche workflow - it was a sprawling, mixed audience visiting the same pages for very different reasons. Citizens wanted to understand strategic milestones in plain language. Partners and press came looking for credible, on-the-record material. As a PM, the instinct is to define one primary persona and optimize ruthlessly; here, that would have been a mistake. So I structured research around intent, not demographics: what does each visitor need to trust, find, and walk away believing? I ran lightweight stakeholder interviews across the ministry's communications side, mapped the questions real audiences arrive with, and pressure-tested the tone the institution wanted to project. The output that mattered to product wasn't a stack of insights - it was a prioritized model of who we serve and where their needs conflict. That model let us make scope calls with conviction instead of opinion: what belongs on the homepage, what authority signals are non-negotiable, and where 'forward-thinking' must never tip into marketing gloss. Good research here didn't just inform design. It gave the roadmap a defensible spine.