Announcing the winners of the 2026 Optimal Experience Awards

Optimal gets used for a lot of research that nobody outside the team ever sees. A card sort that reshapes a navigation menu. A week of usability sessions that kills a feature before it ships. We started the Optimal Experience Awards to put some of that work in front of an audience for once, and this year's entries made the judges' job hard in the best way.

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This year the panel scored hundreds of entries across six categories, with 14 judges reading every submission against the same rubric. Judges weighed the method behind the work as much as what came of it.

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Why we do this

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Good research tends to disappear into the decision it supported. That's sort of the point of it. A good outcome looks obvious once it ships, and nobody outside the room remembers the months of interviews and testing that got the team there. It makes the work hard to point to later. A new researcher can't easily learn from something they never got to see.

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The Optimal Experience Awards is one way to work against that. We wanted the researcher who spent a year winning back a skeptical stakeholder to get the same spotlight as whatever they eventually helped ship. Reading the studies in the open, including the parts that didn't work, makes everyone doing this work sharper.

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How judging worked

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Every entry got scored by more than one judge, working independently, against six criteria specific to its category. Research for Social Good weighed participant protection and replicability heavily. In Outstanding User Research Project, rigor carried more weight, along with how well the method fit the problem. Those scores got combined into a per-category ranking.

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Now, the results.

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Outstanding User Research Project

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This category comes down to one project, how it was built and whether anyone downstream could use what it found.

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Winner:  EE

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Finalists: Southern New Hampshire University, Google, Contentsquare

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Research-Driven Impact

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Here the panel looked past the study design and asked what changed because the research happened.

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Winner:  Paper Leaf

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Finalists: Joruney Digital, Drexel University

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UX Research Leader of the Year

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This category looks at one person's body of work, the practice they built and the people they brought up behind them.

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Winner:  Dawn Ta, Director of Research & Design at Scientella

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Finalists: Dr. Meg Kurdziolek, Sarah Geden, Aline Lin

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Collaborative Research Excellence

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This category looks for collaboration that shaped how the research got built, across teams or organizations, from the ground up.

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Winner: Oxford University

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Finalists: Thailand Development Research Institute (TDRI), London Borough of Camden, Miro

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Research for Social Good

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Judges paid close attention to how well participants were protected here, and to how much the findings ended up helping the people the study was about.

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Winner: Base22 LLC

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Finalists: Analog Devices, Minnesota IT Services

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Best Use of Optimal

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This category rewards how well the tools fit the study, and what came out of that choice.

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Winner: NHS England

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Finalists: American Electric Power, Cengage, Eaton

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Thank You

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Thanks to everyone who put a project in front of a panel of people they don't know. That's not a small thing to do.

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Thanks to the judges too, for the time they spent going through every entry closely enough to argue about a few of them: Graham Gardner (U.S. Bank), Addison English, Harry Parkes (Hargreaves Lansdowne), Erietta Sapounakis (Stan.), Tradd Salvo (Huge), John Rainey (Gallos Technologies), David Vuu (Telstra Health), Joann Wu (Uber), Alexander Wilson (T. Rowe Price), Kate Towsey (The ResearchOps Review), Christina Goldschmidt (Warner Music Group).

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If your team did work this year that belongs on this list next time, we want to see it.

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Introduction

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The skills market has a familiar whiff to it. A decade ago, digital execs scratched their heads as great swathes of the delivery workforce decided to retrain as User Experience experts. Project Managers and Business Analysts decided to muscle-in on the creative process that designers insisted was their purview alone. Win for systemised thinking. Loss for magic dust and mystery.

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With UX, research and design roles being the first to hit the cutting room floor over the past 24 months, a lot of the responsibility to solve for those missing competencies in the product delivery cycle now resides with the T-shaped Product Managers, because their career origin story tends to embrace a broader foundation across delivery and design disciplines. And so, as UX course providers jostle for position in a distracted market, senior professionals are repackaging themselves as Product Managers.

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Another Talent Migration? We’ve Seen This Before.

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The skills market has a familiar whiff to it. A decade ago, Project Managers (PMs) and Business Analysts (BAs) pivoted into UX roles in their droves, chasing the north star of digital transformation and user-centric design. Now? The same opportunities to pivot are emerging again—this time into Product Management.

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And if history is anything to go by, we already know how this plays out.

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Between 2015 and 2019, UX job postings skyrocketed by 320%, fueled by digital-first strategies and a newfound corporate obsession with usability. PMs and BAs, sensing the shift, leaned into their adjacent skills—stakeholder management, process mapping, and research—and suddenly, UX wasn’t just for designers anymore. It was a business function.

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Fast-forward to 2025, and Product Management is in the same phase of maturation and despite some Covid-led contraction, bouncing back to 5.1% growth. The role has evolved from feature shipping to strategic value creation while traditional project management roles are trending towards full-stack product managers who handle multiple aspects of product development with fractional PMs for part-time or project-based roles.

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Why Is This Happening? The Data Tells the Story.

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📈 Job postings for product management roles grew by 41% between 2020 and 2025, compared to a 23% decline in traditional project management roles during the same period (Indeed Labor Market Analytics).

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📉 The demand for product managers has been growing, with roles increasing by 32% yearly in general terms, as mentioned in some reports.

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💰 Salary Shenanigans: Product Managers generally earn higher salaries than Business Analysts. In the U.S., PMs earn about 45% more than BAs on average ($124,000 vs. $85,400). In Australia, PMs earn about 4% to 30% more than BAs ($130,000 vs. $105,000 to $125,000) wave.

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Three Structural Forces Driving the Shift

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1. Agile and Product-Led Growth Have Blurred the Lines
   Project success is no longer measured in timelines and budgets—it’s about customer lifetime value (CLTV) and feature adoption rates. For instance, 86% of teams have adopted the Agile approach, and 63% of IT teams are also using Agile methodologies forcing PMs to move beyond execution into continuous iteration and outcome-based thinking.
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2. Data Is the New Currency, and BAs Are Cashing In
   89% of product decisions in 2025 rely on analytics (Gartner, 2024). That’s prime territory for BAs, whose SQL skills, A/B testing expertise, and KPI alignment instincts make them critical players in data-driven product strategy.
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3. Role Consolidation Is Inevitable
   The post-pandemic belt-tightening has left one role doing the job of three. Today’s product managers don’t just prioritise backlogs - they manage stakeholders, interpret data, and (sometimes poorly) sketch out UX wireframes. Product manager job descriptions now list "requirements gathering" and "stakeholder management"—once core PM/BA responsibilities.

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How This Mirrors the UX Migration of 2019

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Same pattern. Different discipline.

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The Challenges of Becoming a Product Manager (and Why Some Will Struggle)

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👀 Outputs vs. Outcomes – PMs think in deliverables. Transitioning PMs struggle to adjust to measuring success through customer impact instead of project completion.

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🛠️ Legacy Tech Debt – Outdated tech stacks can lead to decreased productivity, integration issues, and security concerns. This complexity can slow down operations and hinder the efficiency of teams, including product management.

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😰 Imposter Syndrome is Real – New product managers feel unqualified, mirroring the self-doubt UX migrants felt in 2019. Because let’s be honest—jumping into product strategy is a different beast from managing deliverables.

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What Comes Next? The Smartest Companies Are Already Preparing.

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🏆 Structured Reskilling – Programs like Google’s "PM Launchpad" reduce time-to-proficiency for new PMs. Enterprises that invest in structured career shifts will win the talent war.

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📊 Hybrid Role Recognition – Expect to see “Analytics-Driven PM” and “Technical Product Owner” job titles formalising this shift, much like “UX Strategist” emerged post-2019.

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🚀 AI Will Accelerate the Next Migration – As AI automates routine PM/BA tasks, expect even more professionals to pivot into strategic product roles. The difference? This time, the transition will be even faster.

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Conclusion: The Cycle Continues

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Tech talent moves in cycles. Product Management is simply the next career gold rush for systems thinkers with a skill for structure, process, and problem-solving. A structural response to the evolution of tech ecosystems.

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Companies that recognise and support this transition will outpace those still clinging to rigid org charts. Because one thing is clear—the talent migration isn’t coming. It’s already here.

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This article was researched with the help of Perplexity.ai

A well-maintained participant panel is more than a time-saver. It sets your team up for better research from day one. The people you recruit and how you track, segment, and manage those relationships over time directly shapes how reliable your findings are.  

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With the right setup in place, you can move forward with confidence, knowing that these participants meet your criteria, aren’t overused, and can bring fresh perspectives to each study.

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Tools like Rally UXR bring that structure to participant recruitment. It helps you build and manage your own participant panel, keep track of consent and contact history, coordinate logistics, and stay on top of all the moving parts. You can also see things like incentive history and email engagement, making it much easier to decide who to invite and when.

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But recruitment is just the starting point. The real value comes next: running the research and turning participant feedback into insights you can actually use.

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Using Rally + Optimal together

Whether you’re running unmoderated studies, testing designs, navigation, or content, or conducting usability testing calls, having the right research tools in place is critical. If you’re already using Rally, pairing it with Optimal can connect the dots from recruitment through to insights, without adding friction to your workflow.
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You can also use Optimal’s on-demand or custom managed recruitment services, though Rally’s strength lies in building your own custom panel and database.
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Here’s how to combine Rally and Optimal into a smooth, efficient research workflow.
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Start with intentional recruitment

Define your participant criteria in Rally. Use screening questions not just to qualify participants. Think beyond “does this person qualify?” and start building segments you can reuse: power users vs. casual users, returning users vs. first-timers, people familiar with the old design vs. new. These segments can make it easier to run focused studies and compare results over time.

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Build your study in parallel

A simple shift that makes a big difference: don’t wait. Build your study in Optimal before sending invites from Rally. This ensures that when participants are ready, the link can be dropped into Rally, and distribution happens the moment you're ready.

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Use the strengths of each platform

Rally handles the relationship and profile management: who's been invited, who's confirmed, who needs a reminder, screener and survey history, consent forms, and more. Optimal handles the research: collecting quantitative and qualitative data, visualising patterns, quantifying usability issues, automating insights with AI, and surfacing the metrics and insights that actually answer your research question. 

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With Optimal, you can immediately put Rally-recruited participants into studies including:
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• Prototype testing
• Live site testing 
• Card sorting
• Tree testing
• First-click testing
• Surveys
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Keep your insights in one place‍‍

When it comes to research, scattered insights = lost impact. Using Optimal as your central hub for results, recordings, and analysis makes it easier to share findings with your team and stakeholders, track progress over time, and back up decisions with real evidence. 
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The tools you use for recruitment and the tools you use for research aren't just operational choices. They shape your research culture. When recruitment and research are both well-structured, everything runs more smoothly. Teams that invest in structure on both ends of the workflow tend to produce research that's faster, more credible, and more likely to influence decisions. 
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Rally and Optimal are powerful on their own. Together, they create a workflow that’s scalable, insight-driven, and built for continuous discovery.

If you're not yet using Optimal, you can start a free trial or book a demo.