Rally is a participant recruitment platform for UX researchers.

Study quotas was Rally's most-requested feature since launch. Without it, customers absorbed hours of extra work, and enterprise deals stalled on a competitor who had it.

Recruiting balanced participant groups meant creating three separate studies and tracking progress in spreadsheets. Duplicate setup, scattered data, manual counting. One researcher described spending 2-3 hours per study on the workaround alone.

Before: three studies to recruit one balanced group

Rally had just launched Teams, enabling ResOps to democratize research across their orgs. More users in the product meant more people hitting the same friction. Without quotas, every new team member inherited the same workaround: three studies, a spreadsheet, hours of overhead.

Meanwhile, enterprise prospects kept asking "Do you support cohorts?" One fintech prospect was willing to stay with a clunkier competitor rather than switch to Rally without this capability. The feature gap was costing deals.

I kicked off discovery by talking to 40+ customers about their quota workflows. I learned how they currently managed cohorts, what workarounds they'd built, and what would actually move the needle.

In parallel, I ran competitive analysis on tools that already had this feature. I documented what worked, what confused users, and where the gaps were. This wasn't about copying—it was about understanding the problem space and learning from others' mistakes.