When UXR is just getting started in an organization, it's useful to deliver some quick tactical wins. But as UXR becomes more fully adopted, I shift more of my work to delivering strategic insights that can inform product direction.
One dysfunction that can happen at this point is that the product teams that had been getting lots of research help are left hanging when the researcher gets too busy to take on their tactical projects.
To avoid this, I aim to build up the kinds of processes I outline in Scaling UXR, so these teams are better able to self-serve with lightweight research help. This frees up research time without breaking stakeholders’ trust.
As UXR matures within an organization, these stakeholders come to include design managers, product directors, and other product leaders. Working with these senior stakeholders requires researchers to shift both the kind of research they are doing and how they communicate findings.
Revealing the priorities of product leaders
Because leader have so much under their purview, it can be difficult for them to articulate what kinds of insights will be most useful. A lightweight discovery workshop can help you get beyond the immediate questions and toward the higher-impact, long term priorities. Because leaders’ time is in high-demand, I try to do extra prep for these workshops by gathering POVs from their direct reports and leaders themselves, and using these as a starting point.
It’s all about the so-what
Sometimes researchers are reluctant to draw conclusions from their findings, preferring to leave that to product teams. But with leadership, it is absolutely crucial to articulate the “so what” of the research to articulate the potential product implications of an insight. One way to do this is to "pregame" findings with affected teams and brainstorm potential implications. These ideas can then be shared with leadership and as a bonus, the impacted team is already informed and bought in.
It's easy to see tactical and strategic research as competing for limited research hours, but in an ideal world you don’t have to choose by shifting toward multilevel research projects. In multilevel research, your tactical studies also reveal strategic insights, and your strategic studies give tactical insights.
In multilevel research, the researcher performs a kind of matchmaking between tactical and strategic needs, figuring out when it's possible to go after both in the same study.
On the tactical side, when a stakeholder requests research, the researcher can assess whether it's a project that can speak to strategy and, if so, choose to be heavily involved. If the project doesn't relate to strategy questions, the researcher can use the scaling research processes to give those teams more lightweight help.
On the strategy side, there will sometimes be these kinds of straightforward requests, but at other times the researcher will have to triangulate strategy needs from working with senior stakeholders, company goals, and emergent opportunities.
What I've described here is a very lean approach to research and once an organization reaches this point it's usually time to hire more researchers and grow the team. Multilevel research is sustainable, but only if the the product scope for each researcher is narrower enough.
From here on out, there will be lots of choices about how to structure the research team's scope, from embedded to consulting to methods-based to matrixed. A fun challenge for another day!