Summary
What does it take to become a great research leader? What are the different types of leaders in research? How do you grow a team from a solo researcher to a successful research team? Growing research teams show a company’s commitment to user-centered and insight-driven decision-making. With growing teams, research leadership becomes a central topic. With user research often having the most comprehensive picture of the user, we will explore what this means for the collaboration with or leadership of other disciplines in the organization. Today we have the chance to learn from three research leaders who share their personal perspectives on research leadership and various facets of it. Get to know our panelists: Anna Avrekh, UX Research Manager at Meta Dr. John Pagonis, Principal UX Researcher at Zanshin Labs Klara Pelcl, Senior Design Research Manager at ebay Join us live as we have plenty of room for your questions during the panel.
Key Insights
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Great UX research leaders aspire to build teams strong enough that their own role becomes less necessary over time, emphasizing empowerment.
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A solid understanding and experience in UX research is crucial for effective research leadership to truly advocate and educate stakeholders.
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Transitioning from hands-on research to a management role involves a difficult mindset shift from producing tangible outcomes to enabling others.
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In research leadership, preparing your team to create evidence that can withstand scrutiny is essential to combating skepticism.
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Stakeholder collaboration is most productive when stakeholders are involved early and continuously throughout the research process.
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Maintaining authenticity and vulnerability as a leader helps build trust and psychological safety within research teams.
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Research leadership is often about relationship management, nurturing individualized trust, motivation, and career growth for team members.
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Communicating research value inside an organization requires patience, persistence, and a multi-pronged approach including education and sharing wins.
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Balancing hands-on research and leadership duties, such as in the player-coach model, demands careful bandwidth management and expectation setting.
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There is no perfect scientific certainty in UX research; qualitative and quantitative methods serve different but complementary purposes.
Notable Quotes
"One of the amazing things about becoming very successful leaders is eventually becoming obsolete because you built a team so strong."
"To become a great research leader, you should be a great researcher, not in knowing everything but understanding deeply what good research requires."
"Leadership is the process of enabling people to become empowered to achieve what they’re tasked to achieve."
"Research leaders must prepare their teams to have evidence that can withstand scrutiny because new research efforts face natural resistance."
"Letting go is a crucial part of becoming a good leader but can be hard when you know the work inside out and want to help."
"The best way to communicate research value is one person at a time while building a growing cluster of advocates through consistent education."
"If your research work is meaningful, you will find a way. Time is the only resource we cannot replenish."
"Management can feel like being a parent — often you hear about what went wrong but no one gives you gold stars for doing well."
"Closing the loop to measure and show how research drives impact motivates researchers and proves the value to the organization."
"There is no certainty ever, even in medical devices — data always have margins of error and should be presented with confidence intervals."
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