Summary
Over the last few years, our simple five-step framework has made it possible to grow our research efforts' impact and scale. It's also helped us shift organizational mindset, establishing Research & Insights team as a trusted and desired partner in key business, product, and design decisions. Whether you do research with customers or need to map out your stakeholder universe to be most effective and increase your work's impact, we hope this framework will help you achieve your goals!
Key Insights
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Balancing generative and evaluative research is key to sustainable impact across multiple product teams.
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Prioritizing stakeholders by their influence and interest helps manage time and avoid focusing on the loudest voices.
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Stakeholder interviews conducted regularly (about thrice yearly) provide clarity on research needs and timelines.
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Empowering product managers and designers with unmoderated tools and templates scales research without overloading researchers.
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Outsourcing research or enabling partners is effective when the problem space is less complex or domain-specific expertise is not required.
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Maintaining a research findings and recommendations tracker keeps insights visible, prioritized, and prevents duplication.
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Achieving a shared understanding of what research is and where it adds value requires consistent education through workshops, office hours, and kickoffs.
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Cross-team literature reviews and tagging prior research accelerate new projects and avoid redundant studies.
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Close collaboration with customer-facing teams such as Customer Success is crucial for recruitment and trust building.
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It can take up to two years to fully implement a scalable research framework, but traction can start in six months with focused stakeholder engagement.
Notable Quotes
"I’m drowning trying to create an understanding of our target audience for a new feature through thorough contextual research, but it leaves no time to ensure existing features are usable - Anna."
"Some PMs need product discovery but I’m drowning in usability and concept evaluation testing - Richard."
"Maybe the person being loudest in the room is not necessarily the stakeholder you should manage closely - Richard."
"Research is like an onion, it has layers, and stakeholders mostly see it as concept evaluation and usability - Anna."
"We are not just trying to get a seat at the table, we want a voice at the table - Anna."
"We do stakeholder interviews three times a year and maintain touchpoints with high influence partners regularly - Richard."
"Sometimes you’re not the right person to answer a research question, maybe a data scientist or a market researcher is better suited - Richard."
"Enabling PMs and designers to do research makes them appreciate the effort and become our biggest advocates - Anna."
"Unmoderated research tools can achieve 100% completion and help scale studies during challenging times like COVID - Richard."
"Keeping research findings alive through collaborative prioritization ensures nothing gets forgotten and avoids redundant efforts - Anna."
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