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Summary
Monty Hammontree will share his take on the future of User Experience Research and how that extends out beyond traditional UX researchers to everyone trying to bring the customer to the forefront of decision making—to everyone striving to be customer connected and data-driven. It extends out beyond traditional research roles to everyone involved in the product making process, such as, Designer, Product Managers, and Software Engineers. He believes the heart and soul of the future of user research as a discipline lies not in trying to create a dynamic where, “the few endeavor to learn on behalf of the many but rather lies in expanding the role to focus on empowering the many to learn.”
Key Insights
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Microsoft tripled its engaged developers by shifting UX research from a specialist gatekeeper role to a team sport involving all disciplines.
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Satya Nadella’s leadership culture pillars of growth mindset, empathy, and diversity strongly shaped Microsoft’s UX research evolution.
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Successful democratization of research requires trusting the organization’s culture to self-correct bad practices by promoting good behavior.
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UX research now embraces a consensus language around assumptions, hypotheses, experiments, and data sensemaking adopted company-wide.
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Researchers at Microsoft are encouraged to be generalists, applying elements of other disciplines to foster collaboration and learning.
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The research mission is to empower everybody to learn, not to keep learning centralized to a few specialists.
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The terms ‘customer’ and ‘user’ are politically weighted; Microsoft uses 'customer' as an inclusive, elastic term.
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Closing the distance applies both between customer and product teams and internally among cross-functional teammates.
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Thick data or highly relatable qualitative data is essential to complement big data and foster empathy and inspired action.
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Elevating others and helping colleagues gain career capital is a fast way to build influence and mature research culture.
Notable Quotes
"UX research needed to be a team sport involving all disciplines rather than the few learning on behalf of the many."
"Our mission is to empower everybody to learn, not just have a few people learning on behalf of the rest."
"Satya Nadella talks about empathy a lot; it’s at the center of everything he does authentically."
"The fastest way to gain influence is to get somebody else promoted."
"If you're willing to take a leap of faith, the system will self-correct when the culture values good behaviors."
"We changed the language to revolve around assumptions, hypotheses, experiments, and making sense of data."
"Closing the distance means more than connecting with customers—it means connecting better across your own team."
"People will work harder for people than for a number, so thick data is critical to inspire advocacy and action."
"Researchers need to become generalists with superpowers, willing to try elements of other disciplines."
"Celebrating learning—especially when invalidating a hypothesis—is a key cultural value we embrace."
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