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