Summary
A multidisciplinary research team needs a well-crafted framework to guide their behavior, nurture their growth, and cultivate their culture. Otherwise, they feel stuck in growth and unmotivated to collaborate. Through a participatory design, the authors established a three-pillar excellence framework at Uber. First, it focuses on the research impact on product experimentation, products, roadmaps, and the company/organization. Second, it promotes creative research methods that successfully prioritize work, produce and scale rigorous insights, and empower other researchers. Third, it recognizes true partnership cross functional teams and beyond their own product area. This framework worked well at Uber for years, and recently was applied by the authors in Booking.com and Course Hero with some modifications. As this starter framework, they hope all researchers and research leaders can build their own ones based on their situations.
Key Insights
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A structured framework helps research managers balance project prioritization, methodology, and partnership to scale research teams effectively.
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Prioritizing projects requires explicit scoring on customer impact, business impact, and collaboration quality to make decisions transparent.
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Building an impact matrix to plan a year’s worth of research work ensures teams balance one-time feature tests with recurring and strategic studies.
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Simplicity in research methods enables scalability, reliability, and global applicability, as exemplified by Uber’s intercept survey for drivers.
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Moving research upstream — engaging early with product development — prevents costly late-stage changes and leads to faster, better decisions.
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Cross-functional partnerships, especially with product, data science, and engineering, are crucial to successful research integration.
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Ethical considerations are foundational to research excellence and must be embedded in project selection, operations, and leadership support.
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In new or uncharted research spaces, starting with impact definition guides methodology and collaboration to build foundational knowledge.
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Prioritizing between customer impact and business impact is often a balancing act that benefits from transparent scoring and team conversations.
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Recognition programs like monthly research excellence awards foster team motivation and continuous improvement in impact, method choice, and partnership.
Notable Quotes
"To have a strategy you need to think about how to prioritize."
"Being simple is extremely complex. Therefore very difficult to do."
"Simple methods are most global, either to do or scale."
"Research work is always called in later at execution stage; we needed to move it upstream."
"After the privacy study, safety and privacy teams combined because users saw them as the same."
"We had to commit to changes, try, execute, and adjust — it’s rarely a clean linear path."
"You can’t do every project that comes in; you need a meaningful way to compare and prioritize."
"The intercept driver survey is more reliable than NPS and worked well even with illiterate drivers using emojis."
"If you’re asked to do something unethical or uncomfortable, don’t do it; leadership must back you up."
"Many times, business and user interests appear to clash, but deeper research can reveal aligned solutions."
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