Crafting excellence:

Building a research practise

CREATING THE SCAFFOLDING

  • Establish Trust

    Who are your co-workers, what makes them tick?

    How do your boss, team and cross-functional partners want to engage with you? What problems is research expected to solve?

    Does the team understand what is expected of them? Do they feel set up to do their job well?

  • Develop Acumen

    What is the business model? What are the paths to acquisition and retention? What are the key business health metrics?

    What do users value about the product and services we provide? How do we know we are providing users’ value and helping them achieve their goals? What customer value and goal achievement does UX impact? How are we monitoring UX impact?

    How is the research organization set up? How do cross-functional partners collaborate? How do they make decisions?

  • Be responsive

    Is the team structure the right one to serve the needs of the business and UX organization?

    Do we have a non-stressful way to evaluate the team’s true capacity and capabilities? Is your team, “as is”, actually able to handle the responsibility and new roles for your projects?

    If we did want to change the research team's structure and operational model, what would be the pros and cons? how might we operationalize the change?

USE THE SCAFFOLDING TO OPERATE

  • Execute well

    What is the rhythm of the business, when are different types of product and UX decisions made and what sort of information (strategy vs feature usability) is needed at each stage of planning and execution? (see image below)

    Does the team have the resources (access to existing data sources, tools for recruiting, data collection, analysis frameworks, continuous collaboration with cross-functional partners and presentation tools and templates) to provide timely, consumable insights?

  • Influence effectively

    Do you know who your cross-functional partners are? Who are your allies and who needs to be coaxed and brought along?

    Is there a clear way for cross-functional partners to engage and collaborate with the research team ? (Watch the video below)

    Is your team set up to engage continuously across different forums on research learning using different formats ( videos, documents, newsletters, chat updates, workshops)?

  • Measure contribution

    A practise is built to contribute certain value to the business. It’s important to be clear what value is sought. For research it’s usually, customer understanding so a business can win in the marketplace by providing better value than its competitors.

    Research should assess it’s contribution on 4 parameters:

    1. Are we building deep customer empathy

    2. Are we surfacing opportunities

    3. Are we unblocking progress

    4. Are we guarding against disruptions - known and emerging competition and new technology

Align research to the rhythm of planning activities

Create and operationalize a cross-functional engagement model

(4 minutes)

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Driving insights to action