Insights to action
influencing product vision, strategy, and roadmaps
Context
In 2018, when I started managing the research function at McAfee, the team had a few researchers who were spreading their goodness across many products. The prioritization criteria seemed to be who has the loudest voice. Most researchers seemed to be running usability testing sessions to inform feature usability and design improvements. They did the research, did the analysis, created and shared a power point presentation, and moved on to the next project!
As a discipline, UX was hyper-focused on being customer advocates and were still wary of ‘catering to the business’. And our product and leaders were not clear about the value research should, could and was contributing.
In order to connect research insights to product and business outcomes, I realized the first thing to change was the researchers’ mindset. Researchers needed to move away from believing that their role was to share insights and that’s where their job ended. Researchers had to see their roles differently. A researcher was successful only when they were able to drive their insights into products in a way that helped achieve the right user and business outcomes.
Researchers had to stop thinking of themselves as data providers, they had to see themselves as storytellers and influencers. They had see themselves as part of product and business teams. So I set about building a route to turning insights to action in a scalable and repeatable way.
Route to turn insights into action
My Role
I was the direct manager for the team and then, when I was promoted, I oversaw the team through a manager.
Laying the foundation
Establish the need to change: the team did a listening tour with senior cross-functional leaders to understand what the research team was doing well, where we could do better, where leaders needed more support. We synthesized the gaps and areas of improvement to establish the need to change.
Define purpose: we aligned to articulate the team’s broader purpose: inform product building and business outcomes with user insights.
Imagine success state: the team’s work is influencing product and UX roadmaps both at the strategy and feature usability level.
Milestones:
Established a flexible research roadmap creation and item prioritization process- researchers operated reactively. To get the time needed to work on the harder questions which took longer to answer, we needed the time to build our own research roadmap.
supported researchers when they needed to say ‘No’ to a request. This needed some hard conversations about trade-offs, business value, and the relative risk of not doing research on a topic.
taught partners to treat the roadmap as a flexible and responsive list of topics
Reorganized the team to meet the business needs
Some researchers, were asked to focus on the user, marketplace and not the product experience. They had the skills and interest in working in ambiguous discovery and define phases. These researchers were focused on informing product strategy and future concepts.
Another set of researchers were embedded in the product teams. These researchers had an interest in doing evaluative UX research and informed UX and the short-term roadmap.
Provided training to boost capability so researchers could expand their methodology tool kit. A large part of this was helping qualitative researchers, who knew a bit of survey research, get comfortable with writing better surveys, doing quantitiatve analysis. We also needed to teach researchers how to leverage analytics to identify usability issues and size usability problems when trying to push for certain fixes. We encouraged them to take external training on emerging topics like behavioural nudges.
Motivated researchers to take an interest in McAfee’s business model and product KPIs by doing reviews of their work. In the reviews, researchers had to connect their work to how their insights would help action to meet user, business, and product targets.
Coached people on how to influence at all levels through polished presentation skills, workshops, effective conversations, and discussions. Provide tools and training to create compelling communication through infographics, storyboards, video clips, and journey maps.
Created playbooks to help product managers and design managers to conduct their own customer inquiries.
Create resources and onboard tools to allow product managers and designers to do their own, simple surveys and unmoderated user testing.
Create a research repository and encourage product managers to dig in when trying to prioritize or write user stories.
Held PM and Design accountable for retiring usability bugs the team entered in the product backlog through creating a process to hold people accountable.
