Finding Great Questions
When opportunities are abundant but there is limited time, resources, and people, prioritization becomes a necessity. It’s a common state for teams of all sizes and disciplines. Being selective with how energy is invested and what work gets done is often needed no matter how big the team or widely available the resources. While this is critical for all functions, research teams in particular are often battling with outsized demand coupled with limited staffing. There is always a vast expanse of exciting and worthy questions to be pursued, requiring a sharp attention to prioritization. In order to stay focused on what matters most, teams often need to become experts at evaluating options and continually hone the collective approach in saying yes to the right things, and no to the wrong ones. Finding, and focusing on, and framing great questions is itself an art to master.
Why is prioritization important? Choosing what work to do is where all great work starts from. It ensures the individual, team, or even entire organization, isn’t spread thin across low impact work. It’s a practice of rigorously, and continuously, considering which research efforts are best set up for success. It’s exploring the landscape of potential questions and pursuing the ones that will uniquely unlock something valuable. Creating a regular practice of carefully examining where effort and attention is placed can help plan ahead, as well as respond to shifts, and consistently put the most important and impactful work first. It also helps to build a set of considerations for what is important that is shared within and beyond the team, making expectations clear and building common ground on how to collectively shape the learning agenda around areas that matter most to the whole organization. Of course the natural instinct is to help and the default is to say yes to exploring all the unexamined corners. If only we could respond to every interesting question with rigorous evidence, insight and new understanding! Unfortunately even with all the time, money and people, there is a need to say no, A LOT, and it’s not easy. Being attentive to time carefully invested is a necessary part of great work with meaningful impact.
There are 4 areas I have found are typically good starting points for honing in on the areas of inquiry with highest potential ROI. These may not be the right ones, or the perfect ones, but they are questions to lean on when it may not be clear.
Strategic importance
Is the question critical to informing a substantial strategic priority? Where does this topic fit within the overarching strategy? Will the research help to inform action on a top level OKR or surface an entirely new direction for the organization?
Scope of influence
What level of change will the work inform? Is the decision significant? Is it informing strategy, vision, experience, or iteration of an existing feature? Will it inform multiple teams? Will it impact customer experience and generate user value? How many user groups is it spanning? How might it impact the business?
Potential for impact
Is there ability to act on the findings? Is there commitment to change? Can research uniquely help unlock progress? Is it at the right time in the process?
Research value
Is research the best source of insights? Is the degree of uncertainty and risk high without research? Are there significant “unknowns”? Are there other means of gaining information? Is the topic narrow, focused and targeted (eg. low risk)? Has previous work been done?
When the risk of getting it wrong is high, the customer problem unknown, and scope large (impacting multiple downstream decisions) the value of conducting custom research to generate insights is at its greatest.
A few common watch-outs that these 4 criteria help trouble-shoot against: questions that are interesting but not important, last minute requests mistimed with development or planning cycles, an inquiry with no team to respond or own the change, research that’s already been done (or easily answered through another means), late stage “validation” vs. a true intention to learn, and simply when no research is actually needed.
Finding a healthy balance
After determining whether a specific question is a top priority, it’s important to look at the overall learning agenda of the group. This is where individual, and team, roadmapping comes in to help assess across a wider portfolio of efforts to ensure there is a balance of making quick turn high impact progress and longer term proactive questions to inform the future work. It will make the balance of high value upper right quadrant work clear, and if there is too much drift into covering too much outside of that.
Planning and prioritization are hugely important to landing impact through research and consistently reinforcing the value of research leadership within a project, across them, but most importantly for the advancement of a cross-functional group in delivering great experiences. It’s not about the roadmap itself, but what the act of having one makes happen: planning forward, demonstrating leadership in shaping a learning agenda, building visibility across efforts and the team. Having a rubric to share with partners may also help make it clear how they also focus their learning agenda overall.
Consider a few thought starters for constructing a healthy balance:
- Leading vs. Supporting: Are you spending too much time advising or supporting vs. directly leading research and operating as a leader?
- Proactive vs. Reactive: Are the questions driving near term action vs. long term impact? Is there a healthy proportion of proactive questions that have not been raised yet vs. immediate needs for near term progression? Are you building on a body of knowledge and helping the organization in seeing what’s next? Is there work that has potential to inform the next planning cycle, fuel multiple efforts, or impact multiple teams?
Striking a healthy balance is seeking out more opportunities where research is leading and operating in the driver seat. It’s also about the critically important act of creating space for surfacing questions proactively that point at the long-term critical unknowns and areas of learning for the company to better align with the people it is intended to serve. A great researcher can help a team see around corners and ask questions that will be critical before they are even surfaced by the team.
At the end of the day this is about your investment of time, and how research is turning up for your organization and partners. It’s the unlock for ensuring we stay focused on the people an organization is intended to serve, and asking the great questions that surface insights that lead to impact. It’s also about you feeling proud of the work you do and ultimately increasing the likelihood that you are able to drive the most change through your practice.
Other articles and resources:
https://dscout.com/people-nerds/prioritizing-user-research-projects
https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/product/ux/ux-research/research-prioritization/
https://www.usertesting.com/resources/topics/5-questions-help-prioritize-your-research
