The Power of Insight
The (not so secret) secret is getting out. The path to impact is often anchored in insight. Only through a connection to real people, real context and real problems can we stay grounded in what matters.
In the future, people powered organizations will be the ones leading the way, gaining advantage based on how closely they can listen, understand and respond to the needs of the communities they serve. The recognition and commitment to understanding the needs of people, has led to a rise in research as a critical function. Research (otherwise known more specifically as user research, design research, market research or insights) is finally being recognized as a core part of a successful organization. Organizations and teams dedicated to learning about people, are rising in importance. Given the complex, ever changing environment we operate in, the ability to de-risk investment, focus on what matters, and align diverse teams around people, is a necessary part of a healthy organization. Bersin examined the issue of learning culture in great detail and found that companies who effectively nurture their workforce’s desire to learn are at least 30% more likely to be market leaders in their industries over an extended period of time.
Many organizations play lip service to being human centered, community driven or customer obsessed, while only a select few have effectively woven it into the fabric of what they build and do. Increasingly, there’s an awakening to a more intentional integration of learning and insight as a means to drive effective product strategy and organizational growth.
“The only source of competitive advantage is the one that can survive technology fueled disruption — an obsession with understanding, delighting, connecting with, and serving customers. In this age, companies that thrive are those that tilt their budgets toward customer knowledge and relationships.” Forrester’s Age of the Customer Report
Becoming truly people centered in not just words, but also action, takes work and dedication. It requires investing in, and uniquely structuring research to pursue big, challenging questions, and setting in house research organizations up for impact. A strong insights function is an indicator of a broader commitment within the larger culture. Communities of hundreds of researchers are growing at large companies, and dedicated research teams are being established in the earliest stages of new ventures. Becoming a critical part of the fabric of any business, research is finally stepping into its full potential. It’s beginning to break free from being tucked away in the corners, or struggling with identity, career paths and conflicting profiles. For too long researchers have been hidden behind other things, or pulled in disparate directions, selectively used as a weapon when convenient, or simply been treated as an after-thought.
“From 1983 to 2017, the UX profession grew from 1,000 to 1 million, according to NNg. From 2017 to 2050, they estimate it will grow to 100 million strong. When we made our map of user research tools, we documented 50 tools devoted entirely to helping companies learn more about their customers, 64% of which didn’t exist 10 years ago. Search intent for “user research” has risen 4.25x in the last 10 years.” https://www.userinterviews.com/blog/the-state-of-user-research-report-2020
There’s still a long way to go. Many companies still operate on assumptions, opinion, or vague metrics in isolation. More often than not, they are easily led astray, investing in the wrong things, creating poor experiences, and sometimes larger societal harm. Based on the McKinsey Business Value of Design report, over 40 percent of the companies surveyed still aren’t talking to their end users during development, even when this is a key differentiator in success and directly tied to higher performance. When looking at research organizations, failure modes can still be far too frequent. Critical missteps in positioning, shaping and focusing the team, end up devaluing one of the most essential points of connection to people. I lament when I encounter stories of research teams of one, talented PHD’s that are stuck struggling to move beyond late stage validation and testing, busy with theatrics, pulled in too many directions, disregarded, non-integrated, or starved of resources. Prioritizing people is an organization wide effort, but most importantly it’s fueled by commitment and investment in setting up dedicated research teams and the “learning” function leaders for impact.
How research is positioned, supported and structured has a massive influence on whether or not it will thrive. Like other areas, it requires a clear vision, purpose, structure, and practices to set the stage for success. Every company is different, but studying several research organizations, at varying stages of maturity, and building them myself, I have seen a few lessons that seem to hold true. Most of this, first and foremost, starts with hiring great people, and creating the context for them to succeed.
A few drivers of success include: establishing a strategic focus, creating hybrid structures, building a community of practice, growing leadership, and operating at scale.
Establishing a strategic focus
While learning is continuous, situating research up front and early is where it has the most value. Its greatest contribution is in looking far beyond what is usable and useful, to understanding what is valuable, meaningful, indispensable, impactful, and equitable. It should be helping to define what gets created in the first place. Nothing is worse that learning you are solving the wrong problem after many hours, weeks or months, have already been invested. Spending more time on defining the right problem can help avoid wasting effort on the wrong things.
“93% of researchers conduct research before anyone designs anything” userinterviews.com
Naturally the research team as a whole is looking beyond the confines of the current product, and seeing beyond the immediate horizon. It means getting skilled at saying no to pursuing all questions, and truly focusing on those where a potential research effort is aligned with company strategy, is critical to impact, with resources to pursue acting on learning, and where research can be most valuable. Often these are in the spaces with the most uncertainty, where more is unknown than known, and typically that is higher risk and more future oriented in nature.
Growing research leadership
Research can and should be operating in a leadership capacity. Researchers are equal leaders, partnered with their peers within product teams (eg. design leads, product managers, marketing leads, and engineering leads), and similarly represented at the executive level. Helping grow great researchers into strategic leaders, means looking beyond excellence in high quality insight to everything around the research itself. It means not just doing great work, but anchoring the work in broader impact, as well as the critical business needs, decisions and actions, the insight is fueling. Researchers who have already excelled at rigorous practice, and are highly skilled at their craft, often need more support in surfacing the most salient insights, building relationships, communicating their work, proactively identifying questions and shaping research agendas, to truly thrive in driving impact. In their craft they ensure rigorous and valid data, and in their leadership they serve as dot connectors, synthesizers, and expert advocates for the people being served. They are constantly asking the questions related to their needs that are essential in the business. They are the ones always asking “why?” and “who is this for? what situation? what problem?,” “how do we know?” and “what do we need to better understand?”
“the least important thing that in-house researchers do is actually conduct the research. What we do is help companies translate the information we get from research into better decisions, and we do that in a lot of ways: through socialization, facilitation, thought elevation, subject matter expertise, and user connection.” Jesse Caesar
A great research team is built from a diverse set of skills, backgrounds and specialties (eg. sociology, anthropology, psychology, HCI, strategy, design, writing/journalism) but most importantly grows this unique combination of capabilities into proactive, collaborative, master insights guides and storytellers that can help lead teams through the fog.
Shaping hybrid structures
Most research organizations naturally need to stretch between big questions and small questions, today and tomorrow, at all phases in development. Truthfully these all require different modes of operating, skills and approach. With limited resources, many teams end up optimizing for one or the other, to the detriment of the whole. Structuring the team as central or embedded is often seen as an either/or choice. The truth is finding the balance somewhere in the middle. Research leaders need to be embedded within the organization, closely connected and partnered with teams, shaping roadmaps across an area of focus or product domain to stay linked with direct impact. Close partnership ensures that insight doesn’t get lost in execution. Embedded research leaders are able to build up knowledge and expertise, establish relationships within their team and look ahead, surfacing questions essential for the future.
The challenge is that research at the company level, and themes across areas of the business, can get lost if researchers are only dispersed throughout the organization without a central means of convening, operating as a whole, and building an overall shared roadmap and knowledge base. A research organization can, and should, be identifying and fielding company-wide strategic questions, as well as those linked to advancing product teams. This is why maintaining a central team of researchers, and creating opportunities for pairing projects beyond the verticals, becomes a key part of the research organizational structure and balance. The ability to look across, but also within the teams, strengthens the insights at varying levels within the overall organization they operate within.
Research is a team sport that requires collaborative partnership at all levels, integrated into the engine of the broader organization. Research loses value, and teams (both the researchers and the teams they partner with) become frustrated, if there’s no impact.
Building a community of practice
Learning can and should be part of a community of practice with diverse skills in methods, data sources and areas of focus. Effective research organizations should be closely connected, if not integrated across, user research, data analytics, data science, market research, business analytics and customer feedback. Some organizations integrate all learning functions into a formal overall insights organization, some tie together specific aspects of learning that have clear common goals formally. Spotify integrates data science and user research into product insights and Airbnb brings together user research with product specialists into experience research. Whether this is formalized or not, every research effort should aspire to tie together and triangulate across data. Each effort should start with understanding existing knowledge, with an intention to weave together qualitative and quantitative, macro and micro, throughout the process. Otherwise teams end up simply drowning in conflicting data sources, and stuck not knowing what action to take. The synthesis of multiple sources into meaning is critical. The ability to triangulate across data sources, effectively tying together the why and the what, is core to actionable insight. Without this tying together, discrete data is only pointing at one small part of a much bigger picture.
Operating at scale
A culture of learning, with an intense people focus, is something that can and should be part of the DNA of an entire organization. Empathy and customer connection shouldn’t be limited to the research team. This is where research operations becomes a key factor. Research operations can cover essential ground in education, leading rapid research programs, building panels, curating knowledge, developing tools, as well as the more traditional role in streamlining recruiting. All of these amplify learning across the organization, while allowing the research team to operate at their highest potential, applying their expertise on the most complex and future focused questions in a dedicated manner.
Democratization is a controversial topic in research circles, and for good reason. It can be a slippery slope. To avoid devaluing rigorous research conducted by an expert, it requires being clear about the role of enabling empathy, feedback and learning at scale. It’s a good fit for focused tactical questions, but not complex, high risk, or critical decisions. It’s not permission to do bad research, or take the place of dedicated experts, or create the need to research everything. In fact it is about up-leveling everyone and creating more clarity on the role and application of data (in all its wonderful forms), and of it’s limitations.
Organizations must continue to move beyond just saying they are customer centered and putting people first, to actually doing it. This requires investing in building a high functioning research organization, made up of user research, data analytics, market research, customer feedback and business analytics, operating in a cohesive manner to develop insights that drive action and impact. It’s having a company-wide set of research efforts, combined with embedded leaders within the teams, complimented with a research operations team that enables and scales research across the organization.
Now, more than ever, gaining insight is critical. Given the shifts in behavior, expectation and perceptions that have been driven by Covid 19, there is widespread uncertainty. There are also bigger issues facing organizations around the world concerning equity, bias, accessibility, privacy, and designing for complex communities and systems (not just individuals) that research can help lead the way on. The most important driver of decisions should always be anchored in why an organization exists in the first place, typically that is only found in understanding how to best serve the individuals, and communities that sustain it, and whose lives it is built to improve. Insight built on understanding of the broader context and needs of people (and humanity) is essential to focusing on what matters most. The research organization is the closest to channeling this insight into every part of the business, feeding it into the roadmap, the overall vision and future priorities, and enabling empathy at a wide scale. Ultimately the path to impact is paved with insight. The shapers of that path need to come out of the shadows and be celebrated.
