We recently hosted a research leadership discussion focused on driving impact with research; how we define it, measure it and advance it.

Our guests included Rebecca Destello, Jeanette Fuccella, Anuj Tewari, and Leanne Waldal, an impressive group with a wide range of backgrounds and experiences. My fabulous co-host was fellow research community builder Kathleen Asjes. Victoria Sosik couldn’t join us, but has a great talk on this topic (included below).

4 Top Highlights

• Focusing on impact requires intentionality. Driving change inspired by insight often means being very intentional at the outset about tying research to the advancement of a larger goal, mission, and working with sensitivity to the broader operating context.
• Trusted relationships create the path to impact. Influence, communication, collaboration, and building trusted relationships creates the path to impact. Research work becomes real only after it has been absorbed, adopted and acted on. Researchers need to cultivate their partnerships, operate as stewards for effective data, advocate for insight becoming more interwoven across the organization, and act as a shared owner in outcomes.
• Change takes many forms. Impact spans a wide range of dimensions and levels of scale from driving strategy, surfacing new directions, informing direct shifts in experience that meaningfully drive metrics and can include advancements in internal process and culture.
• Realizing impact takes (extra) effort. Tools can help make tracking and measuring habitual, but the starting point involves choosing the right work from the outset and designing it with change in mind (eg. framing the right question, shaping the work for engagement and structuring activation).

A deeper dive into our conversation

Confronting the question of impact means shifting our focus to look beyond the questions we frame and the studies we conduct, to the result of our work, tying insight to the outcomes it inspires. In an “applied” environment our role is often in developing knowledge in service of action and change. The value of research can be reinforced by actively connecting to the change driven, whether that be a strategy, a mindset, a direct shift in a product and related metrics, and ultimately, and most critically, the impact in people’s lives.

Trusted relationships create the path to impact. A theme that struck me throughout the entire discussion was that trust and impact are intertwined. Research work becomes real only after it has been absorbed, adopted and acted on. It’s the brilliant work of our partners in engineering, product, design and marketing/sales that take insight forward. The reality is that surfacing new insights, sharing objective facts and providing strong evidence alone does not make change happen. Impact is forged through influence, communication, collaboration, and building trusted relationships, this is where we create the path to greater impact. As Jeannette shared, we need to foster excellence and lead the way so that everyone in a company can be responsible “stewards of data.” She also astutely noted that the ultimate goal is really integration of knowledge and data and it is someone else (not the researcher) taking action or leading a decision.

Focusing on impact requires intentionality. Our guests shared that impact is derived from building a deep connection to what the business cares about and operating as a catalyst for the pursuit of broader goals. It’s not just advancing the mission of one product team or area, but often crosses boundaries. The trick is in connecting back to the larger purpose of the organization, the advancement of the business, and how we are contributing to creating great experiences that change people’s lives in service of that. Focusing on simply conducting research and the artifacts that come along with that, or even looking too narrowly, introduces the risk of not seeing insight fully realized. Impact is advancing research purposefully in terms of changing minds, inspiring action, and often operating at some degree of scale. Over the past few years we have been seeing a broader overall shift from executing excellent rigorous research to this closer linking to driving change, influence, and growing in scope of practice. The questions being pursued are increasingly at the company or industry level, and the impact across multiple areas of a business and millions of people.

Change takes many forms. Measuring and tracking starts with unpacking the many dimensions of impact, understanding types being pursued at the outset, and being mindful about that. Rebecca and Anuj have outlined 4 types that include informing directions (eg. improving launch outcomes or avoiding failure), exploratory efforts to surface and determine what to build, enabling team success (eg. advancing or supporting others work), and advising with cross org impact (eg. spread and scale).

Victoria Sosik has outlined similar types of impact:

• Influences product change
• Influences product strategy
• Increases stakeholder exposure to users
• Shares communication
• Prompts further research
• Prompts a new collaboration
• Elevating the role of user research
• Develops infrastructure

These can be grouped into larger buckets like product, cultural, and internal impact.

Tools to help prompt follow up can be useful to begin building up the habit of tracking impact whether it is to capture citations, mentions, stories, other research, OKR’s, launches, shifted metrics and all of the evidence of actions linked to the work. When it comes to measuring more specifically, Leanne has made it a practice of finding partners who are keen on measuring against the outcome if it isn’t already underway and available to link to. Tracking takes organization and muscle memory, and hopefully in the future will be more naturally woven into the workflow (hello AI). It also presents challenges when the impact is less tangible, direct, or immediate. Foundational and generative work may be fuzzier, resulting in a wider scope of influence and spread naturally requiring extra sustained effort, over more immediate clear and direct link that demonstrates “we learned this, which lead to this and changed x”. That doesn’t prevent the continued attention to this long term ripple effect. Think of all of this as capturing how insights and data become interwoven across the organization. As Leanne pointed out as researchers we don’t “own” this. It only matters in terms of where and how it is showing up across the work being done far beyond the research team.

Realizing impact takes (extra) effort. Every team and organization is unique, and there is no recipe for research impact success other than meeting your team, group or organization where they are. Impact starts with knowing where others are in the journey to data literacy and level of sophistication in understanding the big problems to solve, who is being served and how that informs great experiences. The trick here is to treat it like any other research project, approaching with curiosity in terms of what is already known, what the incentives, motivations and drivers of success are, and seeing what complex unknowns you can help partner with others on addressing. At Pendo Jeannette tied research to NPS impacts since the organization prioritized that and was in growth mode, Leanne worked with sales to understand how research might unlock new understanding in a tricky retention issue, and Anuj shared a story of starting at Uber and getting to know the ins and outs of the product and working where the team was at before introducing broader strategic research. Big leaps in trust can be gained in either starting small or learning from the current body of knowledge, while also setting the foundations of making great work easy through operations.

Carving out space for learning, insights and finding the signal through the noise can also help in amplifying great work toward bigger influence and recognition. Whether that is having a research playbook, a slack spaces for insights, or a rolling insights deck (a key takeaway slide from every piece of work). As Rebecca noted “no one looks at the repository beyond researchers,” so attention to how research is shared, consumed and circulated is a part of weaving it into the fabric of the organization.

Driving change and impact with insight isn’t easy. Someone else is often holding the keys to action and there are no shortage of hurdles to overcome. Proactively navigate barriers by anticipating and preparing for common hurdles. Some of those may include false urgency, being out of step with the team, limited commitment from partners, asking the wrong questions, role confusion, lack of reflection time and many others. While some of these can be addressed through constantly shaping the work for impact across the framing of the question, the engagement of the team, and attention to communication and activation, much of the magic happens in triaging the options, well before work even begins. You can do all the right things but you have to prioritize what gets done. Prioritizing with impact in mind can be an unlock for investing time in areas that have high potential for greater return. Jeannette has created a great framework for thinking through how to prioritize amongst all the potential options. Find the highly complex, highly risky, unknown spaces and make room for some big bets. You can “balance trust wins and support with explorations of problem space.”

CHROME: A framework for asking the right question

• Context: The background on why we’re doing this study.
• Hypothesis: How we expect a proposed design change to impact the user experience.
• Research question: What we hope to learn from this study.
• Outcome: What the findings from this study will inform (actionable next steps).
• Metrics of success: Changes in product/business that will let us know this study had an impact.

Driving impact is multi-dimensional. Simply being intentional about what kinds of questions to pursue, shaping the work for impact along the way and tracking the change driven can go a long way toward setting the stage for advancing impact with research. Thank you to such an incredible group of research leaders for sharing their insight, perspectives and approach to pursuing greater impact with their research!

Perspectives, articles and talks from our guests:

“Building partnerships and earning trust by measuring experience,” Leanne Waldal, produced by Invision

“Starting with the human perspective for research impact,” Leanne Waldal, produced by Invision

“What it means to have impact as a researcher” by Anuj Tewari and Rebecca Destello

“Building a framework for prioritizing user research” by Jeanette Fuccella

“Impact & UX Research: What Is It and How Do We Know We’ve Achieved It?” by Victoria Sosik

Additional references

• A great recent round up, “How to measure UX research impact: A multi-level framework,” by Karin den Bouwmeester
• https://www.userinterviews.com/blog/how-to-track-the-impact-of-ux-research
• https://sprig.com/blog/framework-for-demonstrating-research-impact
• https://uxdesign.cc/three-levels-of-ux-research-impact-174768b7f4ef