I've led functions and practices throughout my career, and UX Research is one of the closest to my heart. Sadly, research is one of the practices that constantly gets questions about the value and the first to go when there is any reduction in the workforce, but they are crucial. When advising companies, I tell them the two two basic things to do to improve: use the product and listen to customers. This sounds simple, but the simple things are hard, like “get really good at shooting three pointers.” Even to this day, in a much different role than a focused contributor, I make a goal of talking to one customer a week.

My research point of view

Similar to design, research has many flavors. The key is to rightsize what you need for your company. Academic and deep research may be necessary for companies working on deep problems that requires a longer term investment, but some may not. When I establish research at a company, here are the three points I make.

Research works with intuition, not against it

Everyone who worked as a researcher or built research teams have encountered the sentiment from founders, "we already know what we need to build." I've seen many people approach this with equal resistance instead of finding common ground. In Tony Fadell's book Build, he talks about Data vs. Opinion. When you have no data, start with an opinion or your intuition.

As you scale, get more data, you have more insights. The truth is good founders built this intuition over the years of talking to customers, looking at support tickets, and really understand the problem. Instead of approaching "we already know what we need to build" with "we don't know what we need to build," position it as, "let's keep learning at scale." The research team should be the personification of what the founder wishes they had time to do and build a culture of the importance of talking to customers.

Research is a force multiplier, not blocker

There are two great outcomes that research helps with. The first is validation. It's not a bad outcome if customers tell you things you "already know." It confirms you're on the right track and it's still a problem. Getting additional signal helps you prioritize. The second outcome is the one you hope to achieve, which is it helps you find new opportunities. This is the power of open ended research. It may crack a nut you or the company were not looking at.

Research is continuous, not monolithic

A lot of people's mental models is that research is an academic study that requires defending the thesis. This type of research is very important as well, but the truth is what most companies need is research that's leaner and continuous.

Start customer research program

Most people are the company are too busy to start doing their own research. This is not a signal of interest but not knowing where to start. The more friction you can remove from access to customers, the more excited people will be. Xin joined my team at One Medical as a Product Designer but her background at IDEO made her such a huge asset to research. She started bootstrapping customer research to the point that our Product Development team ended up funding a Product Rounds (healthcare lingo) program for people on our team visiting clinicians.

Keep research rolling

The number one thing that kills funding research is lack of momentum. The way to mitigate this is to build a lot of momentum and allow insights to flow like a river instead of a perceived glacier pace. My hiring playbook as always been hiring Research Ops along with the Researchers. Start with research you've already done to streamline a repository of insights people can easily read. It starts small, but will compound and grow over time. Set clear targets on how many customers you want to talk to. Though quantity and volume of customers are not the end result, it's a great accountability metric on consistency and habits.

Share the stories

If research isn't shared, was it done? What's worse than not doing research is doing research that doesn't impact what you're building. Share your research like a demo, and do it often. Create touch points throughout the company's iteration cycle that people can see it. One trick I light to do is to cut small clips from research sessions to share in Slack in our user research channel. It's a reminder of all the humans you're speaking with.

Customer research is human and mission driven

There is nothing that feels more human and mission driven than customer research. I can tell you there have been moments in my career when I thought about leaving a company. Perhaps it was frustration with misalignment, a problem with working with someone, or product challenges. What saved me from leaving was talking to a customer—hearing their story of the impact the product you're working on had on their livelihood. Regardless if you're receiving positive or negative sentiments, spending time with customers fills the well and reminds you why you joined the company in the first place.

Hype links

• Tweet of the week¹

• You Should Wireframe by Ellen Chisa

• Prototyping with Primer React by Amie

• Rolling Research: a minimalist UX research process

• I’m hiring a Lead UX Researcher at Replit