Summary
Research for product work is well established; but how do you lead your research team to shape organizational goals? We’ll use a case study from Google to demonstrate how many of the same techniques, methods, and skills you and your team have today can be used to guide an organization’s goals. We’ll also discuss key changes to make for organizational success - from integrating with other insight functions to shifting how your team defines themselves and their work. The results are research organizations that produce insights to impact how your organization defines their goals.
Key Insights
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Early UX research focused on evaluating decisions after they were made, but now researchers can influence product strategy and organizational alignment.
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Assessing how the organization and research teams perceive themselves is crucial to identify gaps and opportunities for influence.
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Researchers often excel in craft and domain expertise but may lack critical business acumen and advising skills, which limits their impact.
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Setting an audacious, long-term goal energizes teams and elevates their mindset towards influencing leadership-level decisions.
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All customer contact can be strategic if research questions are intentionally mapped to organizational goals; the tactical vs strategic distinction is often false.
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Finding a high-level champion before defining problems is essential to accessing key information and aligning research efforts with business priorities.
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Collaboration across user research, data science, and market research enables producing trusted, generalizable data for executives.
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Mapping research findings to business metrics, like queries in search, makes the impact clear and drives organizational buy-in.
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Delivering strategic insights becomes easier after careful preparation and alignment phases focused on relationships and timing.
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Individual researchers can advance influence by leveraging established relationships and growing business and advising skills alongside their research craft.
Notable Quotes
"Leadership growth among UX research is still fairly organic, so we need to learn how to establish ourselves to take leadership roles."
"If you can follow the simple steps of preparing, aligning, and delivering, you can shift the focus and impact of your team."
"We had a great depth of customer understanding, but our view of partners was two-dimensional; we didn't know their needs or goals well."
"Success was often about personal relationships; having the right data wasn’t enough without the right connections."
"Many leaders didn’t know how to engage with research beyond usability and experimentation."
"We set a two-year goal to advise leadership on top issues for annual planning, even though we hadn’t figured out all the steps."
"Any customer contact is touching on strategic foundations — the tactical versus strategic mindset is a false dichotomy."
"Find your champion before you identify the problems to solve; this person helps navigate complex organizational alignment."
"User research excels at explaining why things happen; data science explains what and how; together they build trusted insight."
"By connecting complex user journeys to queries, we made the impact on business bottom lines explicit and compelling."
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