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Summary
Monty Hammontree will share his take on the future of User Experience Research and how that extends out beyond traditional UX researchers to everyone trying to bring the customer to the forefront of decision making—to everyone striving to be customer connected and data-driven. It extends out beyond traditional research roles to everyone involved in the product making process, such as, Designer, Product Managers, and Software Engineers. He believes the heart and soul of the future of user research as a discipline lies not in trying to create a dynamic where, “the few endeavor to learn on behalf of the many but rather lies in expanding the role to focus on empowering the many to learn.”
Key Insights
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UX research at Microsoft shifted from a specialist role to a collaborative team sport driving continuous learning and customer connection.
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Satya Nadella’s cultural pillars—growth mindset, empathy, and inclusion—strongly influenced UX research transformation.
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Microsoft's developer division used UX research to triple engaged developers from 2.5 million to nearly 18 million over five years.
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Empathy efforts focus both on customers and internally within product teams to bridge cross-functional collaboration.
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The team created a research playbook emphasizing hypotheses, assumptions, and experiments as common language across disciplines.
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Democratizing research empowers non-researchers but raises concerns about diluting rigor and recognition of researchers.
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Monty’s approach trusts that a critical mass of good learning practices will self-correct poor research behaviors in organizations.
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The research culture prizes learning over being right, celebrating invalidated hypotheses as valuable insights.
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Complementing big data with ‘thick data’ makes research relatable and drives emotional engagement and advocacy.
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Encouraging researchers to become generalists and try skills from other disciplines enriches the team and culture.
Notable Quotes
"Our mission is to empower everybody to learn; not the few learning on behalf of the many."
"Closing the distance is about connecting not only with customers but also between cross-functional team members."
"Satya Nadella’s leadership feels authentic—he puts empathy at the center of everything he does."
"We changed the culture by changing the language, introducing common terms like hypotheses and experiments."
"The fastest way to gain influence is to get somebody else promoted."
"If you get enough good behavior going on, the system corrects itself and susses out the bad."
"People will work harder for people than they will for a number."
"Learning invalidates being right as the currency of research and product decisions."
"We built a Mount Rushmore of design thinking engineers to help the culture resonate with developers."
"Everybody involved in product making should have empathy for each other, not just for the customer."
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