How I started a product research team in my organisation
Inception
When I began my career at Workhuman (formerly known as Globoforce), I quickly realised that there was lots of room to improve the process for research and design The product in its core is an absolute gem! It’s all about the power of expressing gratitude towards each other during work/life events and more. It enhances company culture and brings visibility to all the excellent work that’s happening across the organisation. Within a few short months, I was able to see the power of how simply saying thanks helped me to form and strengthen my relationships at work.
During my first few weeks, I was assigned to a scrum team, where I quickly identified some opportunities in the process. At the time, there wasn’t much usability testing or other research done in the scope of feature development to validate my design decisions or to prove the value of these decisions to our stakeholders. To emphasis this to the team, I decided to conduct a quick and straightforward usability test. Showing the results helped the team understand why I make design and product decisions and how it was going to improve the user experience.
This was a moment of clarity for me, as I knew I had proven my point about the value of research on the scrum team. My next step was to do more. From that point onwards, I decided that we need to do more structured research as a product design team. With the support of my manager, we were able to increase our usability testing, put a process in place and conduct more research overall. This meant we needed to revisit our current design process and create a more defined step for user research. We defined what activities we needed to have and at what stage to guarantee that research was going to deliver value. Delivering more structured research meant we had another immediate pain point: Resources.
Team structure and process
When I joined the product design team at Workhuman, the team was nine product designers split into six who practised UX and supported approximately eight scrum teams in a decentralised model, and another three product designers who practised UI and white-labelling our product as we signed new clients.
As the volume and intensity of the work kept increasing, I identified an opportunity to get an extra set of hands to carry out usability testing. My first port of call for these resources was to approach the UI team and ask if they would like to learn more about usability testing and if they would like to learn how to do it to help the product designers on the UX side carry out our studies. They expressed their interest, and I created a plan of training sessions that consisted of theory and practice (based on NNG group guidelines and my hand on experience). We carried out this training throughout a quarter and once complete, the UI designers were able to start taking usability testing and assisted the product designers with the workload and the tests. This solution kept us going for some time but wasn’t a long-lasting as the team became progressively busier with the growth in the company. What we needed to do, apart from resourcing was define a more sold structure and make our processes as lean as possible.
Maturing the process
As time progressed, and we became better at carrying out user testing and smaller research initiatives internally, but to improve the validity of our results, we needed to gain access to our end users! Little did I know at the time that this is going to be our biggest challenge in the B2B org setting. My manager, who was working with scrum teams as well, was able to remove himself from the day-to-day work and dedicate himself to advance user research and design methodologies in the company. Our main target for that was to start reaching out to clients. As he took the lead on that, he also started reaching out to customer success managers to improve our access to end-users but was having a difficult time demonstrating the benefits for the clients and end-users. We had to re-group.
Although I was still functioning as a full-time scrum designer, I saw this as a good challenge. I suppose my competitive nature, along with this challenge, was a good combo so I offered to get involved and evangelise the benefits of research. Following the initial discussions, we landed our first client. The excitement level was the equivalent of getting a client pitch in the agency I worked in previously. We finally did it. We kicked off our first research initiative with a client! I was so inspired and motivated as this was our first breakthrough; it was rewarding and insightful as we were able to get feedback from end-users and share it with the product design team. At that point, everybody shared that excitement. For me, it showed what was possible, and that alone was enough for me to get pumped to try to get more clients involved in research initiatives.
Moving onwards, I got more and more involved in the background discussions with customer success managers to get more clients for research. We kept hitting roadblocks with customer success managers and realised we needed to revisit the tactics we were applying. As I embarked on this, I learned that my manager decided to move from Workhuman and as that happened, I saw this as an opportunity to entirely take over the mission of recruiting our clients for research; this has become my biggest initiative outside of my general scrum practice.
From this point onwards, things started to change. Although I was relatively free to come up with a new approach I realised that the people I was trying to recruit didn’t have the time for the ins and outs of product research and I needed to show the value of what we do and how crucial that is to all our work. I took a step back and revisited; who were the key people I needed to collaborate with to get more traction. With the help and support of the product design team manager we received an approval from the executive level to approach the same people, the difference this time is that we had executive support and things started to move a bit faster. We got to run small studies with our SMB clients and larger ones with our enterprise clients. The primary challenge with enterprise clients was that it took longer to get through the approval process from the program managers as well as recruiting the participants; on average a half of a quarter. While it’s great to get clients, we need to deliver results a lot faster due to our releases cycles and Agile working environment.
Two clears paths emerged:
Tactical research — we are a SAAS product, and we have a unique advantage as we have an internal userbase that consists of roughly 500 of our employees who use the product daily.
Strategic research — Larger-scale research initiatives that generally apply to big features or new products, and we are aware of them well in advance. This gives us the time to reach out to our clients well in advance.
Wait? Do we need a team…
Up to this point, product research was happening in support of the scrum process. While this was great, I needed to ensure that the output is of high quality and consistent as this was becoming difficult with few resources and quick turnaround times. As I was the main person leading this initiative, I took on all the admin of the practice on myself. Both of these practices (scrum and research) quickly become a little bit too much for one person. So I asked for help. Specifically getting a dedicated research intern appeared to be the best approach for several reasons:
Product research wasn’t going to reduce in volume but instead grow and evolve, and we need dedicated resources to help in developing this practice.
Any new resource would have an official psychology background, and hence their contribution will be helpful to the entire team.
It will send the message that we are serious about research to the rest of the organisation.
If the intern proves to be valuable, we can hire them full-time, and naturally, this will be the first step in creating a team.
An intern position will help us to demonstrate the need and benefits without the initially incurring cost.
This was the big the plan I had worked on to resolve some of the resourcing issues and prove the value of research to not just the customer success managers, scrum teams or my manager, but to the whole company. I began to see more potential for evangelising research. Therefore I began working on my relationships and lobbying for this new intern position.
Getting the buy-in
In working on the pitch to present to my manager about the intern position it became clear to me that I was seeing the bigger picture of the potential opportunity here; I’m going to set up a research department in our product design team. I outlined what will that role be to my manager, how the intern will assist me in doing more research and pointed out the gaps that needed to be sealed in our product development lifecycle, as well as the wider benefits to Workhuman.
My manager immediately saw the potential and was able to approve and help me hire a research intern. I would like to take the time and give my manager credit for the massive support I got. Without his support and buy-in, I probably wouldn’t be writing about this fantastic experience and amazing achievement. My manager is a vital part of the success and progress of the research initiative that is now a research team of four (including me). He utilised his network and his relationships with stakeholders and critical decision-makers in the company to ultimately help in the creation of this research team. We may face obstacles in our pursuit for a better process, but having immediate buy-in from those you work most closely with really helped me on this journey.
And so, very soon after we hired our first product research intern whom I was extremely grateful for. I was able to delegate some of the research activities to him. As he learned and progressed, I was able to make a case to keep him on full-time.
With his help, we were able to expand the scale and quality of our research, with him working on the tactical day-to-day stuff, freeing me to work on more strategic initiatives and build further relationships. We started working on our own research process that has grown and evolved since then into an entire team practice. I was unofficially managing a small research team, a big milestone in my eyes, but a drop in the ocean company-wise, (don’t take it the wrong way this is a great thing!) There is loads of work to do to support the product design team on their journey, and this is only the beginning of the research team journey.
The community practice
As our practice of research keeps growing and evolving, new challenges keep coming up. We began working on a community of practice to address the evolving needs of the design team.
By-weekly UX research update — In the scope of this meeting, we presented our findings to the product design team and generated discussion around them. This session also gave a stage for our (former intern) researcher to sharpen his presentation skills and become more embedded in the wider team.
Monthly research update — This meeting aimed to give our product strategy team visibility into the research across the teams and the value that it delivers.
One page summary report — A template with key findings that we circulated in slack channels and sent out to stakeholders. To give the wider company visibility into research findings.
Research repository — building a research repository using Enjoy HQ for research to be visible company-wide to help us interconnect all of our studies and create cross-product feature insights that will help the broader product development teams.
Work is never over
As time went on, I moved out of my role as a product designer to a full-time research team lead with a team of three. Having a team means a whole new set of needs and goals. It’s not just about research anymore; It’s about my team, their progress, satisfaction and career growth. It’s about integrating them into the product design process and the scrum teams and setting them up for success in their role. In other words, there is lots to be done on the practice side and the team side.
Conclusion
It’s extremely hard to summarise an approximate three and a half year journey in one post. The main goal of this post was to give an idea of how the product research team at Workhuman came about. If you are thinking of “we need to do more research in our org”, “how can I get to speak with our clients”, “where to start”. Just start with your immediate pain point and work your way up from there. Everything has to start somewhere. Every organisation is different and your challenges will be slightly different from mine due to differences in business models, people, personalities, culture location etc. But the patterns are almost exactly the same. Spend time to learn your org, identify the gaps you’ll be able to fill and find a way to deliver value to your organisation through research. Evangelise your practice with anyone who will listen.
One last thing: As with anything you do, you’ll encounter success, breakthroughs, challenges, setbacks, and disappointments. My biggest take away is it’s all about the people. Nurture your relationships. Have a positive mindset. Be a fun person to be around. Consider the experience of your colleagues after an interaction with you. If you leave people in a better mood than the one they came to the meeting with you are securing yourself higher success rates in the grand scheme of things with whatever it is that you are going to do.
Thanks for reading!
