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Why are products not working as they are supposed to?
This was the question we asked ourselves when we started Airtime, our collaborative research platform, in late 2020. There is a huge amount of data readily available on customers but many products are still unusable. During hundreds of interviews, we conducted with researchers and product people one fact kept reappearing: members of the product team work in silos. This leaves its mark on internal communications and customer-centricity and correlates strongly with decreased company performance.
The process goes like this. User research receives instructions from product managers who need to find out something about the customer. Then researchers conduct their research project and hand over the findings (customer insights) to product management. The product manager combines customer insights with a set of product goals and translates this information into product requirements for the developers and the UI designers. The developers and designers then create an output that is handed to the customer. Each group in the product team gets instructions and spits out the results, just like a black box.
A side problem is that the product development process is run via discrete sprints. When the core setup is a question-answer exchange between different parties, research conclusions are used once and become disposable. The insights gleaned might be saved in PowerPoint presentations or research repositories, but no one will go back to check on them later so storing these insights becomes a moot point. Money spent on research is partly wasted because no-one reuses perfectly good insights.
When product teams operate like this black box/answering machine, it cements the status quo between each stakeholder in the product team. Each stakeholder (product manager, user researcher, UI designer, and developer) has different incentives. These should be aligned towards the final goal of customer satisfaction, revenue, profit, and shareholder value but their alignment is less than perfect.
Let’s look at the typical KPIs different groups in the product team have. (We will use the expression KPI in this article but these can be interpreted as the more fashionable OKR or any translation of business goals to measurable numbers.)
User research:
Product Management:
Engineering:
UI design:
While these all technically should come together naturally, they don’t. User research is fully focused on customer satisfaction but nothing else. Engineering needs to be purely efficient with no regard for long-term customer satisfaction and the customer retention that arises from that. Design marries product usability, aesthetics, and customer attitude. Theoretically, it is the job of product management to bring all these goals together by overseeing each product, and they should have KPIs accordingly. When the product team’s KPIs are defined well, their activity boils down to the bottom line, the goal of top management and the overall goals of the company.
It is much easier said than done. When I worked as a B2B salesperson at a leading financial services company, there was constant friction between sales and product management. Sales essentially acted as the user research team, gathering user needs for product management. They were pushing for customized products developed for single clients while product management wanted to develop scalable offerings. As the two departments had parallel reporting lines to management, the balance was achieved through internal politics and power plays instead of true incentive alignment. Sales won many times simply because its leader was politically more powerful, to the detriment of the company’s bottom line. This is a good segue into our own experience with clients of Airtime.
It’s product management that should marry the different KPIs of other product stakeholders. In many cases though, product management doesn’t have a direct influence on the behavior of these other teams. Developers report to team leaders, user researchers to the Head of Research, and so on. Product managers have dotted line connections to the people that ensure the success of their product or product line. So, the best way to align these different KPIs is to have everyone involved and on the same page.
We propose the organic approach of collaborative research practice. This is research where all stakeholders are directly exposed to customers regularly. It helps greatly in fine-tuning the alignment of different departments. It is much less formal than enforced KPIs but it works nonetheless, as shown by our direct interviews with user research professionals.
According to a customer insights manager at a sustainable fashion brand recently snatched up by the H&M group
“The impact happens when people make decisions based on [customer] exposure.”
She said stakeholders outside research were reluctant to join customer meetings at first, but curiosity grew as everyone got instant answers to their business questions directly from customers. As non-researchers understood the impact of talking directly to customers, they were willing to spend time on it and establish a regular practice out of it.
A lead UX researcher at a global customer engagement platform said:
“Managing the [customer] exposure hours professionally and measuring them would bring many additional benefits… Everyone knows the entire product team should participate in relevant user calls, but there is always some other more important task for people to attend to.”
When stakeholders outside research attended customer meetings, he noticed many benefits including
The principal user researcher at a market-leading music composing platform believes that
“The best way to consume and internalize insights for company stakeholders is to be directly involved.”
He doubts that watching a presentation can give people true insights. Inherent in this company’s culture is the ongoing involvement of every colleague working on a product in customer meetings. This works well both for exploratory research and user testing sessions.
These are only a handful of the many similar opinions we’ve heard firsthand that support the practice of collaborative user research. When ongoing research is organized by user researchers and attended by other product team members, the product team has a shared understanding of user needs, priorities, and solutions, which they can match with their KPIs.
To demonstrate how easy it is for an organization to implement a continuous collaborative research practice, we created our Collaborative UX Research Playbook. It summarizes the key steps to set up such a practice and lists tools that make your life easier. If you’ve reached this point in the article, we’re sure you’ll find it useful. Feel free to give it a read!
KPIs are proxies for an end goal that are systematically defined, tracked, and enforced. A collaborative user research practice is a great way to compliment them. Such a practice acts as a soft set of rules that encourages organizational alignment, ongoing communications internally and externally, and a continuous client focus. Speak of killing three birds with one stone.
All of these contribute to breaking down silos inside the organization and act in the spirit of final business goals: revenues, profit, and shareholder value. When everyone has their finger on the customers’ pulse, executing the business plan becomes easier.
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