Keep an eye on your product’s big picture with UX Research
How product managers can partner with UX to innovate while reducing risk
This article is adapted from a presentation I recently gave to a group of IBM product managers, UX researchers, and designers on the benefits of teaming up throughout the product life cycle.
Over the course of my career, I’ve been lucky to work shoulder-to-shoulder with people who had a range of influence over the end product—from startup founders and CEOs to sales and support teams. This cross-disciplinary perspective offers a unique understanding of the digital product life cycle—including some of its gaps.
Why do so many startups fail to take off, even with brilliant teams behind them? Why do so many products struggle once out in the market? It wasn’t until I pivoted from Marketing into User Experience (UX) Research that I had the following realization:
Product teams are often so focused on building things right—that they lose sight of whether they’re building the right things.
It is critical for product managers and UX researchers to work together to innovate while reducing risk — from vision to launch and beyond.
Wait—what’s a UX researcher?
Most people in the business of building products have heard of how UX revolutionized companies like Apple, Procter & Gamble, IBM, Nike, and Uber. But hearing about UX and understanding how to fit it into your product strategy and organizational structure are two very different things. To do either of those, you first have to understand what “UX research” is.
A UX researcher employs qualitative and quantitative research methods to systematically study the totality of a user’s interactions with a company. Much like product leaders, their ultimate goal is to improve product quality while driving efficiency, profit, and market position.
Achieving this goal requires UX researchers to build empathy not only for people who use the product — but also for those who buy it, sell it, market it, support it — and anyone with a stake in it. They leverage principles from psychology, behavioral science, and human-centered design to develop a deep understanding of each of these groups’ behaviors, needs, and motivations.
A good UX researcher knows how to:
- Understand and clearly articulate the challenge at hand
- Uncover both user and business needs in the context of said challenge
- Ask questions that generate actionable insights
- Communicate findings to a cross-functional team
- Guide that team through to implementation
In addition to collaborating with product leadership, marketing, sales, support, and development, UX researchers pair up with UX designers. These designers bring the design recommendations generated by UX research to life—producing the artifacts that most people think about when they hear “UX”: hand-drawn sketches, low- and high-fidelity prototypes, and the final wireframes for engineering.
What does this partnership look like in practice?
Let’s break it down into the five typical phases of the product lifecycle.
Phase 1: Exploration
Every product starts as an idea. Someone somewhere has a hypothesis about a problem that needs solving. During this initial phase, the product manager or aspiring entrepreneur typically focuses on questions like:
- How will this idea make money?
- What market(s) should we address?
- What should the timeline be?
- What are the high-level requirements?
These are all important to answer—but arguably, the most important question too often goes unanswered: Are we focusing on the right problem?
Through ethnographic research, stakeholder interviews, generative interviews with prospective users, and other methodologies, UX researchers can reveal how and why people experience a certain problem — and ultimately validate, refine, or disprove your initial hypothesis.
Disproving a hypothesis before Marketing, Development, or Sales are involved is an excellent (albeit under-appreciated) outcome. While not easy to swallow, it means you’ve saved your team an enormous amount of time, energy, and money. Moreover, the research likely uncovered valuable insights that point to a new, much more pertinent problem to be solved — allowing your team to pivot and recover quickly.
Once UX research validates your hypothesis, the Design team can leverage the findings to generate valuable artifacts that align the team as it powers ahead—such as an exploration charter, hypothetical user outcomes, and a set of design principles.
Note: There is no “product” yet—only a problem to be solved.
Phase 2: Understanding the market
Once the team is focused on solving a valid problem, it’s time to understand exactly who the problem is being solved for. What is the market opportunity, and what’s the best way to approach it? How are others approaching it?
Product managers typically have a variety of tools for sourcing market and competitive intel. However, it’s important to recognize that these tools generate quantitative data, which only reveals the what. The beauty of UX research is that it generates qualitative data—which reveals the why. You can triangulate quant with qual data to understand:
- Who are our target buyers and end users? Are they similar or different, and why?
- What are their pain points and requirements, and why?
- How well is the competition meeting these needs, and why?
- Who and what else might this product impact that we should be considering?
Through contextual inquiry, diary studies, competitive analyses, persona development, jobs-to-be-done studies, and other methods, a UX researcher will uncover the “whys” behind the “whats”—giving the team a deep understanding of the market opportunity, as well as valuable artifacts such as personas, mental models, job maps, business model canvases, and iterative press releases.
Note: There is still no “product”—only a problem to be solved and an understanding of who + what the problem impacts.
Phase 3: Concept definition and validation
Now that the team has a clear understanding of the problem to be solved and precisely whom they’re solving it for, it’s time to define the solution and validate it with target users. Product managers and UX researchers will diverge slightly here—with the former focusing on financial forecasting, quality certifications, routes to market, and pricing and packaging models (to be tested with prospective users).
UX researchers will work closely with prospective users to validate the personas from Phase 2 and determine how the solution will map to their needs and pain points. Based on their findings, they’ll iterate on the hypothetical user outcomes from Phase 1, determine key deliverable milestones (with input from engineering), and support the product manager in identifying and mitigating risks.
Specific UX research activities might consist of journey mapping, heuristic evaluations, prototyping and iterating, surveys, preference tests, or conjoint analysis. Outputs from these activities will include a crystal-clear problem statement for the team to rally around (a “north star”), validated personas and journey maps, user outcomes, mid-fidelity prototypes, and an experience-based roadmap. It all comes together in a “research readout” that informs the product manager’s go-to-market strategy.
Note: Not a single line of code has been written yet!
Phase 4: Go-to-market
With a validated solution concept, an experience-based roadmap, and clear financial objectives—it’s now time to map the high-level experiences on your roadmap to more tangible user stories and features—and start writing code! A UX Researcher will work side-by-side with the product manager, UX designers, and developers to answer questions like:
- Which user stories should we include in our first release?
- How should the individual features work together?
- How will research, design, and engineering work together to ensure that we deliver a quality Minimum Viable Experience (MVE)?
- What’s a reasonable target launch date?
At this point, a UX researcher’s scope also expands to include the customer experience (CX)—i.e., how a prospective customer will discover, learn, try, and ultimately purchase the product:
- How should we market the product, and to whom?
- How can we reduce the learning curve for new users?
- Should we offer a trial? What should that look like?
- What will prospects be willing to pay?
UX researchers can apply their narrative-building skills to inform the go-to-market messaging and marketing collateral such as launch videos, infographics, press releases—even sales and support enablement materials.
This is a good time for the product management and UX team to define joint product KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)—in other words: How will we know if the product has succeeded? Both teams should have unique KPIs tied to their distinct work—but it’s essential that some of these KPIs overlap. A UX researcher will be able to advise the product team on relevant UX metrics to monitor, how often, and which tools to adopt for collecting in-product analytics.
You finally have a product!
Phase 5: Sense and respond
As soon as your Minimum Viable Experience (MVE) is out in the wild, it’s time to shift into sense and respond mode. Product leaders begin capturing metrics to:
- Ensure that their understanding of their users is up-to-date
- Find out if the market is changing in any way
- Explore different ways to optimize and add value to meet the evolving needs of users and the business
In this phase, the UX researcher’s role goes beyond simply identifying bugs before the next release. They’ll continue to recruit and engage with fresh research participants and have ongoing conversations with Sales and Support about what they’re seeing in the field. As new information emerges, the design team should update and recirculate the artifacts created in earlier phases—personas, mental models, job maps—otherwise, they risk becoming stale.
Product managers can triangulate UX research findings with product analytics, marketing funnel metrics, requests for enhancements (RFEs), competitor data, and other sources at their disposal to understand the health of the product and inform overall strategy. As the product grows and matures, UX research insights will spark new concepts, extend the value of existing product lines, and give product leaders a deeper understanding of their customers’ evolving needs.
To recap
Product leaders—you now have a model for how to work with UX researchers to spark innovation while mitigating risk.
I challenge you to leverage their capabilities to answer the critical question, “Are we solving the right problem?” throughout your product’s life cycle—especially at the beginning. Once the answer is “yes,” power ahead—together!—toward identifying the right solution and continually iterating upon it.
I would be remiss to leave out the #1 requirement for all of this to work: communication, communication, communication. Product leaders must be willing to communicate and collaborate with UX researchers for this partnership to be effective. Keep the communication lines open, and I promise you—UX researchers will be your #1 ally.
Further reading:
- Effective Agile UX Product Development (NN/g)
- Design Thinking practitioner badge (IBM)
- What does the state of UX look like in 2021? (UserZoom)
Nicole Keyes is a UX Researcher at IBM based in Austin, Texas. This article does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies, or opinions.
