The stages of growing a UX Research team

By Marianne Berkovich, Director of User Research at Teladoc & Becky White, Lead Design Researcher at Canva

A year ago, Becky joined Canva as their first Design Researcher. A few months later, they hired another researcher, then another. As the team grew, her responsibilities rapidly expanded from conducting research to setting up the entire discipline for success. It was her first time doing this. She learned heaps about people management, teams, and her own personal strengths. She found it challenging, yet rewarding. Canva’s research team is now 7 and hiring.

Four years ago Marianne joined Glooko as their first User Researcher. She was a “jill of all trades” as she introduced the company to formal user research; She wrote about it then. Two years ago, she moved to Livongo where she’s had the chance to not only grow a research practice, but to grow the User Research team as well. This included a surprise of being acquired by Teladoc, which increased her team’s purview. Teladoc’s research team is now a team of 6 and also hiring.

Setting up a new research discipline isn’t for everyone. You’re essentially taking everything you know about what makes a successful researcher and research project, and scaling it across an entire organization.

How can I recruit participants for this study, becomes: what kind of tooling and processes does our team need, to source quality participants for the next year?

How should I collaborate with this PM and designer, becomes: how does the research specialty effectively work with PMs and designers, across the organization?

Your focus is constantly shifting: just as one aspect of the team gets to a good place, another aspect is on fire. And as your team and responsibilities grow, you spend less time actually conducting research and more time on ‘invisible work’ behind the scenes, helping to ensure your team of researchers is successful.

Building a new team — especially for the first time — can feel isolating and uncertain. For both of us, it was hard to know if we were focusing on the right things, in the right order.

Once we met with other research leaders and shared our collective experiences, we realized many of us experienced the same challenges. If you’re starting to establish a research team, you’re not alone! We’ve documented our experiences in hopes that it’s useful to you. Here’s the article we wish we had, as we got started.

A couple of quick notes before we dive in: We’ve identified broad themes, but every research practice will be different. Things like the size of the company, which domain it’s in, the company’s past experience and attitude about user-centered design and more, will play a role in which of these challenges you’ll need to address, and in which order.

The Research Ops community has developed a fantastic framework of the “8 Pillars of User Research,” which is a broader look at what a research practice entails. Consider this article as our personal Getting Started Guide to supplement that work.

Phase 1: Getting a UXR Practice Started

This is the phase of going from zero user researchers to one or two.

Research Work: Focusing on the highly impactful and visible

This is what you were hired to deliver after all, so after you’re settled, get started researching.

• Pick research projects that support highly visible, critical company initiatives. Resist the urge to revolutionize the company with never-before-seen methodologies just yet! Easily applied findings, clearly connected to the product will give you the biggest bang for your buck.
• There may be lots of excitement around your arrival. Ruthlessly prioritize projects, and openly share your rationale. You don’t want to spread the UXR peanut butter too thin by working shallowly on too many things, and satisfying no one.

Operations: Creating “just enough” process

Since the team is only a few of you, focus on what you need most to get research done.

Some of the basics you’ll likely need are:

• A process for finding and paying participants, either through existing lists, recruiting agencies, or tools like Respondent/UserInterviews.com
• NDA and Consent forms
• Templates for study plans and findings reports, so you don’t have to reinvent these with each study
• A simple knowledge repository (such as a wiki page with a table)
• Tools for conducting and analyzing your research such as Dovetail/Nvivo, dscout, Usertesting.com, etc.
• You might develop the beginnings of a prioritization process, such as a research request form and might create a spreadsheet to track requests.
• If you have budget to use vendors, weigh this against the time it will take to hire/oversee them vs. other tasks you could be doing

The Research Team: Hiring a T-shaped right-hand person

You’ll be looking for a T-shaped mid to senior-level researcher, who is willing to wear many hats and enjoys a variety of UXR related tasks. This person should be excited by the prospect of building a practice with you; some folks are put off by a team without a history or track record.

Within the Organization: Putting the first stakes in the ground

While you’re still in early stages, you’re starting to carve out a niche UXR’s purpose within the organization. (For inspiration, check out Andy Warr’s article Building a team.)

• Before diving in to change things, take time to understand the organizations’ history with UX research. How is it perceived? Are there any misconceptions?
• Spend time building relationships with leaders of other disciplines across the company, especially product (Design, Product Management) and your research counterparts (Data Science, Market Research, Customer Success, etc). They may be on similar journeys within the company. Learn from them.
• Demonstrate and communicate a vision of how UXR should be working with product teams.
• Establish basic ways to share UXR insights with the entire organization at regular cadence. For example, at Teladoc we do quarterly shareouts with 1-slide “trailers” of each study and one “main attraction” deep dive of a study that would be of particular wider interest. At Canva, we set up monthly “Customer Brekky” sessions to share insights from recent studies, play videos, share quotes, and get Canvanauts closer to customers. It’s an open invite for all employees.

Phase 2: Growing a UXR Practice

This is the phase of growing from 3 to 6(ish) people. Excitingly, it will start to feel like you’re working as a team instead of a bunch of individuals. At times, it may feel like everything is held together by duct tape, but these are just growing pains as processes get established.

Research Work: Prioritizing ‘invisible work’

As the specialty leader, you may have time for a few projects here and there, but primarily your role becomes about unblocking your team. This can often mean “invisible work” like documenting processes, procuring tools, and establishing ways of working with product teams.

Operations: Documenting processes, and scaling tooling

As new researchers join, you’ll need to formalize and document processes so everyone is aligned on how things are done.

• Leverage new team members to help document — and/or define — the processes
• Create more templates or reusable pieces to accelerate work. For example, how about an intro spiel for participants at the beginning of a session?
• What worked for 2 might not scale for 6 — you may need to look into new tooling and processes, such as how you source participants.
• Develop a more formal budget for studies, vendors, incentives and tools
• If you work in a regulated space such as health or financial, you’ll likely need to define formal Standard Operating Procedures
• Collect all of these things in one UXR team handbook, even if it’s skeletal and will be fleshed out over time.

The Research Team: Morphing into a team

As your team begins to coalesce, you’ll likely be focusing on hiring and culture.

• Start with hiring mid-to-senior level researchers who can own a space independently, and then layer in junior researchers under them. Look for different backgrounds, perspectives and skills; varying levels of experience, and complementary skills.
• Hire an operations person early, if you can.
• Focus on your team’s development. Learn their strengths, and where they want to grow. Develop career ladders that align with your company’s.
• Bring in external resources for team learning and development, but remember you have a lot of internal knowledge that may go a long way to creating your own UXR University series!
• Make concerted efforts to build team culture. Define your team values as a group, and start to live them. Establish team rituals, and prioritize time for bonding. For example, at Canva, we hold a weekly “Craft and Camaraderie” session. The agenda varies, and is set by the team. Past sessions have included giving feedback/critique on work, discussions on hot topics, and guest speakers.

Within the Organization: Creating momentum

At this point, teams are starting to notice the impact of research.

• Try to meet the demand for research through a transparent system of prioritizing requests, and/or embedding researchers within teams. But don’t spread your team too thin, instead advocate for more hires.
• Leverage relationships with leadership to make sure that UXR is focused on the most critical projects to the business, and can get a step ahead of where the business needs are heading
• To keep research enthusiasm high while you hire and scale thoughtfully, consider enabling “small r” researchers to take on doing some research themselves. (“Democratizing research”). Support them with templates, how-to guides, guidance from UXR, Brown bags, etc

Phase 3 — Accelerating a UXR Practice

At this point, you’ve built a solid track record, and more teams are requesting research help. As you grow from 6 to 15 researchers, your focus will shift to hiring and scaling. You’ll likely be conducting more candidate interviews than participant interviews!

Research Work: Full-time managing

Your growing team is developing a library of valuable insights. As your researchers focus on the day-to-day details of executing their projects, you can see the forest for the trees. Your time is best spent ensuring:

• Research projects are tied to the company strategy
• Insights have high visibility and are being used by product teams and senior leaders
• Dots are being connected across studies.

Operations: Graduating from duct tape

Now’s a great time to re-visit your processes and remove any duct tape.

• Hire a dedicated ResearchOps person, if you haven’t already
• Audit your processes for anything overly manual or time-consuming for your team
• Re-visit budgets from when you began to see if they need to be adjusted
• Possibly look into external vendors to help you expand your research coverage, especially for hard-to-reach audiences. For example, to conduct a11y research, global research, or research with minors.

The Research Team: Re-adjusting and fine-tuning

There’s internal pressure to hire and scale quickly. But you need to keep the right balance of roles, and ensure the team culture you’ve carefully cultivated continues.

• Junior researchers may be easier to come by, but you’ll also need senior leaders and research managers so you’re not overloaded.
• Keep up the quality of research being conducted. Ensure there are clear (and possibly documented) standards for the caliber of research work you expect.
• “Give away your lego.” Let senior and tenured researchers own team tasks that you no longer need to. It’s a great growth opportunity for them, and you get more time towards higher-level team tasks.
• Assess existing team rituals as you scale. Do you need different meetings?
• Revisit your team goals from when you first started out, and flesh them out more. Get the team excited about where you’re heading, why. They should be able to explain this to others.

Within the Organization: Sustaining the fire

Product teams have now seen the confidence and clarity research insights can add to projects. Build off this momentum to establish your team and its value.

• While you hire and scale, support teams without a dedicated researcher with ‘democratizated’ tools, and best practices. For example, at Canva, the Research team holds fortnightly Office Hours, pointing people towards existing resources and guides, helping shape research plans, and so on.
• Possibly, partner with other disciplines to more formally document ways of working
• Develop your spidey sense of where research (and researchers) will be most needed in the coming quarter, to avoid bottlenecks

Phase 4 — Toward Maturity?

15+ researchers

Admittedly, neither of us have gotten to this stage yet! We have a few ideas of what might be next — we’ve been part of teams this size in the past — but aren’t sure. We’re excited to find out, and will share with you when we find out :)

Growing a UX Research team can be exciting, but also challenging. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed comparing where you are today, with your ambitious dreams for the future. Take it day by day. Learn from your missteps — everyone makes them — and celebrate the wins, no matter how small they might seem. In hindsight you’ll realize how every discussion, project, template, report, and hire was a building block.

If you’re building a team, we’d love to chat! Feel free to reach out to us on LinkedIn.

Special thanks to Sian Townsend, Andy Warr, Jenny Lo, Erin Howard, and Amber Lindholm for contributing their thoughts which informed this article.