User researchers need to understand the business
Lessons I learned from banging my head against a wall.
We recently had a discussion in my product team about our roles and responsibilities.
Being the sole user researcher in a cross-functional product team I more or less have full ownership over my life’s purpose, so it didn’t take me long to scribble something down about being the voice of the customer and getting everyone to agree with it.
The engineers, however, had to reach group consensus on their mission and it was in this conversation that I heard a truth bomb being dropped.
“We deliver business value through quality code.”
“Should we say we deliver business and customer value?”
“We would never deliver customer value that’s detrimental to the business. Customer value is part of the business value.”
It’s a way of seeing things that has taken me some time to get around, but that has had a profound impact on the quality and outcomes of my work.
So it’s with my commercial hat on that I want to talk to you about why user researchers need to understand the business they’re working in.
Business value and customer value aren’t fundamentally separate entities
User researchers are seen as the people whose job it is to live in Customer Land and bring news from its depths on a regular basis. This view of our role limits us from doing effective work.
We tend to fall into the trap of thinking about business and customer value as fundamentally different beasts, the connotation being that they’ll inevitably clash with each other and we’ll have to fight the noble customer corner against the big bad money monster. This is a naive view that reinforces siloed thinking and blocks constructive conversations.
Yes, we are committed to creating products and services that have value for our customers and address their needs and problems. But would we ever build solutions that would drive the business into the ground?
We should all be critical of businesses who put profit over their customers. We should all be passionate about demanding customer-centricity be at the core of everything our organisation does. But we should also get real about the fact that customer value on its own does not a business make. We will always build the customer value-driving solutions that also drive the business’ commercial success.
If this sounds like a bummer to you, fear not! Because…
Understanding business constraints leads to better user research
Years ago, I spent an embarrassing amount of time arguing the case of how we need to change The Big Thing That Customers Hate to anyone who would listen. It felt like I was banging my head against a wall day in and day out and that no one cared about our customers’ frustration with The Thing.
It wasn’t until I learned about the commercial model behind The Thing that I realised why everything I was fighting for — based on the user feedback and research I had conducted! — fell somewhere between ridiculous and insane on the scale of bad business ideas.
Far from feeling discouraged, it was the first time I could see light at the end of the tunnel. The wall my head had met so many times was of my own making and, as soon as it came crashing down, I was free to pursue this customer problem from an entirely new perspective.
Armed with this new business knowledge, I could research the problem and its potential solutions from a much more realistic stance. Instead of continuing my fruitless affair with The One Big Solution To End All Suffering, my eyes opened to a world of very different possibilities and ideas that could address customer pain in this space.
Once I came back with insight about changes and improvements that wouldn’t bankrupt the company in a week, people did listen. The truth was that they were interested in improving the customer experience of The Thing and they did believe that we could do it better. They just didn’t have the time to entertain ideas that were completely detached from the reality of how The Thing works commercially.
I quickly learned that business viability constraints make for a great user research framework — one that leads to insights that are applicable, actionable and sitting in that sweet spot of overlap between the business and the customer needs.
It takes two to make a thing go right
“But why do I always have to make the effort to leave my comfortable cave in Customer Land and venture into the Plains of Business?,” I hear you asking.
Easy — because as a researcher, you’re better positioned to understand other people’s point of view and empathise with their worries.
Eliminating silos is all our responsibility but product people are especially well-suited to drive this. Put your research skills to work by understanding how the business works and come back with insights that will steer it to success.
You’ll see that people become very receptive to seeing things from your customer-everything perspective when you first make the effort of understanding their business concerns.
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All of this is not to say that customer value can never drive fundamental business change or that customer value should always make itself fit in the box of business value.
But to truly drive change you need to first understand the ins and outs of the problem you’re trying to solve. The same way we first and foremost learn as much as possible about our customers’ problems and needs before ideating solutions for them.
Otherwise, Customer Land and The Plains of Business will always live in parallel universes instead of being part of the same magical landscape. In other words, you’ll keep banging your head against a wall that doesn’t need to be there.
Thanks for reading! If you liked this article, applause is very welcome. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the great question of the relationship between business and customer value in the comments! :)
