Product research for everyone

Product managers and product designers do a lot. We plan, we sketch, we facilitate, we explain, we decide (that’s a big one), we lead (often without explicit authority), we envision, we guide, we inform, we write, we shape.

But in order to do any of that well, product teams need to systematically endeavor to understand. That is: we need to research.

Research generates insight; that insight leads to decisions; those decisions result in product; that product produces outcomes. Like a gardener taking time to learn about weather, soil, sunlight, and seed, good product practitioners research the conditions that will affect their product before ever putting spade to earth or finger to mouse — and they keep doing it as more information becomes available.

Research is a skill, of course. Effective researchers are curious, determined pros who draw upon a body of techniques and practices, and build upon previous work. As such, research skill can be developed — and it can be hired. When I’m recruiting or networking with product people, I love to discover their quirky personal research interests. Ask the next designer or product manager you meet to explain an issue they’re weirdly passionate about — bluegrass music, state flags, the Belgian royal family — and you’ll learn quickly about their research skills.

This month’s Pollinator features recommended reading on research and discovery for product from several of my Solution Design Group (SDG) colleagues, Josie Adkins, Andrew Krzysiak, and Camille Westfall. One of the great delights of working at SDG is encountering so many skilled practitioners collaborating together and sharing their knowledge. All of the fine teammates whose thoughts I’ve included here work every day to help our customers understand their markets and design and deliver great products. I thank them for their contributions. Gardening is best when done together. So is product.

On to the Garden,

Around the Garden

Identifying latent needs through “deep hanging out”; avoiding vanity metrics — Recommended by Josie Adkins

Check it out:

• Solving the Mystery of Latent Customer Needs, The Clever PM

• Vanity Metrics: Add Context to Add Meaning, Aurora Harley, Nielsen Norman Group

An important distinction between immature and mature product teams is the ability to identify latent needs, or do "deep hanging out" with users. This comes with a developed research discipline and evolves beyond taking feedback from your users at face value. The Clever PM blog describes it like this: “The single most powerful tool that Product Managers have to make products that amaze and delight their users is to figure out what problems their customers have that they don’t even realize are causing them pain.” That’s a great reminder to product researchers.

I've also found that the best analysts and teams I've worked with avoid vanity metrics and identify quantitative data that can support or inspire user research. Aurora Haley of Nielsen Norman Group (NNg) explains that vanity metrics can become useful if we add deeper context, perhaps by changing the metric to a rate or ratio — which is a part that can be played by a skilled UX researcher.

NNg’s writing obviously leans towards UX concerns, but Haley’s article explains that data is an area where Delivery and UX Research teams can work closely together to develop comprehensive research analysis.

—Josie Adkins, SDG Consultant specializing in User Experience and Product Design.

Developing a continuous research practice — Recommended by Andrew Krzysiak

Check it out:

• Continuous user research in 11.6 seconds, Tomer Sharon, Cofounder & CXO at anywell, on Medium.

• Implementing continuous user research at Medium, Laura Carroll, for Medium.design.

• Building better products: Introducing continuous user research in a fast-paced scale-up, Claire Jin, Bootcamp.

The practice of continuous research gives UX researchers autonomy to direct their efforts free of the traditional project "find the answer to X" mindset.

Tomer Sharon’s 2018 article outlined the case for shifting to continuous research. Sharon described the limitations of a popular “dedicated studies” model and advised that research teams learn from continuous delivery practices at places like Amazon.

A 2021 follow-up article by Laura Carroll describes how the practice was implemented at Medium itself. She explained that Medium had used continuous research methods that Sharon described, and credited quantitative and qualitative results to the practice.

These articles were inspirational to UX research and product leaders like me, but admittedly lacked detail when it came to the exact mechanics of implementing the practice.

Fast forward to fall 2023. Claire Jin published another article on the topic, where she describes how her company, Brevo, implemented continuous research practices. She even provided a checklist that researchers could adapt, and referred to foundational writing by Teresa Torres and Erika Hall. In many ways, Jin’s brief article provided necessary specifics and structure. She emphasized the need for a centralized insights hub, a tribe approach, weekly sessions by each tribe, and the connection to iterative product cycles.

As I’ve experienced personally, and as we've seen within SDG, UX researchers have the ability to provide immense insight to product and sales leaders.

—Andrew Krzysiak, SDG Consultant specializing in User Experience, Innovation, and Product Strategy.

A place for UX Research in an AI world — Recommended by Camille Westfall

Check it out:

• AI meets Research: Experts weigh in on the future of UX, Lorelei Bowman, Maze.

There’s a couple of reasons I like Lorelei Bowman’s article from late last year. First, it reminds us that AI right now is simply sophisticated Machine Learning, which has been around since the very first computers in the 1940s. Because of this, AI tools are only as good as their training data (which you can hear more about in a recent SDG podcast).

So even with AI tools available, UXers and user researchers remain important creative and strategic roles in the product development process. As Bowman states, “it is about understanding people and solving their problems.” For now at least, that is something AI models cannot yet do.

When you experiment with popular generative AI tools, you can see that AI offers user researchers efficiencies in implementing research plans, analyzing data, and even implementing things like recommended accessibility features. What used to be extremely resource-intensive can be done much more quickly. This offers streamlining to researchers who are a one-man-band, and, I hope, will encourage more products to invest in research, as the barrier to entry is a bit lower. We researchers can use AI to enhance, not replace.

As other product-heads have noted, product-market fit or “time-to-right” is changing. Bowman explains this by quoting Jo Widawski, Maze’s CEO.

I’ll also add that for all the chatter about AI, the research process itself is unavoidable. The questions we ask, and who we ask them to, are going to determine the quality of the solutions we create. As researchers, it’s our job to choose the questions and the audience. Even if the questions are prompts and the audience is an AI model, we have to remember that the quality of the answers will only be as good as what the model has been trained on. The creativity, empathy, and strategic thinking of user researchers thus is more critical than ever, as a user’s experiences are quickly becoming the central marker of a product’s success.

—Camille Westfall, SDG Consultant specializing in UX Design, User Research, and UI Design.

Outside the Box

HIGHBROW is a learning platform with a very simple delivery model: email. Register for a course, and a new “lesson” shows up in your inbox each morning. Topics in Highbrow’s vast catalog include art, technology, psychology, culture, and science. Lessons usually only take five minutes or so to complete, and the courses are done in a few weeks. There’s a free period when you can try it out; after that subscriptions are $10 or less. Check it out at https://gohighbrow.com.

About The Pollinator

• The Pollinator is a free publication from the Product practice at Solution Design Group (SDG). Each issue is a curated digest of noteworthy content and articles from across the internet’s vast product community.

• Solution Design Group (SDG) is an employee-owned digital product innovation and custom software development consultancy. Our team of over 200 consultants includes experienced software engineers, technical architects, user experience designers, and product and innovation strategists. We serve companies across industries to discover promising business opportunities, build high-quality technology solutions, and improve the effectiveness of digital product teams.

• The Pollinator's editor is Jason Scherschligt, SDG's Head of Product. Please direct complaints, suggestions, and especially praise to Jason at [email protected].

• Why The Pollinator? Jason often says that as he works with leaders and teams across companies and industries, he feels like a honeybee in a garden, spending time on one flower, moving to another, collecting experiences and insights, and distributing them like pollen, so an entire garden blooms. How lovely.