Snapshots from the research journey
By: Liz Donovan
Tags: UX Research, UX, Product Design

Engage stakeholders to accelerate learning and boost impact

Photo by @thematthoward on Unsplash

Research can be done with your head down at your desk, but it’s much more persuasive and impactful when you bring others along on the journey.

Early in my career, I made the mistake of assuming research is about arriving at a destination. I thought that after receiving an assignment, researchers should disappear, do some magic, and surface when they have their brilliant report to deliver.

Aware of this misconception, my manager at the time asked me to send out a monthly newsletter of findings from ongoing research projects. I was surprised at the positive response. My colleagues reached out to me with questions, enthusiastic comments, and offers of new information.

It was a lightbulb moment where I realized the importance of raising visibility of the work so that it could be strengthened by others’ insights.

One recent project at Duo Security put this learning into practice. We accelerated knowledge discovery by proactively identifying, engaging, and listening to research stakeholders. It’s a rewarding process, and can be adopted for any project.

Engage internal experts and create project champions

Our project was customer facing so we conducted interactive interviews with colleagues on the front lines with our customers. This consisted of collaboratively building a customer experience journey map to explore steps, thoughts, and feelings that occurred throughout the process.

This informed our work with the collective knowledge they carried. Equally important was that they became aware of our project goal, which meant they were happy to raise awareness of the project across the organization. They also connected us with potential customers that could validate our data and assumptions.

For your project:

Who is on the front lines with your customers everyday?

Who has a stake in your research and can become a champion that connects you with others?

Accelerate learning by raising visibility of the work

Designers and researchers are great communicators, and we need to leverage that skill to communicate with our own organization to raise awareness of our work. For our project, we put our energy into two channels.

At the start of our project, we mapped our stakeholders. We defined a group of stakeholders that would be interested in our work and offer perspectives from different vantage points across the organization. We set up biweekly meetings where they:

Learned about our findings

Clued us into other helpful information that we would not be aware of otherwise

Let us know the questions that were on their minds.

These meetings acted as a feedback loop, and through them we sharpened our research questions and learned of additional resources to investigate.

For your project:

Map the stakeholders connected to your project. Who are project drivers? Who are contributors? Who needs to be kept informed of decisions? These stakeholders’ roles determine how you communicate and engage them.

After determining stakeholder roles, clearly inform them of expectations for their participation in the research effort to help them plan their involvement.

Our second tactic was to broaden our reach through a company-wide newsletter that gave highlights of what we were finding, and linked back to reports and artifacts so that our colleagues could take a deeper dive if they wished.

For your project:

Does your company have a mechanism for organization-wide communications? Can you use an existing communication mechanism, or do you need your own?

Listen for opportunities

Through our communication efforts, we created a feedback loop. People were aware of our activities and let us know of additional opportunities to learn.

We joined calls with our customer success team to learn the questions customers were asking about our product. We also attended and learned from a retrospective workshop related to our research.

From that workshop, we gained clear examples of the current challenges Sales, Customer Success, Engineering, and Product Management faced, and how best to mitigate those challenges.

We no longer had to seek out learning opportunities — they were coming to us.

For your project:

Connect with people across your organization and ask them to keep an eye out for opportunities for you to shadow customer interactions or retrospectives.

Enjoy the Journey

As a result of our work to raise visibility, we gained access to valuable knowledge and learning opportunities. New initiatives launched because of our discoveries, and the work was quoted in company-wide messages to staff. Though it requires additional effort, these steps can be adopted for any project and increase impact.

It’s romantic to imagine you’ll quickly strike out on your own and bring back all the answers, much like a backpacker trekking to the top of the mountain. The reality is that if you’re part of an established organization, you need to invite others along to engage, contribute, and strengthen the work.