5 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Becoming a UXR Manager

Senior ICs often ask me: should I get into management? and it’s encouraged me to reflect on the things I wish I’d known before I started managing UX Research. The TL;DR is: you should, if you’re aware that normal management challenges become harder when managing a function like UXR that’s generally misunderstood and often underutilized. Here are 5 questions I’d ask anyone thinking of getting into research management before making the jump:

1. What’s your opinion on democratization? The question of democratization has become especially important the last few years as UXR grapples with its place within company hierarchies amid layoffs. Whether you support democratization or not (I don’t), as a research leader you’ll need to have an informed opinion and use that opinion to shape your team and the role of UXR within your company. Having a stance on this proactively can help you plan ahead as you prepare to step into a management role.
2. How comfortable are you standing alone? This is the biggest blind spot I had before becoming a research manager. Many UX researchers in tech (the domain I’m most familiar with) know the experience of being the only researcher on the team or at the company, and all the attendant challenges: explaining your discipline, advocating for research, managing stakeholder expectations, etc. However, these difficulties are magnified when combined with the general isolation of leadership. Research leaders often lack peers at their level to commiserate and strategize with because the function is so generally understaffed. Partnering with leaders in other functions is necessary, but can be tricky when UXR is not well understood even by disciplines it’s usually paired with (like design). Research leaders are also often managed by non-researchers who have little to no research training, which can present its own challenges when they seek support. A natural consequence of being 1 of 1 in an organization is that you represent not only your team but your overall function. This means more work. Therefore, the relationships you build, the decisions you make, and the outcomes your team drives take on outsize importance. If you want to get into research management, you’ll need to be comfortable with a certain level of isolation, and more actively work on building a peer and leadership support network (more on this from me later!).
3. How good are your marketing skills? Managers are generally expected to advocate for their teams. However, as a UXR manager, you’ll not only be expected to advocate for your team but to (continually) explain why your function should exist, how it works, its value to the business, and why it should be staffed appropriately. These decisions may be scrutinized to a greater degree than other functions already deemed essential (ex: data science). You’ll need to employ marketing and communication strategies to regularly promote the visibility of your team’s work and tailor these for various leadership levels.
4. What’s your tolerance for debate? As a research IC I encountered stakeholders who didn’t understand research, who pushed back with the tired Henry Ford argument, and who generally regarded UXR with either disinterest or suspicion. This attitude extends to leadership with higher stakes and increased frequency. To step into research management, you’ll need to be prepared to defend the value and integrity of the discipline laterally and upwards — whether that’s pushing back on unreasonable deadlines + timelines, justifying methodology, or explaining why researchers should write their own project briefs — over and over again. You’ll need a really, really thick skin, and a strong support network.
5. How broad is your research skillset? As a research leader you’ll manage or build out a team with a broad set of skills across quantitative and qualitative methods. While it’s definitely possible (and recommended) to hire and coach people with skills you don’t have, you should aim to develop fluency with of a broad variety of methods to appropriately shape the methodological approach and rigor of your team. Without this, you risk becoming a research leader that can’t spot when your team is doing bad work. It’s possible that people won’t notice when research quality slips, but that can be a difficult slide to come back from.

It’s not all doom and gloom! If you’re able to navigate these challenges you can stand up a research function that’s impactful, productive, and well-respected. I’m fortunate to have this at Reddit. This is also by no means an exhaustive list; these questions might look different if you work for a large company or one with a very robust research organization. However, I think these are a good starting point for researchers as they think about making the management leap.

I’ve read a lot of resources on research (and quite a few on management) but very few on research management specifically, so I’ll be publishing a series on some of the lessons I’ve learned. Stay tuned for more!