Beyond Research: Practicing Product Leadership as a UX Researcher

Shifting from a service-oriented to product leadership mindset.

Illustration generated with Meta AI

UX research practitioners invest years in developing their research skills, but often struggle to drive change and influence product teams. The difference isn’t skill — it’s mindset. Adopting a leadership mindset, rather than a service-oriented one will enable you to actively shape what gets built and gain significant influence.

From my experience working in user led product development, this can manifest as…

Shaping the product experience

• Share cumulative knowledge: Researchers shape what the team builds and prioritizes for users, leveraging multiple inputs: their own and other’s research, behavioral data, or market research. They lean on their intuition from past experiences, amassed knowledge, heuristics and best practices.
• Bridge insights beyond your scope or org lines. Strong research leaders bridge their cross-functional team to other relevant initiatives and ensure their team understands how their product fits into a users’ holistic journey, rather than a narrow feature.
• Lead initiatives. Researchers can drive key initiatives beyond the research track itself — They can shape their team’s vision, strategy, priorities and more.
• Demonstrate expertise and contextual awareness. Product leadership involves contextualizing information about your domain area, company or org goals, priorities, metrics, history, competitors, and related products and teams with your research insights.
• Be opinionated but open. Researchers who embody product leadership are not afraid to share their perspective or propose product directions. They also look for and consider alternative perspectives and help reconcile differences in service of a shared vision or goal.
• Show; don’t just tell. Instead of relying on research reports, use multi-media formats like videos clips, visuals, or prototype to drive home your key points, provide nuance, or make the findings memorable.

Changing how we operate

• Balancing execution and team health. Effective researchers care not only about the team’s productivity (execution, hitting milestones and metrics) but also their health. They step in to provide guidance, unblock progress, or support collaboration when challenges arise.
• Expand the definition of “team”. Product leadership broadens the idea of “team” beyond the research function or direct reports. Researchers build strong relationships across all cross-functional partners, working with anyone essential to reaching a shared goal.
• Prioritize what’s needed, not just what’s requested. Researchers reconcile wants and needs of the team, prioritizing work that aligns with their team’s strategic initiatives. This can mean saying yes to some requests, but also spotting unanswered questions and new opportunities, and then building buy-in for these investments.

Putting product leadership into practice

Use these examples for inspiration, not as an exhaustive list. While adopting a product leadership mindset, ensure you continue to perform the ‘minimum bar’ activities. The ‘leadership bar’ activities are intended to illustrate this mindset shift.

Prioritizing research

• ✅ Minimum bar: Prioritize and cover research requested by the team.
• ⭐ Leadership bar: In addition, initiate research the team hasn’t realized it needs yet, and build buy-in for why it matters.

Recommendations

• ✅ Minimum bar: Include recommendations in research reports.
• ⭐ Leadership bar: Ensure recommendations are actionable, i.e., the team knows what to do next, follow through beyond the deliverable, and create alignment via 1:1s, brainstorming sessions, or design sprints.

Product reviews

• ✅ Minimum bar: Share research insights in documentation or meetings.
• ⭐ Leadership bar: Use research and other data to insert new ideas, and be an active voice in reviews and product documents.

Timelines

• ✅ Minimum bar: Hit research deadlines.
• ⭐ Leadership bar: Track and intersect your research timelines with cross-functional partners’ timelines and when there are dependencies (e.g., prototype for usability sessions) hold partners accountable.

Answering “What do we know?”

• ✅ Minimum bar: Share all research that’s been done.
• ⭐ Leadership bar: Synthesize across research, data, history, and strategy; reconcile contradictions; propose a point of view and next steps.

Domain and product expertise

• ✅ Minimum bar: Knows the product that’s being researched.
• ⭐ Leadership bar: Possess a deep understanding of their products and how they integrate into the broader user journey, vision, and strategy.

Product leadership is a mindset, not a title, and one that any researcher, whether an individual contributor or manager can embody.

It means moving beyond simply conducting studies to actively shaping what gets built.

I’ve shared a few ways I’ve seen this show up in practice; now, I’d love to hear from you… How have you or other researchers you’ve observed step into product leadership?

This article began as an internal piece I wrote in 2022; I’ve adapted it here for a broader audience. Many thanks to Elissa Darnell for her thoughtful feedback on both versions.