Backlogs: The secret to managing user research

Jas Nijhar is a user researcher who supports multiple teams and squads, which can be tricky in an agile environment.

They decided to make use of his product ownership experience of maintaining and prioritising product backlogs to help create a research question backlog.

Here’s what happened.

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Having a well-groomed research question backlog is a great way to help you plan, prioritise and manage your time effectively as a user researcher.

It can give you and your stakeholders confidence that you’re working on the right things and can help manage expectations. It can also help you to identify related work and creates transparency across all the teams you support.

At BT, I’ve created a research backlog template with a step-by-step guide for any researcher to pick up and use to create their own research backlog.

(Fig.1. A research backlog template)

What’s the process of creating a backlog?

Step by step process:

1. Run a workshop with your team/s to first capture and prioritise research questions.
2. Using the template, move the identified research questions into the “Backlog” section. New research questions can also be added as they emerge.
3. Starting with the high priority questions, try to fill out as many of the columns as possible:

• Squad/Tribe/Area — which squad/tribe/area would this work fall under?
• Key stakeholders — who are your key stakeholders for this project?
• Research question — what’s the question you’re trying to answer?
• Type — is this evaluative or discovery research? Keeping track of this over time, will help you to ensure there’s a good balance.
• What’s involved? — what are the UX research methods could you use to answer the question?
• Research plan — add a link to your research plan here
• UX Researcher Effort — how much effort will it be for you to complete this research? 1 = Low Effort (e.g. days), 2 = Medium Effort (e.g. weeks), 3 = High Effort (e.g. months). The more you estimate effort, the better you will get at predicting how much work you can take on, deliver and by when. This will then help you to better manage expectations.
• Importance — how important is it to answer this research question? Think about the business and customer impact — you may want to rely on the POs to guide you on this. L= Low importance, M = Medium importance, H = High importance.
• When is it needed by? — Is there a deadline for this work?
• Who/what else could we rely on? — It may make more sense for another team to pick up this research question e.g. Analytics, Customer Insights.
• How much do we know currently? — What previous research has been done? Are there any other insights from other teams/sources which we could use to help answer this question.

4. Based on the importance and your estimations of effort, pull the research questions that you feel confident that you can deliver in the next month into the “Monthly Backlog”. You may decide a quarterly or weekly backlog is more appropriate for your needs.

5. Set up a regular meeting (Every two weeks, or monthly) with you key stakeholders (Product, Design etc.) to review the Monthly Backlog and confirm what the high priority projects are.

6. Once you pick up a research question, move it into the “In Progress” section

7. As you progress with the project, you can update the “Status” column accordingly to keep stakeholders informed e.g. Planning, Testing, Analysis, Reporting

8. Once the project has completed, move it into the “Completed” section. You may wish to add a link to your final report in the “Status” column.

Benefits beyond tracking work and sharing findings

Creating a research question backlog for my own area of responsibility was one of the first things I did when I joined BT last year.

Going through this process helped me to build strong relationships with my key stakeholders and gain a much better understanding of their needs. We now have a very transparent process, where expectations can be managed easily.

In the past, I’ve felt quite stressed and a bit disoriented when lots of different stakeholders have approached for me for research requests. Having a well-groomed research backlog and prioritisation process helps me to manage my workload a lot better and also feel better.

How to you manage your research? Let us know in the comments below.