Fusing separate research teams’ roadmaps to enhance collaboration, efficiencies, and insight quality — and get more done with insights

Published in

Integrating Research

6 min readMar 21, 2022

Integrating research > Expanding reach and connectivity > B. Turning up research communications > Article B3

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Research teams planning studies on complementary topics in isolation, which is illustrated as three unconnected circles, representing teams, each working on similar topics, represented as colored shapes. An arrow points toward: Research teams sharing study roadmaps and collaborating to grow impact together. The illustration shows similar topics, represented as shapes with the same color, grouped together into work streams.

Like two ships passing in the night… or was it ten? Deep in siloed teams, researchers of different stripes often work on similar and complementary questions — without any visibility or collaboration. Maybe their stakeholders will clue them in, or maybe they’ll never know.

To align on future work, researchers can lead recurring, structured discussions around their pooled roadmaps. They can identify any duplication as well as opportunities to work together, driving more predictable streams of impactful insights for product people to use.

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When great researchers take on projects, they check with their colleagues about existing and upcoming work on particular topics of interest. But in many growing organizations, this alignment effort is ad hoc rather than a consistent operation — and it often leaves out staff in important insight-generating disciplines, who may remain unknown or perceived as ‘distant’ from research work.

Alignment on upcoming research questions is typically high-touch. While completed research work products may turn up in intranet searches or repositories, various teams’ plans for future studies often have lower internal visibility, especially over longer time horizons. Even in cases where research teams have created online intake queues, such lists may prove to be more signal than noise for potential collaborators.

Speech bubbles: Q: “I hear you are working on the same topic as me, is that right?” A: “We’re thinking about it differently, and we’ll be working on it next month.” Q: “Could you tell me what’s different and help figure out how we can do this as a multi-method over time?” A: “I’d love too, but I’m knee deep in analysis for a study that’s due ASAP.”

While running repository programs, I’ve been asked repeatedly by product leaders about upcoming research and analyses, not just what’s already done and available. It feels like I’m offering a full course meal of genuinely useful insights to apply to their own product planning — which they happily consume, but then look at me expecting a dessert of new studies.

Getting a consistent, recurring handle on research roadmaps across teams is not easy. There’s usually a lot of unpredictable factors involved. However, those times when I did pull off cross-team research roadmapping workshops, I always wished that I had made it one of my first priorities in a new-to-me organizational landscape. It’s a great way to assess current collaborations, learn about how different disciplines are conducting research, and get a window into how different insight-seeking stakeholders are connecting with insight-generating partners.

When researchers and their teams operate like independent units, planning their work largely in isolation, they are leaving their common stakeholders on the hook for more sensemaking across different streams of studies. Unaligned researchers may be talking about their concurrent learnings in different ways — instead of delivering shared, evidence-rich insights that could more directly fuel improvements toward customers’ real needs.

When researchers take the time to connect on future work across a broader community of insight generators in their organization, they’re not just weaving together threads to create improved, multi-method outputs. Alignment on future work can also promote longer-term shifts: from building collective identity and purpose, to elevating the quality and impact of an emergent, cross-team research community. When otherwise disparate researchers make an effort to conceptualize and execute their work in common ways, they are laying cultural foundations for advancing their organization’s learning processes over the long haul.

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Improving your insight operations

Get more done with your research community’s insights by:

Determining who to include in aligning of research roadmaps
Find out which sources of insights your organizations’ product people are actually using to make their decisions, regardless of discipline (e.g. Research Science, Analytics, UX research, Market research, Customer Success, other People Who Do Research (PWDR), etc.). Connect with these insight generators about the opportunity to align upcoming streams of work. Find out who they want to be in greater collaboration with. In larger organizations, filter by similar customers, analogous domains, or other areas of overlap.
Reaching out for any initial roadmap inputs from selected research teams
Connect with each insight-generating team to see if they can share any information about their upcoming studies. Work to understand reasons behind any gatekeeping of research plans, with the understanding that it’s often because teams don’t have clear visibility into what they’ll be working on past the current quarter.
Meeting to concisely share forward-looking research topics and questions
Gather research teams in a shared (often virtual) space, with the goal of capturing and discussing each teams’ roadmap. Work to keep documentation minimal, in discrete units that can be categorized later across contributing teams’ plans. For each discrete unit, capture the intended and desired stakeholder audience. Avoid team-specific terminology, seeking plain language where possible and ironing out terms across contributors.
Synthesizing and communicating out a hybrid research roadmap
Bring together a subset of researchers to find affinities in the collected topics and questions. Pay special attention to opportunities for growing the audience of important clusters of upcoming research (B1). Tag clusters with suggested collaborations between researchers. Flag any clusters that may be driving redundant data collection across teams. Find ways to share out the resulting cross-team roadmap in a way that primes suggested collaborations and piques stakeholders’ interest in participating (B2). Secure leadership endorsement to follow through on cross-team efforts, which product people will then receive in the form of richer insights with clearer implications.
Finding an owner to continue facilitating these connections
Turn the success of your initial exercise into recurring operations. Identify someone who’s passionate about bringing together different researchers and disciplines, and convince them to own an intentional program that delivers ongoing alignment around future research work. This owner can schedule working sessions on a regular cadence in order to continuously build from previous cross-team roadmaps, updating research systems with the latest hybrid plans, celebrating collaborative wins, and cultivating new norms.
Your idea here…

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On the path from insight to product impact

Connecting the dots across research teams’ roadmaps is part of research communities gathering sufficient evidence for crucial topics. It’s also related to usefully articulating insights as well as increasing awareness of possible planning targets.

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Let’s connect

If you’ve read this far, please don’t be a stranger. I’m curious to hear about your challenges and successes connecting the dots across research teams’ roadmaps in your organization. Thank you!

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Selected references

“I don’t think this has been said clearly before, that what ResearchOps is, is the lever to the promise of a tightly drawn and fully articulated revolution — a conductor for the orchestra of mixed-method research.” Brigette Metzler
https://medium.com/@brigette.metzler/researchops-the-risks-and-the-opportunities-of-a-life-lived-at-scale-5447ade0a38a
“Research roadmaps also give the leader a lens through which to reflect on the practice overall and ask questions such as, do we have the right mix between foundational and evaluative methods, do we need to build out new practice areas (i.e., Advisory Councils), and can the current team scale to the demand or do we need to make a case for growing the team or augmenting via outside vendors (and are those vendors vetted and approved)? Robin Beers
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/research-leaders-what-we-up-robin-beers/?trackingId=hFw6DeZrShulXixzClBX9Q%3D%3D
“Common ResearchOps activities and efforts within knowledge management include: Coordinating with other teams conducting research (e.g., marketing or business intelligence) in order to create a comprehensive source of insights.” Kate Williamson Kaplan
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/research-ops-101/
“I like the idea of building in a system where we have enough operations support that we can start to plan for future research, and the product team can see what research is going to happen.” Nate Mahoney, Sofia Quintero https://medium.com/enjoyhq/researchops-spotlight-nate-mahoney-user-experience-and-design-researcher-at-turo-a3a563e096ff