Bringing Research and Development in-house at John Lewis
Co-authored by Julia and Sandra - both UX Designers at John Lewis. Julia works in The Community Content product team and focuses on optimising how authentic user generated content, such as reviews, are gathered and surfaced to improve a customer’s shopping experience. Sandra works in the Product Details Page team, ensuring that customers have the information and reassurance they need to make a confident purchase decision.
We’ve both been lucky enough to take part in some of the first official Research and Development (R&D) projects at John Lewis and here’s what we’ve learnt…
Bringing Research and Development in-house at John Lewis
At John Lewis our multidisciplinary product teams work on different parts of our website and app — iterating, optimising and improving the experience for our customers. But when it came to stepping away from the day to day and considering the bigger questions, the unknown possibilities — well, we were struggling.
We didn’t want to derail product teams from their roadmaps and missions so whenever such a project arose, we would spin up a new team using an agency or contractors. The exciting work was going outside of our core design team. That’s expensive for the business and unrewarding for our Partners (all employees are Partners of the business). So, we started running Research and Development (R&D) projects.
What is a John Lewis R&D project?
Within John Lewis, R&D is used to understand complex problems and find innovative solutions to them. The projects represent the first stage of a new service or initiative — sometimes they are extremely broad, sometimes more focussed. The point of them is to explore.
Our R&D squads last anything from 4–12 weeks and generally consist of service, UX and UI design, a product manager and a UX researcher. They take a design-led and user-centred approach, leveraging the double diamond methodology to give some structure to the work.
However, this blog post isn’t really about explaining how we do R&D projects. Instead we want to share what we’ve learnt, now that we’ve run four projects over the last year or so.
What we’ve learnt
A good brief goes a long way
So far we’ve had a real assortment of briefs for our R&D projects with varying levels of detail. We’ve had some which provide the solution and simply expect an approach to execution, to others which give limitless scope and possibility for discovery and exploration — sometimes too much!
The temptation is to run headlong into an exciting new project that has a limited timescale, but we’ve learnt that to set the team up for success it’s helpful to really flesh out the ask, spend time interrogating it with your stakeholders and ensure the scope and deliverables are clear. A brief template can help to get everyone thinking about and agreeing on what’s important before the starting whistle.
Starting with a solution isn’t always a bad thing
We’ve learnt not to fear solution-led briefs. Sometimes R&D projects are the ideal environment to explore and scrutinise those big ideas your company has always been thinking about but hasn’t had time to investigate. The key to success is knowing which type of brief you’re working with. That way, expectations are clear to everyone.
Moving forward, we’re going to classify briefs into project types. For example, a Blank Slate project is one where the team is unsure about what will be delivered and how to deliver it. A Solution project is where they might know what will be delivered but aren’t sure how to go about it. We expect this will give teams an idea of where to focus, what the challenges might be and what the outcomes could look like e.g., the feasibility of a specific idea or a series of concepts.
Eddie Obeng discusses four project types:
Make time for a sprint zero
All of our R&D squads wished they’d had more time, and a pattern emerged across projects of similar activities taking place in the first couple of weeks. Our R&D projects generally put together groups of people who haven’t worked together before, so it’s helpful to get squads together ahead of kick off to discuss things like how you want to work and ceremonies you’ll put in place. This time can also be for tangible activities like mapping stakeholders and creating project timelines to set the project up for success. We’ve been calling this a sprint 0 — a time when folks moving into an R&D project can wind down their day to day product team work and begin preparing for R&D to start in earnest in Sprint 1. It’s also a good time for more fun activities, like a team bonding lunch or evening out!
Education, as well as exploration
It’s not quite enough for R&D squads just to do the work in the brief. We’ve found that a lot of time is required to ensure that we take people on the journey and really embed what user centred design means and what it can offer the organisation.
To engage stakeholders, teams have found creative ways to communicate project wins and progress. We’ve seen teams send weekly postcards with updates, sharing photos of workshops, store visits, products or sketches. Squads have run interactive Show and Tells where audiences take part in quizzes or share their first-hand experiences. Concepts have been brought to life as Top Trumps and squads have created bespoke branding to really stand out.
Keeping up momentum when the project finishes
The project has come to an end. We’ve done our final Show and Tells to stakeholders. Feedback has been constructive and encouraging. What next? At John Lewis, once an R&D project has ended, the squad members return to their teams, which has meant we’ve found it a bit challenging at times to keep momentum going without somewhere to pass the baton. It takes an enthusiastic and empowered team to make time and space to push the work through and get it onto roadmaps. When squads have done a great job of keeping stakeholders engaged and excited, this has been all the easier because there are people behind it wanting to make it happen.
Patience is a virtue
The other thing we’ve learnt is that sometimes these things just take time. John Lewis is a big organisation with many priorities, so patience is key. Things are often happening in the background to have the conversations, set up new teams and create solid plans to get R&D work into the hands of customers. And that’s when it gets really exciting. Seeing the work that started as a kernel of an idea or problem, turn into an experience that really makes a difference.
Can’t stop, won’t stop
John Lewis recognises the success of R&D so has no plans to stop! Project insights and recommendations have made their way onto a number of product roadmaps and we have some exciting work in the pipeline new teams have been spun up for. The hard work individuals have put into R&D has been rewarded with a new appreciation of this way of working, and crucially, a much deeper understanding of our customer needs and how best to improve their experience with us. We look forward to learning even more in our next projects!
