User Research at an early-stage startup
We hired our first user researcher a month after founding Kiip in 2021. Corina was that hire, even preceding a product designer.
Corina and I often discuss the role of research, why she was that first critical hire, and how atypical it is to hire a researcher at this stage. We thought it would be interesting to ask each other questions on the subject and turn that into a Medium article. So we jumped on Zoom and hit record. It was a great conversation. That interview was transcribed through dovetail and edited for clarity. Below are the highlights:
Phil: So you come from an agency background as a strategist, you’d done this intensive program in user research, you were fairly new to the field, and now it’s time to find a job. How did you go about that? What were the things that you were looking for?
Corina: I knew I was ready to leave my agency role because I had been working with various different clients, but it never really felt like we got to focus and work on a project in depth and see that work through to completion. Work always has the potential to get botched and changed and adapted once you hand it over to a client. So I was looking to move into an in-house role at an organization where I could have more ownership over the output. When I made the decision to move into user research, I really wanted to find an organization that was focused on doing social good. I had a background working at a small nonprofit as a homeless youth outreach counselor many moons ago. So I wanted to find a way to thread that experience into a role in research, and Kiip felt like the perfect opportunity to do that.
Corina: What were you looking for in a researcher as the first hire on your team?
Phil: Having worked with a variety of researchers, there’s sort of the researchers that have a very hard line as to where their role stops, which is as a fact delivery mechanism. And I think what I was looking for was somebody who could take it a step further and say, “I found these three things, and here are the results of those findings, but also, like, here are the implications of those findings as well. You should do these three things, and here’s some thought starters.” So I wanted someone who definitely had a bit of initiative and the ability to think for themselves. Someone who could take and ask and run with it and transform it into something that is more than I could have imagined when I originally asked it.
Often, product designers do get asked to do research, but we were at the phase where we were pulling a rabbit out of a hat. I think it takes an incredible amount of mental energy to do that. And, I think, to ask a product designer to pull a rabbit out of a hat, then go figure out what that means and ask all those questions that research does, it just felt like two jobs. So yeah, you know, sort of splitting the workload up. We’re working with vulnerable populations, and finding somebody who would give it the time, the patience, energy, and care it needed to ask those questions in the right way felt sort of imperative.
Phil: How did you justify the risk of taking a job at an extremely young company?
Corina: I didn’t see it as a risk at the time because of the history of Two Bulls [the agency that Kiip evolved from]. Even though it wasn’t Kiip in its current form, the company had been around for so many years, and the team had history. So it wasn’t as though the team was coming together for the first time and figuring out how to work together. I also felt like the growth plan was realistic. Nobody was making promises of wild exponential growth or an expanding team. I think there was just a groundedness and a good sense of reality around how we would grow, when we would grow, and what the plan for that was. And I had a chance to meet with pretty much every member of the team, and through getting to know everybody, I felt like I understood what the experience would be like working there, so it didn’t feel like I was going in with a whole lot of mystery. So I think that alleviated some sense of risk.
Phil: Did you have any apprehensions about the role?
Corina: I think my biggest apprehension as a researcher was am I equipped to work with this population? You know, what makes me qualified to go out and have conversations with people experiencing homelessness? And while that was part of what drew me to the role, because I wanted to work with populations of people that might be a little bit harder to access and get information from and work with collaboratively, I think I also sort of, you know, maybe had doubts around my own skillset and just wanted to make sure I was leveling up when I could, and reaching out to the right people who had experience working with those populations, and just doing my own due diligence.
Corina: What is the role of a researcher at an early stage startup?
Phil: You could solely do research as a researcher in a startup, but I think that you’re also carrying this torch of user centricity. That, ultimately, is equally as important as the work. Proving your value, helping people understand what you do, and aligning the company direction to the needs of your users. All of those things are these soft skills that orbit what a researcher does. And you know, I’ll tell you from experience being in agency/studio world, either research never makes it into the budget, or it’s the first thing that gets cut from the budget. You have to be really cognizant of that when you’re a researcher looking at an early stage startup, because if you don’t have someone above you who is justifying and defending your role, I don’t know how long that role is going to last. You really have to make it work quickly.
So I think that the object of, or the goal of, an early stage startup researcher is to bring a lot of value very quickly. You should go find those really interesting answers and help folks understand what that information means in the context of the trajectory of a company that could potentially be going in five different directions in any given week, and help steer the ship.
So, if you’re hiring, you should go look for researchers who can tie information to action and have interest in driving action. That would be a great researcher to get.
Corina: Yeah, I think about it from the perspective of mitigating risk, and that should be one of an early stage researcher’s primary goals — to be aware of, and have your feelers out for, risk. They should be trying to ask questions to uncover hidden risks associated with any decision the business is making that impacts its users.
Phil: Yeah. And you know, I’ve always viewed researchers as sort of the standard bearer of truthiness, as well, and the defender of that. And I love talking to researchers because I’m generally someone who kind of gets carried away with his own big ambitions and ideas. It’s not hard for me to come up with a whole wild scenario, and it’s nice to have a researcher in the room who can sort of bring me back down to earth. This is very helpful to do before your teams go too far off the deep end in terms of what they want to do or what they want to build. Good to validate your assumptions. I think there’s that adage that one hour of research saves 10 hours of engineering time. Given we’re young with limited runway, it's really important what we do build and also what we don’t.
Corina: Do you have any advice for someone integrating a researcher into an experience or design team?
Phil: I would think about it from a user journey or service design perspective. And I would think about how, you know, there’s different types of research, and sometimes researchers get pigeonholed into, “oh I’m gonna go do discovery,” or “I’m gonna go do user testing,” or “I only look at this part of the product.” It’s very easy to get siloed in that way. But I think you need to think about the process that your product team has, how you can integrate a researcher at every single one of those touchpoints, and teach your researcher how to do that, too. Not just research, but just working in a design and product team to solve hard problems. They may not necessarily know how to do that. So it’s sort of a give and take.
I love when you come with big undiscovered areas that we may not have seen. But it’s also really great when that area can become an idea that a researcher proposes that can make it all the way through to a feature release. It’s even better when that happens, and we’re getting ready to release, and you call us out on some assumption we’ve made, like “this doesn’t quite make sense.” It’s also great when you validate it after it’s been released and help us improve on it as well. So it’s not just a moment in time, it’s a journey. You’re weaving a thread that starts with findings but needs to be a part of problem definition/reframing, solutioning, delivery, and refinement.
Phil: You’re in the role, it’s been three months, you’ve never really worked at a startup in this capacity before. What was your expectation versus reality at that point?
Corina: I think my expectation of my role was, like, okay, I’m gonna be doing the research, and that’s my job. I did not expect that so quickly, I would actually be part of a design team, and that meant giving input on designs, sketching stuff out, and being more hands on in the product than I would have anticipated. I didn’t know that I would be in daily standups or working directly with developers. But I think all of that exposure has given me a certain level of insight into the product that researchers at larger organizations might not always get.
They might see a slice of the product or feature they’re working on, but not sort of the big picture of how the company’s running. So I think my expectation was that my job title is researcher, that’s what I’m gonna be doing. But in reality, I’m so much more involved in the entire company than I thought I would be.
And I have the freedom and space, thanks to you, to come up with an idea that might not be traditionally within the purview of research — like a sales strategy or a marketing campaign — but there is the runway to just kind of go and do it and explore and test it. And I think that is all connected to the research function, because you’re learning things through that process. You’re getting feedback, and it might not be traditional UX research, but it ties together under an umbrella of better understanding our users and what they will respond to.
Corina: What are the biggest ways you think research has shaped the product so far?
Phil: I mean, I think the number one thing would be that we thought that it was about document management and storage for individuals. We were really on that vital document management kick about a year ago. And I think that you helped us very quickly realize that the real pain point was much more with the organizations that we were working with. So we shifted from building software for individuals to building software for organizations to help individuals. And I think you did a good job of bringing that to all of us and helping us understand what that looks like.
The other one that comes to mind is the mental model or the conceptual model of the product. We were having the prioritization problem of do we add additional ways for people to add and share files to each other? or should we transform what we’re calling a room, the shared collaborative space, into more than just a listing of files?
So you were pushing for chat at that point, and we didn’t really have a ton of people on the platform, and we didn’t know that a lot of people were gonna be chatting. We sort of talked about that and you said, “Well, no, it’s not about highest priority. We have 20 features that we need to get out the door today, and they’re all equally important in some ways, but if we get chat in here, people will understand the product.” That was such a cool moment, and only something that you could tell us. And it really ended up being the framework that we have built and also stuck to. A year later, we’re still pretty damn close to where we were, in terms of how we’ve built our most critical feature, and we just keep adding onto that. So I think it proved foundational in how we built out the product and how people understand what it does.
Phil: What makes you close your laptop and say “That was a good day?”
Corina: Well, I mean I love the tip you always give, which is to accomplish three* things a day. It helps you feel like you’ve actually accomplished something at the end of the day. I feel the most excited at the end of the day when I’ve actually talked to people who are using the product. I always feel like things make more sense whenever I’ve done a research session, or had a call with a client, or interacted with somebody experiencing Kiip. It helps it feel like, okay, we’re not just working away in our little hobbit hole. This actually has larger implications, and it always makes me feel good when people get excited about using it and you see their eyes light up and you know, the idea gets validated (or not!).
*Phil: It’s actually four things, but you do you!
Q: What about you? Same question.
Phil: I just get really jazzed when we all kind of have a really hard problem and we just kind of come together and figure it out, you know? My favorite question to ask anyone is, “Can you please just draw this?” I think just bringing sort of that, like, visual thinking into a company, and building that culture, and just getting everybody to draw a diagram so that we all have alignment, it just gets me so happy. If you have a meeting where everybody talks, you just walk away with nothing, and 30 minutes later you’ve forgotten what you said. You know? I take great pride in helping everybody realize that they need to create artifacts that are representations of the truth of where we were at that time. I think that’s really awesome.
Corina: I’m wondering how you think of user research as a function, not just a role. How can user research help a company shape its culture?
Phil: I think it builds a culture of user centricity. I don’t know when people typically hire their first researcher, but I feel like it’s way down the line from where we are. At that point, who has made the decisions up until that point? Who is the loudest voice in the room? Who has the respect of the team? And even if you were to hire a principal or director of research, their first six months to a year is going to be spent on redoing a lot of that culture of “well, because I said so, because I’m the business owner.” I think that planting that seed now, proving that value, like I was talking about before, and building that is hugely valuable for the long-term culture implications. You hear it here all the time: “Well, we should test that, or we should go ask Corina.”
So it sort of builds that culture of deference, where people kind of recognize that they’re jumping to assumptions, and that maybe the easiest thing to do is just to table this conversation until we have more facts. I think that’s the culture that I’m really looking to do, to build, do we have the facts, yes or no? You know? And if we don’t have the facts, do we know enough to make a decision, and are we kind of comfortable with that level of risk? Or do we just launch it, knowing it’s not perfect? At least it’ll be enough to get a reaction from other people, and then we can kind of come back and fix it the way we want it.
All of this thinking is only really achievable because we have you. At any moment in this process, we could go get those facts. So we’re much more free to decide what level of assumption we want to make, and balance that with how quickly we want to get something out that we perceive to have value. Everything we’ve released has had some risk, but the major pieces have all been validated by research. That’s a lot of sleep that I don’t have to lose, and it’s incredibly reassuring to know that everything we’re doing is highly requested by our customers and users.
The speed at which we ship a feature and the level of value it provides are the two biggest levers we’re trying to optimize as an early stage startup. All of this kind of comes back to the concept of what I would consider to be a learning organization. One that actually is actively looking at the things it’s doing and learning from them. And I think that research is probably the most critical part of that culture.
Corina: And I would add that I think it can help build a culture of curiosity and inclusion from the beginning. It gets everybody asking questions and just thinking in a different way. We started an “I wonder” Slack channel early on to create a space where anybody can drop in a question. Questions come from engineers, the growth team, our CEO — they come from everybody at every level of the company, and everybody gets exposure to those questions. And I think it just builds the muscle of it being okay to just ask any question to start a dialogue with other people.
Phil: So you’re talking about culture a bit, but let me ask it directly. What do you think you’ve added to the Kiip culture?
Corina: Like I was saying, I think I’ve added to our culture of curiosity and asking questions. Another ritual we’ve started that helps build user research into our company culture are biweekly Three Things presentations, where I round up three interesting things I’ve read or heard that week, and we discuss them as a group and how they might impact the company. It’s a great way to deliver research in a bite size form and get people at the higher level of the company talking about research and bringing up questions. Once a quarter or so I’ll present highlights from those meetings in a Three Things Brown Bag to bring the rest of the company.
And it’s just another space like “I Wonder,” where people can stretch out of their comfort zones a little bit, and think about questions and topics that they might not normally be thinking about in their everyday jobs. And the perspectives and ideas that come out of those meetings blow me away.
Corina: We’ve been talking about the critical role of research to the entire company. On that topic, how does research help design keep its seat at the leadership table?
Phil: I think that done correctly, research helps us prove the business case for design. It’s the ability to be in a conversation and add meaningful contributions, but also to show the outputs and results of the decisions that you make. And to help align the needs of the customer with the needs of the business, which is ultimately what I think user experience actually is.
The chat feature I mentioned before — our CEO wasn’t initially aligned. I had to make a good case for it, and I’m grateful that even though he didn’t personally agree, he chose to trust in our decision based on our expertise and the facts we had. Tracing that thought, you did the research, which translated into a huge shift in how the product works, which means that now we have to change how we market and sell this product, how we charge for it, what we do next, and design is involved in all of this.
I’ve spent a fair amount of time in roles that did not have a research component, and it just always sort of feels like you’re grasping at straws a little bit, in terms of trying to find facts to justify your actions. And at its worst, I think that argument devolves into one of aesthetics and cosmetics. There’s no easier way to disqualify yourself, or to be removed from your seat at the table, when you’re sort of stamping your feet over those kinds of things. So I think research helps design stay very grounded in facts and reality and, hopefully, business outcomes as well.
Corina: What are your hopes for Kiip in the next year?
Phil: We deliver something that brings people joy, that makes their lives better, and ultimately has an impact on the communities that we live in.
Phil: Same question!
Corina: I hope we’re helping more people get access to the benefits they deserve!
Coming soon: An inside look at how we conduct research at Kiip
