User research at an early-stage startup. Part 1
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:
Note: This article is split into two parts. Part two is here. If you’d like to read it unabridged click here
Part 1: From job hunting to the first 90 days at Kiip
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.
Read part two of this article or read the whole unabridged version here
