7 Tips for Collaborating with Other Researchers

How three researchers from different teams became a dynamic, mutually supportive power trio.

100% co-authored by Babette, Rachel, and Brenda

I (Brenda here) recently had a conversation with a colleague who’s taking an improv class in her free time. She reminded me of one of the key principles of this performance technique: a scene is only successful when each person sharing the scene is successful.

I realized that the same is true of our collaborative work as Facebook researchers. I experienced this truth personally when Rachel, Babette, and I were recently brought together for an extensive cross-team project. Rachel and Babette were each embedded in a different product team, while I was tasked with keeping an eye on the overarching workflow. It wasn’t all sunshine and rainbows, but we all agreed that the key to our success was our open, dynamic partnership.

After taking a little time to reflect on why our partnership worked so well, we came up with a few tips you might want to try during your next collaborative effort.

1. Make space for everyone. When two animals first meet, they often take a questioning stance: Are you here to eat my dinner, or to play? Not that the three of us are animals, but we did share a moment of instinctual concern: If you’re here to do xyz, what exactly am I here to do? Airing this concern at the start enabled us to quickly figure out that there was space for everyone.

This isn’t always easy, but odds are there are enough questions to answer, or ways to approach the work, to keep everyone busy. Do your best to operate from a space of bounty, not scarcity.

2. Before defining roles, be clear and vulnerable about your personal goals. When we started planning our research efforts for the half, we all shared our goals openly and honestly:

• Rachel wanted to stretch herself by working across different teams, orgs, and time zones. She also wanted to pick up some new tricks from other researchers.
• Babette wanted to work with new methodologies and expand her impact beyond her product team.
• I wanted to demonstrate leadership — and I was only on this project for one quarter, so it needed to happen early on. I also wanted to leverage new methodologies, with a focus on rigor.

These truths became our unofficial “collaboration agreement.” They made it easy for us to invest in one another’s personal successes — and to define roles across the research projects.

Be honest from the get-go what you need out of the project, and why. Then work together to find ways for everyone to get what they need out of the partnership (or most of what they need).

3. Build bridges early on. Because we’re close to our respective product teams, different perspectives or approaches can sometimes seem strange or wrong. When those feelings arose, we actively focused our conversations on the reasons we were working together, finding ground in team questions and user problems.

This bridge-building approach permeated our work. Sometimes it meant that Rachel was testing Babette’s team’s designs (along with her own team’s work) and vice versa. These connections became critical when tensions arose among product teams. Instead of becoming territorial, we came together — across three time zones — to openly discuss the problems. We gave one another room to be upset, listened, and then actively worked to find a compromise.

Take the time to find common ground early on. Build the bridges that connect your worlds. When those bridges start to sway, hold on tighter and commit to working it out together.

4. Play to everyone’s strengths. This one seems obvious, but it’s worth reminding ourselves about, since we don’t often collaborate with other researchers. Because we’re used to steering our own ships, we can have a hard time ceding control to a colleague — even when when a collaborator spits out, say, an amazing rationale for conducting research in a particular market.

Luckily, it didn’t take long to realize that the three of us loved different elements of the research, which enabled us to start leaning on one another’s strengths.

Take turns at the wheel, figure out who likes doing what, and you’ll be amazed at how much more you’ll get out of the research and how quickly things can come together.

5. Make room for new ideas. One of the most enriching parts of collaborating with other researchers is watching them do what you do, but in a different way. We learned so much from one another by paying attention, staying open, and asking questions along the way.

This openness can have some very practical benefits. We expected that working closely together would naturally result in some redundancy and wasted time, but we found that it actually made us more efficient. For example, we completed the thorough testing and revision of a guide in just 3 days — something that would have taken much longer with a more individual approach.

By maintaining a curious, judgement-free approach to collaboration, you can speed things up and make yourself much more likely to walk away with new ideas, new approaches, and a dash of inspiration.

6. Share the icing. If evaluative research is cake, foundational research is the icing. The prospect of generating the kind of insights that can shift thinking is alluring. But in bigger collaborative projects, you’re likely going to have to do some less glamorous work, too.

We did our best to couple foundational efforts with evaluative research so that all three of us had a nice mix of projects. Every time we slated in foundational research, we paired it with something evaluative. This helped steep all of us in the cross-team product designs while keeping us equally invested in bigger-picture thinking to help inform the direction for the next half.

Don’t be greedy and scrape off all the icing. It’s more delicious with a little cake, anyway.

7. Come up for air. We are all ICs — individual contributors. It’s natural during a collaborative project to question whether you’re having enough individual impact to meet your goals. With three IC researchers all working on the same project, you might expect some tension around this point. That didn’t happen with us — thanks to tip #2 — but it may have influenced the amount of work we took on and the pressure we felt when changes needed to be made.

For example, when roadmapping dates changed, we needed to cancel two research trips. No matter what we did, we couldn’t see a way to keep that research, prepare for inbound, participate in roadmapping, and keep our sanity. It was a tough call, made tougher by the concern that cancelling this research would mean we might not hit our individual impact goals for the half. Luckily, our managers and directors were able to see what we couldn’t. They provided some needed perspective and support, and emphasized shining through collaboration over individual impact.

When concerns about your individual impact arise, discuss them with your manager and work together to find ways to highlight what you did to move projects forward within that collaborative space.

I know we’re not the first ones to collaborate together on research. Tell us: what other methods and approaches have worked well for you? Please share so all of us can benefit from your positive experiences.

Authors: Rachel LeRoy, UX Researcher at Facebook; Babette Schilte, UX Researcher at Facebook; Brenda Weitzer, UX Researcher at Facebook

Illustrator: Drew Bardana