A Bright Future for UX Research

I recently had the pleasure of recording an episode of Lenny’s Podcast, released last week. It’s available on Spotify, Youtube, Apple, and directly via Lenny’s website.

If you don’t know the podcast, here are two facts:

1. Lenny’s Podcast and its associated newsletter are the creation of Lenny Rachitsky, a former start-up founder and PM at Airbnb. He’s also one of the most outstanding humans I’ve ever had as a colleague.
2. His podcast focuses on product, product managers/CEOs/founders, product strategy, and growth. He’s got a pretty huge audience in that space.

Lenny invited me on (thanks to Louise Beryl for suggesting it!) for a conversation about the article I wrote over the summer — The UX Research Reckoning is Here — but our conversation covered a lot of ground.

Lenny’s Podcast is full of wisdom, mostly from interesting and talented people.

I won’t repeat our conversation in detail — I hope you’ll listen! But I will repeat the main point:

I think UX researchers have long operated inside of a broken system, made the most of it through their talent, but often been set up to fail. Fixing the system is all about killing the service model and creating constant engagement in the product process. Doing that will unlock the power of researchers and insights in our next evolution.

A Broken System

Here’s how I think we got here:

The last 15 years were a golden age. As UX matured and design teams grew in tech, many researchers were hired on. Great people jumped in to companies big and small, but mostly those companies did not invest in setting up product processes that could make the most of research and researchers. That left many talented folks doing their best but (relatively speaking) set up to fail.

As long as the money was cheap, that was fine, but when the shit hit the fan over the last few years, it put many researchers inside a vicious cycle:

1. Companies hired researchers but never invested in product processes to maximize the product and business value of insights.
2. That set many researchers up as an external service function, in reactive mode, engaged not at all or only at the end. Those researchers were less able to build influential relationships, represent for their work directly, and participate in decisions.
3. As a result, researchers ended up working on things that mattered less, further away from the centers of power.
4. When times got hard, execs went looking for people having less impact, and concluded researchers fit the bill. What they saw wasn’t because of something inherent to research, though, but because of the broken system companies set up for them.
5. As a result, many great researchers lost their jobs.

It’s tough to be stuck in a broken system, doing your best, but not set up for success.

Obviously this is the worst-case scenario. There is a lot of variation within the tech industry and across the many types of research disciplines in and out of Silicon Valley.

And there are some notable exceptions to this pattern. Individual PMs and designers sometimes made great partners, but mostly weren’t structurally supported or incentivized to be. I can think of quite a few talented researchers whose power overcame a broken system, and who drove amazing business impact with their insights.

But when I think of examples of companies and research orgs that broke the mold here, in basically every case it was because someone fixed the broken system. Somehow a researcher or a research leader was able to position the org differently. They were able to do away with the service model and integrate researchers more deeply. They institutionalized the engaged model and focused researchers on business critical problems. They demonstrated success with business impact, got execs on board, and the rest was history.

Now we just need to do that for the rest of the industry.

Fixing the System

There are definitely things that researchers can and should do to bring about this needed change. For example:

1. Become more multi-method. I believe the mostly qualitative model of UX Research, Insights, whatever is a relic of the last 15 years. Moving forward, researchers need to be proficient across multiple types of quant and qual research, dabble in data science, and integrate AI smartly.
2. Learn the language of business. Too many researchers aren’t willing or able to speak the language of business. In the future, every researcher will need to understand financial vernacular, the details of the funnel, the competitive landscape, goals, OKRs, metrics, and so on.
3. Build strong relationships. When researchers turn their formidable powers inward to better understand their colleagues, they’ll be more influential, in a better position to put insights to good use. Part of that transformation will require researchers to get out of their lane, and start thinking of themselves as business/product people first.

(I talked about these last two things in my keynote at PUSH UX a few months back, and you can watch the video here.)

The solution is a constant conversation with research, and a product process that makes it the norm, not the exception.

But all this won’t matter as much until we fix the broken system. The structural solution is simple, but not easy:

1. Create product processes that integrate research/insights fully from start to finish.
2. Incentivize product people (and engineers, and designers, and marketers, and data scientists!) to develop strong relationships with researchers and be great partners to them.

The thing is, researchers need help. We need designers, PMs, engineers to see the broken system and the opportunity to fix it. That’s why my conversation with Lenny focused there. And I’m encouraged by the response so far — I’ve heard from a lot of product folks who heard the critque and see the power of a different model.

If you’re an individual researcher wondering where to start, the answer is to start small. Focus on just 1 or 2 relationships, get close, solve problems, and create a constant conversation. Once you’ve done that in a narrower area, the impact is the evidence you need for a broader change.

The Future is Bright

I’m more convinced than ever that the future is really bright for UX Research as a field. I think a productive shift is already underway, and it’s going to set research up for success.

But there are also quite a few people out there still stuck on a model that I think is dying. I get it, it’s tough to evolve. Especially when your skillset and livelihood may come from doing or coaching researchers in a particular system.

And the landscape isn’t changing all at once. There are plenty of companies and research disciplines that are humming along just great. For now. But anyone who thinks change isn’t coming to their corner of the world isn’t paying attention. Even if your corner of the research world seems stable, there’s a huge opportunity for more impact.

Evolution is normal and natural, and the great thing is that researchers are natural learners. We can evolve. There are many great folks out there writing and teaching about how researchers can do more with their talent. But I think until we solve for the system, those folks will be doing it with a giant huge weight tied around their necks. Making progress, having impact, but not nearly as much as they might be if we set them up to fly.

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