Moving from agency to in-house UX
Two Pinterest researchers share what they’ve learned along the way
Anh Nguyen| UX Researcher, Growth & Monetization and Priyanka Bhansali|UX Researcher, Growth & Monetization
Hi there! We’re Anh and Priyanka, two UX Researchers working on Pinterest’s Growth & Monetization team over the last 6 months. We both joined Pinterest on the same day and quickly formed a strong partnership, where we leveraged our unique skills to help support one another as we grew into our roles. Having both come from agencies, our career paths were similar, but different: Anh coming from the consulting arm of a SaaS company where she was more traditionally trained in UX Research methods while Priyanka worked at a global agency specializing in market research.
Our previous agency experience taught us skills and experiences that made us uniquely qualified to bring different perspectives to Pinterest research. As we transitioned into our new roles over the past few months, we’ve reflected on key learnings which have helped us evolve our work and anchor ourselves as key partners on our teams. We hope that you find the insights useful if you are thinking of making a similar transition.
What we’ve learned in the last six months at Pinterest is that each place you work at will change you: you’ll learn new skills, grow your network, and expand in ways that you will have never expected to. We reflected on what we wish we had known and if you’re thinking of making the change from agency to in-house research, here are the top 3 things to bear in mind:
1) Agencies are a great place to start your career as a researcher
When you’re first starting out in the field, exposure will be most important for your professional growth. Exposure to new styles, exposure to different client types, and exposure to a range of methodologies will help you build a strong foundation as both a researcher and a consultant. These skills — like tapping into learnings from previous lightweight UX work you have may done, or arming your toolkit with a diverse set of methodologies — will come back to help ground you when you transition into your first role in-house. Every client-facing project experience we had while working at an agency has come back in some way: such as sharing insights about upcoming trends in a niche vertical or using our breadth of client work to help creatively tackle a complex and convoluted research ask. For example, Anh was able to draw back on her experiences working with a client who conducted international research about emerging use cases for third party apps to inform her latest research project. Priyanka has been able to draw on her past experiences at her agency of handling global projects remote, which has helped her work with teams during COVID to make research engaging and interactive.
The diversity of experiences you collect at an agency will help you build your story and will allow you to find your unique perspective to bring to the world of UX Research. Not only will you find that you’ll come away from this work with a strong research foundation, but you’ll also master necessary soft skills, like people management or relationship-building.
“…each place you work at will change you: you’ll learn new skills, grow your network, and expand in ways that you will have never expected to.”
2) When you move in-house from an agency, you won’t have ALL the skills but…
the good news is that you won’t have to do it alone! You’ll be able to invest in relationships that will allow you to learn how to navigate this new space. Working in-house means access to smart, creative people who possess specialized knowledge about different processes and methodologies that you may not have been exposed to before. In discussing our experiences, we realized that we each learned that pulling back instincts at first and patiently taking the time to learn from different people will help you transition. We spoke to stakeholders across the organization and (again, tap into those awesome moderation skills), asked them about their experience with research and challenges they’ve faced in the past. Similarly, we tapped into the expertise of the highly diverse in-house research team. We asked for tips and tricks and leaned on them heavily to understand best practices. The research team is also a great resource to supplement your skill set — not sure how to use a UX tool? Find the in-house ‘expert’ and ask them all about it! Eventually, the breadth and depth of knowledge you collect from these 1:1 meetings will help grow your organizational knowledge, within research and outside. Your relationships with others will help you understand how product decisions are made, and in turn, your research can get more honed in with better recommendations.
3) You’ll learn to love the whole process of product development (not just research)
Our biggest learning through the transition is that impact matters. When you move to in-house research, the effectiveness of your job is not just measured by how detailed the research was, or how beautifully the story was written. The most important part is the impact it had on the organization. Were your stakeholders invested in the research? Do the insights resonate with them and can they translate your insights into actionable recommendations and next steps? Did the insights help them make better product-decisions? Remember, beyond the actual research, you also need to evangelize the work and ensure that people internalize and take action after your presentation. And this takes positive persistence! You’ll need to champion the voice of the users again and again. And again. Staying involved and curious through the product development journey will help you get better with these softer skills. And over time, you will build credibility and reputation within your team.
“When you move to in-house research, the effectiveness of your job is not just measured by how detailed the research was, or how beautifully the story was written. The most important part is the impact it had on the organization.”
In sum, our experiences working at agencies laid the groundwork for our roles now at Pinterest. Working at agencies made us strong storytellers, project managers, and great consultants. We’re adept at executing research quickly and owning unique areas of expertise (such as remote usability testing or creative storytelling) that we may not have been able to fine tune if we had started in-house. We learned how to manage clients, and applied it to have to manage stakeholders. We learned diverse research tools and methods, and applied them to execute projects creatively in-house. We learned how to analyze research findings, and applied the techniques to create compelling stories and presentations.
Which path is right for you? Which will make you a stronger researcher? It ultimately depends on what you’re looking for and what you want out of your career. If you’d like to become an agile researcher with a diverse set of tools, stories, and experiences under your belt, agency research might be a great fit. However, doing in-house research allows you to access parts of the product that you won’t get to touch working at an agency. It’ll also help you learn how to work better cross-functionally, will challenge you to expand your influence across a product team, and will require you to adjust to different ways of working. Each experience is valuable and both will ultimately make you a more nuanced and thoughtful researcher than you may have been before.
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