Building a User Research Practice from Scratch at Rubrik
The Challenge:
I joined Rubrik as the first User Researcher in 2020. Although user-centered design had always been at the core of how Rubrik builds products, clear best practices, processes, and tools for user research had not been established yet. Product Managers and Product Designers relied on Customer Advisory Boards, Sales Teams, Competitive Intelligence Teams, Support Teams, and other customer-facing teams for feedback. However, as the team and scope of the product grew, the team faced some very real challenges:
- Recruiting target personas
- Limited sample size to make confident and unbiased decisions
- Long and manual recruitment process, making it hard to gather timely user feedback
- Lack of a centralized searchable insights repository
My charter was to bring deeper customer insights into every phase of the product development process, ensuring all stakeholders had the necessary data to build a customer-centric product, while also laying the foundations for a scalable user research practice. In the past two years, I have learned many lessons about what it takes to build and lead a user research practice from scratch and would like to share my journey with the hope of helping those who are building a research practice, especially in the Enterprise UX space.
Evaluating current state:
During my first few weeks at Rubrik, I spent time listening to leaders and partners across various teams, including PM, Design, Engineering, Sales, Support, and Marketing. The goal was to understand Rubrik’s industry, users, strategic vision, and what mattered most to the product team. Also, since I was surely not the first person building a research practice from scratch, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel I looked to books and blogs (like this one 😉) to learn about how UXR leaders had approached this challenge at similar organizations.
What I kept landing on was that ‘it depends’. There is no prescribed way of going about this. It depends on the maturity of the organization, it depends on how big the team is, who your team is and the pace of product development. It definitely depends on executive buy-in, scope and resources. So the next step was to map Rubrik’s UXR Maturity and come up with a structured plan to achieve maximum impact quickly.
A resource that got me started with this process and something I still keep going back to is the Nasdaq Model for UX Research maturity. It serves as an indicator of where we are in our journey towards making user research the primary tool for discovering new insights, validating existing hypotheses, and innovating into new and existing markets. In retrospect, the approach I took during the early stage (first six months) was very different from what I had to focus on in the growth stage (next 6–24 months).
The Approach: Early Stage (First 6 months)
I knew that Rubrik valued user research and that Product Managers and Designers were eager to learn best practices and conduct their own research projects if necessary. I also knew that the team was in its ‘Early’ stage of UXR maturity where we were primarily conducting ad-hoc usability studies, relying on user/advisory groups and conducting research limited to a few product areas. So for the first 6 months my approach was focused on:
- Defining a User Research Framework
During early meetings with PMs and Designers I got many questions around what is user research, how it will help the business and what methods should be used. To help with this, I took the UCD product development process that the Rubrik team followed and was already very familiar with and mapped the user research purpose, focus and methods on it so it was easier to anchor the conversation. Depending on where the team was in the product development cycle, we talked about the type of research needed (discovery, exploration or validation) and how it can be accomplished. Clearly defining and consistently using the same terms throughout all of my documentation and conversations about research ensured that everyone was on the same page.
2. Creating a User Research Workflow:
There are endless variations to how researchers assemble their project workflows — not to mention the myriad tools we use to execute on each step. However, the overall structure of a user research workflow is generally homogenous and consists of five phases: alignment, planning, execution, analyzing, and storing research within a repository. Visualizing this workflow and mapping concrete actions and tools for the team set us up with an efficient and repeatable process for every phase of the development cycle. When the research process is well-defined, it can help facilitate critical thinking and enhance user-centered approaches.
3. Navigating the challenges of Enterprise user research
Enterprise or B2B user research comes with its unique challenges.
- The biggest one is recruitment. Access to participants is limited as gaining access to decision-makers who control purchasing decisions (CIOs, CISOs) or end-users (IT Admins) can be difficult. These are extremely busy people.
- The complexity of Enterprise SaaS products with interdependent workflows and integrations makes it challenging to design effective research studies that accurately represent the user experience.
- Confidentiality and security concerns that arise due to the sensitivity of data and information collected, and participants may be hesitant to share information about their workflows or processes. This was especially true for Rubrik’s users who deal with mission critical organizational data susceptible to cyber attacks.
- The relationship an Enterprise user has with a product is quite different from the relationship a consumer has with a product. An Enterprise user is using the software all day, every day. Some users are really vocal because they hate something in the product or because they are fans. One has to be really careful about the bias of talking to a small group of vocal voices.
- Other challenges include effective prioritization of projects, balancing user needs with business goals, and dealing with limited time and resources.
As the first researcher, it was important to build credibility early by tackling these challenges effectively. In my first few weeks I chose a few “low-hanging fruits” and focused on building out tools and processes that would set a strong foundation for future studies.
4. Building partnerships while doing the research:
To be able to effectively execute on research projects for B2B products it is uber important to build relationships with internal teams like Sales Engineering, Customer Support, Product Marketing and the Data teams that can help you learn more about the product, business goals and identify the right users to talk to. But when starting out, a lot of these folks had no idea what user research does or why it mattered. So it was important to approach each conversation with a “what’s in it for them” mindset. It was my job to make it easy for them to help me by clearly and briefly communicating “why are we seeking user feedback”, “who do we need to speak with”, “how will the session be conducted” and “what are the next steps”. In the early days, it was also important to follow up with these teams, even if they were not directly impacted by the product decisions, to share what we learned from the users and how that impacted product decisions. This kept them invested in the process.
Another focus area was to bring the team along the research process by sharing a research calendar with the team and inviting folks to observe sessions. Also, instead of spending time trying to introduce new tools I chose to rely on existing tools and team processes for participant management (Google Sheets), scheduling (Calendly), compensation (marketing team had a rewards system in place), insight management (Google Drive). These approaches made it easier to demonstrate to the team what research is, how it works, and why it’s valuable.
5. Enabling User Research Democratization
While there has been extensive debate in the UXR community regarding the value of research democratization and its impact on research outcomes, within Rubrik, a B2B enterprise, it was evident that relying solely on the user research team for customer feedback wasn’t feasible for our future. Thus, I adopted a balanced approach toward user research democratization. This involved establishing clear guidelines, providing toolkits, constructing support systems, and offering consultative services when necessary, all while nurturing a collaborative culture. By encouraging diverse perspectives within a structured framework, we ensured that research expertise remained robust and undiluted. Furthermore, investing in training and mentorship programs empowered the product team to effectively contribute to research efforts, maintaining a balance between democratization and research quality.
6. Knowledge Management:
While recognizing the eventual need for a more robust research documentation tool, my initial focus was on establishing a standardized, repeatable, and scalable documentation framework using our existing tools (Google Drive & Confluence). I proceeded to visualize the dispersed insights into persona slides, journey maps, and JBTD maps, enhancing ease of sharing and consumption.
Engaging with users yields valuable insights, but without proper documentation in digestible formats, these insights dissipate swiftly. As the volume of insights grew, we encountered limitations using Drive as a knowledge repository. It became evident that we required a tool capable of generating, searching, transferring, organizing, preserving, and disseminating the knowledge gleaned by product teams, especially amidst organizational changes. Following a three-month pilot program evaluating various knowledge management tools, we finally settled on Dovetail.
The Approach: Growth Stage (Next 6–24 months)
Throughout the initial six months, my primary focus remained on establishing foundational elements and demonstrating the tangible value of user research. Consequently, momentum surged, leading to an influx of evaluative or tactical research requests. While this trend was expected, my aim was to ensure teams utilized user insights not only to optimize specific feature development or confirm the usability of our products but also to shape product strategy and prioritize features. I actively encouraged a reevaluation of our presumed knowledge and allocated space for discovery research. Collaborating with product leadership, I steered research prioritization efforts to align with strategic objectives, simultaneously increasing the visibility of research-driven impacts.
As the company’s leadership increasingly recognized the value of user research, we successfully expanded both the team and its processes. Despite the economic climate between 2021–2022, a period marked by organizations downsizing UXR teams, we managed to recruit and expand the research team to meet the growing demand for both tactical and strategic research. Our product team has come to regard UXRs as indispensable strategic partners.
What’s next…
Looking forward, my vision for the research team is to cultivate an empathetic, impactful, and innovation-driven culture of user enquiry and become the driving force behind Rubrik’s user-centric approach, where every decision and product development cycle is rooted in a deep understanding of our users’ needs and aspirations. We will do this by focusing on:
- Strategic Alignment: Ensuring our research efforts are aligned with Rubrik’s broader business goals, making user insights invaluable in decision-making processes.
- Investment in Methodologies, Process & Tools: Constantly evolving and adopting new methodologies & processes to extract deeper, more meaningful insights from our research.
- Team Development: Nurturing and empowering researchers to grow not just in their expertise but also in their ability to communicate and advocate for user-centric solutions.
