Get the most out of stakeholder collaboration — and maximize your research impact

Anna Poznyakov

Published in

Salesforce Designer

9 min readFeb 24, 2021

Anna Poznyakov, Lead Researcher, Salesforce Research & Insights

Richa Prajapati, Senior Researcher, Salesforce Research & Insights

The Challenge: Research at the Speed of Business

“Research doesn’t have value unless it results in decisions and actions.”
– Lang and Howell (2017)

As researchers at Salesforce, we understand the value our work brings to the organization. We can even describe it concisely and memorably: supporting the company’s business, product, and design divisions, tackling the right problem at the right time and ensuring that stakeholders consider and act on our findings.

In short, to add value, research teams need to be closely aligned with stakeholders. That sounds straightforward enough — but the speed of technology and business can make keeping up a challenge. The popular Agile framework was not designed with research in mind, leaving little to no space for collaboration with researchers during sprint work. Generative research meant to form and inform product strategy can be outpaced by rapid design iterations. And while churning out evaluative studies to keep up with sprint timelines is possible, the tactical impact could be far greater. These factors affect the perception of value that research brings to the table — and how much a company is willing to invest in it. And Salesforce is no exception.

A Framework for Research Impact

Faced with reduced resources, ever-tighter timelines, and increasingly siloed projects, the Salesforce Research & Insights team decided to investigate alternatives to the status quo. We developed a five-step framework that allows us to engage with various stakeholders, multiply our research efforts, and increase our impact. The resulting methodology has helped us establish our team as a trusted advisor on pivotal business, product, and design decisions. We believe it can help other research groups collaborate more effectively with stakeholders and scale efforts for greater impact.

Five Steps to More Effective Research Support

Have a clear understanding of your stakeholder ecosystem.
Help stakeholders understand where and how research brings the most value.
Change how you analyze and prioritize research requests.
Arm stakeholders with the research tools that they can use confidently and accurately.
Keep findings and recommendations “alive” throughout the product development lifecycle.

For a sneak peek at how we met these goals, compare our before-and-after research plans. The “today” plan may look daunting, but it reflects a well-balanced, tiered approach that generates sustainable weekly output to stakeholders while making our work more exciting and fulfilling.

Step 1: Understand Your Stakeholder Ecosystem

When researchers hear “stakeholders,” we usually think of executive sponsors or the designers, product managers, and others we work with day in and day out. But we realized that increasing impact meant changing how we thought about our stakeholder ecosystem — and expanding our stakeholder footprint. And to do that, we had to move from a proximity model to an impact model, including everyone with a significant impact on our work, from our strongest allies to our most stringent detractors.

In this new model, a stakeholder can be:

Your manager, senior executive, or teammate
Colleagues from functions including product, design, engineering, sales, marketing, customer success, and more
People outside the company — such as government, press, industry analysts, and customers

To stay focused, we next used a 2-by-2 framework to prioritize stakeholders based on influence on and interest in our work. Once we identified those with substantial impact and interest, we could focus on their needs and concerns. As a bonus, the exercise reminded us why it’s never a good idea to focus on the loudest person in the meeting.

Finally, we need to be mindful of those we need to keep informed and content, if only so that they don’t block us down the road.

Step 2: Get Your Stakeholders On Board

OK, we’ve identified our relevant stakeholders. So how well do they understand the value that research brings to the table?

As researchers, we know that our work can inform all product development stages, including discovery, design, and evaluation. Still, most stakeholders view research as “finding usability issues during product evaluation.” For example, we once pitched the idea of conducting contextual inquiries to uncover use cases for a new product. To this, the VP of product replied, “You are very diligent researchers, but I don’t see how researchers can discover current or future use cases. That’s what my product managers do!“

To overcome this perception and increase our impact across the product cycle, we need to build a shared understanding of what research is, where it brings value, and how it aligns with each stakeholder’s vision and goals. We do this with regular events such as educational workshops, office hours, and project kickoffs. Figure 3 shows how we partner and collaborate with everyday stakeholders, including Product, UX, and Engineering, across product development stages — and how we map our deliverables to inform theirs.

Step 3: Analyze and Prioritize Research Requests

Next, we conduct one-on-one interviews with influential stakeholders to understand and capture their research needs. What’s keeping them up at night? What are their priorities for the next quarter? What can we do to support them? And where in their timeline can they most use our insights?

The result: a research request list like the one shown in Figure 4.

Next, we prioritize our list of research needs. The specifics of your company, product, or career trajectory will, of course, affect each research team’s priorities. Here are the factors we use most:

Importance: How important or critical is this research for the company, product, and stakeholder? And how important is this stakeholder? (Remember the “manage closely” vs. “keep informed” list?) Will this research be helpful to other product or business units? Has anyone from other parts of the business asked for a similar study?
Urgency: How soon is the insight needed to make an impact? If we don’t think we can meet a timeline, we follow up with the stakeholder. Stakeholders usually have some flexibility — most would rather have partial insight than none at all.
Complexity: How difficult is this research? How much rigor or domain expertise does it require? (Even when a design or solution is complicated, the study might not be.) If your answers here run to “very” and “lots,” Research should lead. If not, a designer, PM, or vendor may be able to cover it.
Capacity: Do we have enough resources to execute this research? If not, we can politely decline or ask the stakeholders for resource support (see Scaling research efforts” below for more on this).
Personal brand: Is this study related to your current stream of work or to an area you are interested in or would like to learn more about? If so, prioritize the request.
Ownership: Who is best suited to do this research? Product strategy, go-to-market, market, or competitive research teams could be the right ones to conduct the study.

Step 4: Prioritize and Delegate

One of the best ways to build relationships with stakeholders is to help them answer their product, business, and customer-related questions. But doing so doesn’t always require our direct involvement. Depending on the type of question and available resources, we use several tools and techniques to help stakeholders find the answers they need, including unmoderated tools, research training, and outsourcing.

While unmoderated tools have their limitations, they are an excellent fit for research questions that fall in the pyramid’s top section in Figure 5. Use templates provided by many of these tools, or create your own based on your domain expertise.

In the absence of dedicated research support, many designers and PMs must research their own product areas. However, they might not know how to solicit feedback in an objective, rigorous, and unbiased way. To help partners collect objective and meaningful feedback, we offer regular training in research methodology (including interviews, concept evaluations, and site visits), templates for answers to common questions, and office hours to address ad hoc questions.

Research questions into the top half of the pyramid can be handled by designers and those lower down by project managers.

Outsourcing research to a vendor: Easier said than done. But outsourcing is sometimes possible with stakeholders who value research and see you as a trusted partner. Instead of declining research requests, we often check to see if stakeholders have the budget to outsource.

It’s best to outsource research when:

Answers are needed urgently, but limited time and bandwidth keep you from handling the research in-house.
Third-party objectivity is desired (for example, to manage internal politics).
The product area requires ongoing repetitive studies (e.g., usability benchmarking).
You have a niche participant segment that is difficult to recruit for.

Figure 7 shows the allocation of incoming research requests from Figure 4; we focus on strategic studies, with other work divided between unmoderated tools and stakeholders. Figure 8 maps the same work to a timeline, combining multiple research efforts in flight with deliverables almost every week to ensure continual value.

Step 5: Get the Most Bang for Your Research Buck

Good job — researchers, stakeholders, and vendors have worked together to generate a body of research. Now we need to ensure that stakeholders act on the findings and recommendations. But many such outcomes are often postponed by prioritization or resource constraints.

When this happens, don’t give up — instead, keep track of when bandwidth opens up. A Research findings and recommendations tracker (RF&RT) makes it easy to track research findings and revisit them with stakeholders when circumstances change.

The RF&RT (Figure 9) provides a consolidated view of all issues uncovered by research (in a single study or series of studies), their severity, and proposed recommendations.

After every research project, we schedule a working session with essential stakeholders to review any issues and questions. Starting with the most severe issues, for each one we:

Make sure we agree on the severity level.
Assess the recommendation and discuss all possible solutions
Indicate recommendation status: in process, resolved, out of scope, needs further research, or postponed.
Assign the issue to the responsible party (e.g., PM, Engineering, or Data Science).

Using collaboration tools and regular standups, we follow up on assigned items until all outstanding issues have clear resolutions. Some items are deemed out of scope; others are postponed until an upcoming release. We then go back to RF&RT and review deferred/out-of-scope items for possible inclusion in each release planning. Ultimately, this simple document has helped us achieve consensus, prioritize issues, trace their resolution, generate ideas, and collaboratively shape the product roadmap.

Changing Process — and Mindset

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Over the last few years, our simple five-step framework has made it possible to grow our research efforts’ impact and scale. It’s also helped us shift organizational mindset, establishing Research as a trusted and desired partner in key business, product, and design decisions.