Beyond research impact: grow your career, extend collaboration and deepen your skills

Hi friends 🫶

Recently I have been more actively involved in mentoring and coaching UX researchers and designers in their work, career growth and stakeholder management. In these sessions, one of the most common questions I get is ‘How can I showcase who I am as a researcher / designer?”. In my first few attempts, I tried to find, highlight and prioritise every piece of advice — little or huge. But I found one framework that helped me understand the type of researcher I am and where I want to develop. The key to showcasing who you are is the impact tracker.

Sooo… What is an impact tracker and why do I need it?

We can safely say we all strive for good research to be heard. Meaning, with our research we want to influence decisions to contribute valuable knowledge through diverse insights. So the best way to track those decisions is by using impact trackers. There are many different forms of such, but the underlying framework is twofold: the type of impact and the scale of impact. I am not going too deep into this topic, since I think there is already amazing materials out there, such as hereand here. 📓

Using a google doc or sheet helped me track my impact from multiple (bigger and smaller) projects, by identifying the project, the timeline, the types and scales of impact and also by bringing in supporting evidence (I either took e-mail or slack screenshots or asked colleagues for brief feedback).

Ok, got it. So, how can impact help me further?

Now we get to the juicy part. 🔥

How can you use impact beyond tracking? In my experience, I used it for career development (1), by identifying strengths and gaps, expanding my sphere of collaborations (2), and deepening my skills (3) — partial to who you are as a researcher. But first, let’s see how we start interpreting the impact. Can it get more nerdy than this? Yaas daaaaaarlin’ (read this in a RuPaul voice).

Now the first step is not to fall into a trap. 🪤 One useful piece of advice I got during my career is not to look at impact as a checkbox — like “Yes- I’ve delivered report X; it was used for decision Y and it was referenced by person Z.” While that’s great for you to note it down, think of impact as progress. So when you start interpreting your impact, ask yourself questions around frequency and consistency, which can help you stretch into that mindset:

• Have I done it frequently & how frequently am I doing it?
• How consistent am I in delivering it?

1. Use impact as an indicator for your career development

Looking at your impact holistically can support you in identifying strengths and gaps — which are crucial to advancing and growing your career.

To identify those you can ask yourself:

• Have I constantly been influencing a certain type of impact at scale?
• Have others noticed I have been influencing certain decisions for some time?
• How confident am I that my next work would do the same or better?
• What stops me from influencing something? How can I start influencing decisions on a bigger scale?
• How will this work contribute to my overall career growth?

For example, when looking at my impact framework, I saw that I was influencing product and strategic decisions within a team, often touching upon a recurring expertise/domain. Together with my manager, we saw a gap in often not diversifying my impact to a bigger scale — thus, in order to help me diversify decisions, I decided to deepen the knowledge based on my previous research of a specific domain in order to reach teams across the company, who could be investigating similar domains. This helped me extend my impact and grow into a domain expert across the company.

2. Impact highlights collaboration beyond product teams

These frameworks can also help you establish current collaboration with stakeholders and partners. You can look at the type of scale of impact you have been doing and break down the stakeholders influenced along the way or people you’ve collaborated closely with in order to deliver the research.

Some questions that can help with that are:

• Who have I been collaborating the most/least in the past months?
• Who should I start collaborating with more?
• How can I extend my work to diverse types of stakeholders (disciplines) across the company?
• How can my work influence conversations with senior leadership?
• How did <x> work help me reach out to new stakeholders/partners?

As an example, I have been looking at my overall impact for the past months and saw that it has reached the usual suspects — PMs, Designers, Engineers, Product leadership, etc. I wanted to start developing relationships across the company in order to start diversifying my stakeholders. While talking to my manager, we identified opportunities to start collaborating more with marketing, branding and business in order to bring product perspectives into their creative directions. In this way, interpreting my impact tracker helped me branch out my usual impact scale and expand collaboration outside of the product team.

3. Impact as factor for deepening your skills

This is one of my personal favourites, since it can really teach you things about yourself and the future path you wish to take in your career. Maybe you are trying to figure out how to get the next promotion, or maybe, you have been wondering if you should focus your energy on IC paths or people management? To hold truth, the framework does not hold the answer, but rather the path to get there.

So you could ask:

• What skills do I need to develop as a people manager?
• How do I start coaching/mentoring researchers within my team? How do I start mentoring / coaching people outside my research team?
• How can I master a certain methodology and/or become a domain-expert?
• What methods have I heavily used in the past periods? What methods bring me energy? How can I expand on my methods toolkit?

I have been doing quite some quantitative research and I realised my energy was more up than usual. I deployed quite some surveys across teams, however I realised that using a certain type of method can only help me so much. I identified that in order to increase the scale of my quant research impact, I needed to expand in quantitative methodologies which helped me set goals for the next quarter and grow as a quantitative UX researcher. On the same hand, I realised mentoring people within my team helped me gain more confidence in advising about certain steps in their career or stakeholder management, but I realised I wanted to explore a more formal way of mentoring people whose context/work I do not know, which helped me reach out to broader researchers outside my organisation.

To end, I want to make sure that I highlight this one more time — impact is not everything, but it is important — especially if you are in the field of UX research. Personally, tracking impact is so cool, especially if you use some of the above-mentioned frameworks. Using them by adding frequency and consistency can have many benefits that go ‘beyond tracking’ such as growth, collaboration and career direction. Moreover, learning how to elevate your insights and recommendations can make one research piece influence product decisions, strategy and roadmaps, increase visibility in a topic, educate stakeholders about a specific gap or increase knowledge in new users behaviours, any many many more. You can even use it in your CV to start highlighting what your research influenced.

While typing the last words of this looooooooooong mental note, I realised the sun is out in Amsterdam (and for those who live here you know how rare this is) so for now I am going to share this note, pack my computer in the backpack, go out and enjoy some nice rays of sun. ☀️☀️☀️