Research That Scales: Three Strategies for Small Teams to Create Lasting Impact
In early 2018, we (Jordan Berry, Cordelia Hyland, and Erik Olesund) joined Thumbtack. Together, we formed the experience research team.
Thumbtack, an online marketplace for local services, was going through a period of considerable change. The core product that we had built to match customers with local professionals for pretty much anything — home repairs, wedding photography, you name it — was evolving, which meant our metrics were changing and we were adding thousands of new users every week. A lot of the existing research no longer applied, so people turned to our team for help. Right from day one, we were swamped by research requests. It was clear that there was much more demand for research than our tiny team could meet.
In a series of articles, we’ll share three strategies that we used to scale up the impact of our tiny research team without increasing our headcount. You’ll see how we improved our output by building repeatable research processes, how we increased the value of our research by making insights easier to discover, and how we empowered our colleagues to perform excellent research in their own right.
This article, Part 1, is focused on how we scaled ourselves. You should also read Part 2: Scaling Existing Research and Part 3: Scaling the Contribution of Others. This series is based on a presentation we shared at UXPA 2019: “Scaling Research Without Scaling the Team.”
Part 1: Scaling Ourselves
When you need more research, one simple fix is to hire more researchers — but that wasn’t an option for us. Thumbtack had just recently hired the three of us and, at the time, was not planning to expand the team anymore. So we turned our full attention to scaling ourselves.
One of the first things we did was overhaul our own branding within the company. We created an identity: the Thumbtack Experience Research team. We had a logo, custom Slack emoji, and designed report templates. By building our brand, we shifted the perception of our size and impact from a small team stretched thin to a team with far-reaching impact. Our branding was so effective that a different team lead actually reached out and asked how we’d managed it. But more importantly, this contributed to our colleagues approaching us as their default source for research because they viewed us as a large, specialized team.
Next, we looked at where our time was going. We found that a large portion of our working day was spent setting up study plans, reports, observation docs, debriefing frameworks, and so on. Creating all our documentation from scratch on a project-by-project basis put a huge hurdle right at the start of all our research projects. So we designed templates for everything, which allowed us to set up any project quickly and focus on defining the problem rather than formatting documents.
Take our study planning template, which Cordelia created.
Before we perform any research, there’s a lot of preliminary work to do and it’s easy to overlook something small. Our study planning template helps us (and non-researchers that are doing research) remember every detail we need to consider to launch a successful study. By designing that one template, Cordelia was able to eliminate some of the set up from each study, which gave us more time to spend on other projects.
Finally, we looked at how to partner with other teams in Thumbtack to support our work. One of the most impactful ideas that emerged was to partner with Thumbtack’s customer support to conduct phone surveys.
During one particularly busy time for our tiny team, we spotted an interesting trend — churn from a specific feature in our app — but we didn’t have the time to interview dozens of users ourselves. So we went to the customer service team lead and asked if we could partner with a few of their agents to call our users and ask well-scoped research questions.
With the help of just four customer service agents, we received quick feedback with little effort in recruiting and no effort moderating on our part. Using the training program we developed, we took steps to train the small team of agents on how to conduct research. With their help, we were able to scale the number of studies we could do by running research in the background.
We recognize that these methods — branding, templates, and partnerships — may not be the most novel ways to scale a team’s work. But in concert, they helped us scale our research operations, limit rework, and transform our internal perception. And they helped our tiny team stretch out our research arms and scale our impact.
What’s next?
In the next installments of this series we’ll cover:
Do you want to help us continue to scale the impact of the Thumbtack research team? We’re currently hiring a Quantitative researcher and Summer 2020 Interns.
This article was co-authored by Cordelia Hyland, Erik Olesund, and Jordan Berry — researchers at Thumbtack. Special thanks to Cory Weaver for the illustrations.
