How to Elevate User Research Impact on Both Levels: Tactical and Strategic

We often hear from user researchers getting requests from a product manager who has already decided what features need to go to the backlog and in what priority. The product team calls a researcher to learn the best way to build a specific feature or to test that they have created something right. As a result, researchers are left with evaluative work and remain uninvolved in building that backlog. For a company, this might lead to missing opportunities or wasted resources. How can a user researcher change that unproductive working behavior and drive business impact?

Dr. Natalia Korchagina, Ex. Head of Product and Market Research at Tiger.Trade and Lead User Researcher at Bitvavo, discussed this question in one of our recent UX Research Munich Community talks. She shared her experience of elevating the impact of user research at different levels: from tactical to strategic. Inspired by Natalia’s talk, this article reflects on the concept of strategic research. It also provides several strategies for user researchers to help their stakeholders explore and evaluate assumptions behind why a specific feature should be prioritized and how it will impact reaching the business goals.

If you want, it’s the process of zooming in and out: zoom in to the micro level of humans or competitors and zoom out to a more macro level of markets. The most promising strategic opportunities are often derived from the intersection of these three insight areas. Therefore, working on strategic research will help you boost the impact of research in your organization.

When aiming to drive the strategic approach, it’s your time to try taking the role of that facilitator who brings the stakeholders together to combine the knowledge about these areas. Having the complete picture, the goal is to find new strategic capacities for your product. Once you have a range of strategic opportunities, start thinking about JTBD (jobs to be done) to realize them. Next, you can prioritize core strategic initiatives and, finally, plan your tactics.

Sounds like a lot of work? Don't DO this all alone. Instead, initiate collaboratively going through the process: set up a strategic brainstorming session with your stakeholders. Encourage them to collaborate and organize some room for it. For example, conduct explorative sessions together on a digital whiteboard. You can simultaneously cluster research data or create user journey maps, zooming in or out to the right level of detail. The impact of your research may reach a new organizational level if you invest time and effort into this collaboration.

To stay focused and productive during your brainstorming session, follow a framework for employing strategic research like the one below.

When you collect those assumptions, remember to validate them first. If they turn out wrong, you might deliver an irrelevant strategy, wasting time and resources.

Your stakeholders might tell you they want to expand their product to new customer segments or markets. Yet you observed that the current user experience is not satisfying, as many users complain about it. In that case, your stakeholders might need to postpone thinking about scaling to a later stage. Your job is to address the most urgent issues and focus the efforts accordingly.

However, sometimes your team needs to be more convinced of the need for strategic research. But, then, it’s not easy to convince the team to devote time to it and raise strategic questions. Is there anything you can do about this?

Start with analyzing your tactical work and operational tasks. Then, doing that, aim at framing your user study to see whether you can expand it: is there a bigger business question behind this part of the user experience you are testing? Following this approach, you’re conducting a study about usability and identifying urgent strategic questions, which are then addressed on a team level. You’ll find an example in the case study below.

The extensive exploration process is then mostly on your shoulders. Meanwhile, you can still engage your stakeholders early in the research process.

Imagine your team comes with a new project request. In the project briefing session, the surface team’s assumptions on how they can reach their business goals. You can achieve that by asking them about the business goals and product metrics they want to impact.

Then, you can turn the assumptions of your stakeholders into research questions. As a result, you will reframe the research value from helping the team implement the feature they have already decided to implement to learning about the current user needs and challenges and finding essential opportunities.

The ultimate role of research is not only to perform research requests from the team but to operate strategically and drive impact on the strategic level.

Here is a short story of how Natalia’s team used both ways to convey their organization's need for strategic research.

Natalia works at a company that builds software solutions for trading. She shared how the product team requested a customer onboarding process usability study.

To tackle that project, Natalia’s research team identified the parts of user experience before onboarding. Going back to the first step in a customer journey, the research team focused on how the product and the company were perceived based on the website communication: users need to install the application they find on the company website.

One of the app mockups on the website contained a particular type of stock chart, perceived as too sophisticated for many users. Although the product targeted people with different experience levels, some professional traders found it tricky to read or use the chart in their analysis.

As a result, the website communicated that the product was more professional than its potential users. In other words, Natalia’s team found that the company’s core clients didn’t identify themselves with the product. As a result, the bottleneck appeared to potential customers before they entered the onboarding process. So, the usability study request dropped because the user research team first learned about the customer's struggles by asking fundamental questions.

Let’s reflect on Natalia’s story. Product teams might be very much committed to their current solutions because of the switching costs. Meanwhile, these solutions might contain significant pain points for the current product users. User research might be helpful to account for that by taking a step back and exploring:

• What are the switching costs?

• Is any critical customer journey part missed?

• Are there any prominent switching barriers?

• Is it possible to reduce those switching barriers?

That essential UX research work, on both tactical and strategic levels, might help attract new users to the product or retain more current customers just as it happened in Natalia’s case.

Long story short, she illustrated how to use tactical work to provoke strategic questions and why it's helpful to move from "Are we building the thing right?" to "Are we working on the right problem?" when taking on a new research request.