Who has time for research?!!
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Confernece talk as part of the Leading The Product conference in Sydney. The talk covers the main reasons why Product Managers struggle to get time with users, and provides a framework via a user resaerch canvas to aid them and their squads to plan and conduct user research more efficiently.
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Who has time for research?!!
- 1. 1 1 @amir_ansari @iress @LTPCON Who has time for research?!! @amir_ansari @iress @LTPCON
- 2. 2 2 @amir_ansari @iress @LTPCON "Why did the product manager cross the road? To get to the user's house and ask them what they really want, but they didn't have time, so they just made assumptions instead." "Why did the product manager never visit their users and customers? Because they were afraid of getting too close and falling in love with their feedback!" I'm presenting at a product management conference, the topic being that product managers don't have time to research their users and customers. Tell me a joke to start my presentation relating to this topic. This doesn't make sense and is not empathetic towards product managers 5
- 3. 3 3 @amir_ansari @iress @LTPCON I apologize if my attempts at humor have not been helpful. As a language model, I'm here to assist you and provide guidance based on your requests. If you have any other requests or questions related to your presentation, I'm happy to help in any way I can.
- 4. 4 4 @amir_ansari @iress @LTPCON Gnarly problem #5: How do I balance my time to continuously learn about our market and customers while also doing the delivery work and managing my stakeholder demands?
- 5. 5 5 @amir_ansari @iress @LTPCON Deep in delivery! UXR underinvested
- 9. 9 9 @amir_ansari @iress @LTPCON “HMW ensure product teams plan good enough user and customer research with little support from UX researchers and designers.” Gnarly problem #5: How do I balance my time to continuously learn about our market and customers while also doing the delivery work and managing my stakeholder demands?
- 10. 10 10 @amir_ansari @iress @LTPCON User Research Kick-off canvas
- 11. 11 11 @amir_ansari @iress @LTPCON Credit where credit’s due Credit - original canvas in Miro by Michael Bierens de Haan.
- 12. 12 12 @amir_ansari @iress @LTPCON Research Kick-off Canvas (in Miro)
- 13. 13 13 @amir_ansari @iress @LTPCON Introductory frames Intro
- 14. 14 14 @amir_ansari @iress @LTPCON Project info (optional) Step 1 Topic / Project name: Research Lead: Product Manager: Team: Collateral location: Short description:
- 15. 15 15 @amir_ansari @iress @LTPCON Initiative brief (optional) Step 2
- 16. 16 16 @amir_ansari @iress @LTPCON Why do this research? Step 3 Outcome - alignment on research objectives Purpose of research and key goals? What are the questions we want the research to answer? E.g. Understand user behaviour during checkout flow E.g. Is feature xyz a good idea to build E.g. Why are people dropping off the second page of checkout? E.g. Why are carts full but abandoned? E.g. Should we even build feature xyz?
- 17. 17 17 @amir_ansari @iress @LTPCON What do we already know? Step 4 Outcome - Information sharing, reduced duplication of work Personas Analytics Designs Journey maps
- 18. 18 18 @amir_ansari @iress @LTPCON Who are our stakeholders? Step 5 Outcome - tailored, meaningful comms & closing the loop High Influence Low Influence High Interest Low Interest CORE TEAM (manage closely) INTERESTED STAKEHOLDERS (keep informed) MONITOR (minimum effort) INFLUENTIAL (keep satisfied) E.g. Head of e-commerce E.g. Head of Digital E.g. CPO E.g. Head of Sales, Technology
- 19. 19 19 @amir_ansari @iress @LTPCON “Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in.” Isaac Asimov - American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University
- 20. 20 20 @amir_ansari @iress @LTPCON What are our assumptions? Step 6.1 Outcome - alignment on research objectives Customer assumptions Business assumptions Technology assumptions E.g. Our customers use checkout as a comparison tool E.g. Shipping costs are impacting checkout E.g. our cookie rules are not long enough to store guest customer cart content
- 21. 21 21 @amir_ansari @iress @LTPCON What are our assumptions? Step 6.2 Outcome - alignment on research objectives Important No evidence Have evidence Not important Focus here: Beliefs that are critical for success, with little evidence. E.g. Our customers use checkout as a comparison tool E.g. our cookie rules are not long enough to store guest customer cart content E.g. Shipping costs are impacting checkout
- 22. 22 22 @amir_ansari @iress @LTPCON How do we validate? Step 7 Outcome - alignment on methods to validate Critical assumption Validation method E.g. Our customers use checkout as a comparison tool User interviews / contextual inquiry
- 23. 23 23 @amir_ansari @iress @LTPCON How will we research? Step 8 Outcome - clear and concise summary of research plan Project / problem statement: Goals of research (from step 3) Methods (from Step 7) Timing Who involved What data captured Deliverables Setup Participants How will you recruit participants? Interviews ‘Checkout’ user behaviour May 2023 Remote, Screen sharing Voice, Screen Findings deck Customers with $$$ carts Intercept survey BA / SME
- 24. 24 24 @amir_ansari @iress @LTPCON How will we research? Step 8 Outcome - clear and concise summary of research plan Participant What do you want to find out? What question will you ask them? E.g. Customers with abandoned cart of more than $$$ Why did you not purchase anything? Why do you have so much in your cart?
- 25. 25 25 @amir_ansari @iress @LTPCON Research Kick-off Canvas (in Miro)
- 26. 26 26 @amir_ansari @iress @LTPCON Continuous research cycle 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Conduct, Synthesise, Analyse Objectives Assumptions Good research provides answers but also yields more questions. More questions resulting in new objectives or more assumptions needing to be answered
- 27. 27 27 @amir_ansari @iress @LTPCON Continuous research cycle 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Conduct, Synthesise, Analyse Objectives Assumptions 3 4 5 6 7 8 Conduct, Synthesise, Analyse 3 4 5 6 7 8 Conduct, Synthesise, Analyse
- 28. 28 28 @amir_ansari @iress @LTPCON It's really helpful for those of us who don't have a lot of 'formal' experience with conducting research as it helps to consider things from all angles and ensure you're taking the best approach. [Client Solutions Consultant] The canvas is extensive, and there probably needs to be a liter version of it for projects that already have a lot of preliminary information. [Product Manager] There is a load of information and guidance that is important to build a robust research project and if followed step by step can go a long way in helping one answer the questions. [Product Manager] I used it as a guide to help me get ready for some client interviews I was doing [Commercial / Account Manager]
- 29. 29 29 @amir_ansari @iress @LTPCON Recap Gnarly problem: How do I balance my time to continuously learn about our market and customers while also doing the delivery work and managing my stakeholder demands? Problem statement: HMW ensure product teams plan good enough user and customer research with little support from UX researchers and designers. Solution: User Research Kick-off Canvas Outcome: ● Save time and streamline your research planning, ● enable continuous feedback loop, and ● ultimately increase likelihood of getting close to user and customers.
- 30. 30 30 @amir_ansari @iress @LTPCON Thank you @amir_ansari @iress @LTPCON Let me know how you go!
Editor's Notes
- First of all, let me say I’ve never met a product Manager this scary. But I’m sure many of you feel this way on the inside!!! I’ve been given a gnarly problem so gnarly that even ChatGPT couldn’t help with!
- So I thought I’d prepare a funny joke in context of this talk to get you folks in the mood. I decided what better place than ChatGPT! So I asked it: I'm presenting at a product management conference, the topic being that product managers don't have time to research their users and customers. Tell me a joke to start my presentation relating to this topic It replied: "Why did the product manager cross the road? To get to the user's house and ask them what they really want, but they didn't have time, so they just made assumptions instead." Now, I wasn’t gonna piss this amazing large audience off with a non-empatheic joke. SO I replied: This doesn't make sense and is not empathetic towards product managers. After it apologises, it responded: "Why did the product manager never visit their users and customers? Because they were afraid of getting too close and falling in love with their feedback!" Now there is some empathy there but it didn’t get to the heart of what I wanted to achieve. This went back and forth 5 more times as I wasn’t happy with the jokes. It simply wasn’t getting. It even threw in a few knock knock jokes! It finally said:
- I apologize if my attempts at humor have not been helpful. As a language model, I'm here to assist you and provide guidance based on your requests. If you have any other requests or questions related to your presentation, I'm happy to help in any way I can. See, a problem so gnarly that even AI can’t help!
- OK, Jokes aside… I am lucky enough to address gnarly problem # 5: “How do I balance my time to continuously learn about our market and customers while also doing the delivery work and managing my stakeholder demands?“ Firstly, let me empathise with you Product Managers - you are way overworked, under immense pressure by all arms of the business to deliver a product and commercial success, manage your cross-functional teams, AND continually get close to your users and customers and market in general!! With all these responsibilities, no wonder you’re having an existential moment! Like this lady.
- Now I have a hunch as to some possible causes: First cause: Over the years, I’ve observed many PM’s who are stuck in ‘delivery’. You can see it in the gnarly statement. Many are too busy managing scrum teams and backlogs, and in effect doing the job of a PO or Delivery manager as well as “or instead of” the strategic product management role they should be focusing on. Second cause: Many organisations STILL underinvest in the practice of UX, specifically user research. All you need to do is look at the design-to-PM ratio of organisations - at Iress, our’s is about 1:5! So you don’t have the people to help you do that continuous customer research.
- Don’t fret - you’re not alone! This is common and consistent with many PMs and organisations. Don’t take it from me, here are a few people from Iress - who want to get closer to their users and customers- who feel the same way!! Now, I’m not a magician: I can’t invent more time! And I can’t get you to lift up from delivery overnight. AND I can’t help you hire UXers - especially because I’m desperate to have some for myself and Iress!! However, I can help reduce your pain a little bit. I’m going to show you a framework we use at Iress that helps PMs claw back some time by making it easier and faster for them (and hopefully you and your teams) to plan user and customer research.
- I have another a hypothesis - besides the time it takes to actually conduct research, I think the main reason teams don’t run research is that they don’t know how to plan for it. We can all talk to people right? So you could argue we know how to interview people! Sure there’s some skill involved in not leading the participant and that’s easy to learn. What most lack is knowing the building blocks required to plan the research - what do we want to find out? Who should we talk to and how many? What method should we use? How will we find participants? Should we pay them? How much time should we put aside? And this is just the start of questions I’ve heard PMs ask - the list goes on.
- There’s a perception that user and customer research is hard and requires expertise. If you know me well, you’ll know that I’m a proponent of democratising the craft of UX, especially around User Research - aka teaching everyone and all to fish for themselves! I’ve spoken at numerous conferences and meetups around this topic. After my talk, you’ll walk away feeling empowered and confident and in control of planning regular customer research efficiently.
- Now, the gnarly problem can be solved in many different ways. I’ve created a HMW statement today to tackle our gnarly problem: HMW ensure product teams plan good enough user and customer research with little support from UX researchers and designers The premise is that I want to help PMs plan “good” not great or amazing research, and help them do that without having a UXer by their side. Idea be to make PMs and teams self sufficient.
- Introducing you to …drum roll…. the User Research Kick-off canvas
- While building our playbook and toolkit at Iress, and looking to streamline for everyone how to run research, we stumbled across a miro board by Michael who had put a step-by-step guide for people to plan user research. You can google his name or search in Miro and I’m pretty sure you’ll find the original canvas.
- As good designers and product people do, we decided to use it and make improvements to it. So today, I’m going to spend the remaining time walking you through our version of the canvas. For ease of presentation, I’ve dissected it and put it into a slide format - but you can see that it’s a single Miro board, where you methodically work through from left to right! I will share a PDF version in slide format, which will also have a link to the Miro board. And throughout my talk, I’ll represent the different stages using these square boxes. The board helps to create alignment across your team regarding the objectives for your research, hypotheses you have and what you want to answer, the best research methods to use to answer those, AND a summary of all the things you need to make the research happen. And what’s great about it is that it’s ALL in the one easy-to-follow step-by-step miro board. All that’s left after you’ve completed the board, is to put a discussion guide together, schedule the participants and conduct the research.
- The first and second frames are introductory, talking about the purpose behind the canvas, who can use it, and how to use it. Now what’s brilliant about this board is that you can either run it as a workshop or have a go at filling it out yourself and then getting feedback. The third intro frame is some indicative timings if you were going to run it as a workshop. In our experience, you can run a workshop in 2 hours. For today, I’m not going to zoom into these three introductory sections.
- Step 1: This step is basically a summary of your research round. It’s helpful for when you share your canvas with stakeholders or if others stumble across it I’ve represented the step as a dotted line as it’s an optional step and not mandatory. You could skip it
- Step 2: This is unique to Iress, also optional but worth quickly touching on. At Iress, regardless of the business unit, anyone who has an idea for an initiative is asked to complete an initiative brief. It’s a one-pager. The reason we have it here is that most often, initiatives get started and then teams realise they need to do research! Sound familiar?!!! In an ideal world, this would be blank or partially completed. We tell people who are using our research canvas that often the research will help them complete their initiative brief. Maybe you have something similar in your organisations? If not, you can just remove this step.
- Step 3: In a nutshell, these are the overall objectives for your research - they can be really broad or really specific. It’s literally a dumping ground for goals or objectives you and your team have for this research round. As an example, it might be that you want to better understand user behaviour or friction points during your e-commerce checkout process The bottom half is another way to frame the objectives, in the form of questions. Sometimes objectives as they are written may be too broad and reframing them as questions might be more helpful for some. Examples could include: why are people dropping off on the second page of our checkout
- Step 4: this is where you dump any artefacts you already have. This could be personas and journey maps, existing screenshots, past research reports and desktop research, even analytics. This is important as it ensures you’re not going over old ground, and using existing knowledge to fast-track insights and decision-making and to help you focus on what you don’t know or have confidence in.
- Step 5: Good old stakeholders. Can’t live with them… you can fill the blank!! But we know that initiatives can’t succeed without buy-in. So this step is all about mapping stakeholders with low and high influence and low and high interest. You may use other frameworks like RACI. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you have mapped out the individuals you need to keep across the progress of your research and initiative and appropriately close the loop with them. The four quadrants provide some tactics such as who to keep satisfied, vs who to manage closely. I’ve just provided some examples to give context.
- There’s a quote I love about assumptions by Isaac Asimov - an American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University “Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won't come in.” Steps 6 and 7 are all about assumptions and where the rubber really hits the road. Think of this step as you are giving your window a scrub!
- Step 6 has 2 parts. In part 1, you capture all the assumptions you have from the customer business and technology perspective for the given context you’re focusing on. Examples might be: for your customer, you feel they’re using the checkout as a comparison tool From a business perspective, you might be assuming that shipping costs are turning off your customers From a tech perspective, you might be assuming that your cookie rules are not appropriate hence you need users to create an account to save their cart. No matter what you assume, capture them here.
- In part 2, you map and prioritise these assumptions for which you want to get answers via research. Simply put, you look at all the assumptions you’ve captured, and you map them against importance and evidence. The idea is that you focus on the most important and riskiest assumptions for which you don’t have any research or evidence This matrix forces you to really focus. Remember, that research is not something you do once. It’s a continuous activity and this canvas acts as a feedback loop (I’ll go into that later).
- In step 7, you take the critical assumptions you’ve mapped in the matrix and decide the best methods to answer them. Remember, there are many research methods and not all are suited to a given research objective. For example, if you wanted to find out what are people’s general thoughts and opinions on shopping cart flows and the check-out process (given that’s abroad research objective) you might use 1 on 1 interviews. However, if you wanted to know across multiple checkout designs, which one is most effective, you might do an A/B or multi-variate test. For our Iress canvas, we’ve referenced the most common research techniques we use from our Playbook and provided a blurb and a link. You can easily google ‘research methods’ if you don’t have a playbook or UX practitioners to help you. The idea is to have those methods in this canvas all in one place for non-UX people to reference in context.
- Step 8 helps tie up some loose ends and bring your plan together. For example: The first two sections we’ve covered. We’ve talked about and covered goals and method. Timing - are there any deadlines that will impact you, Who will be involved - will you get support from your team to help with conducting the research Setup - how will you physically do it? Remotely, in person? Do you need cameras? What will you capture - just audio? Video? Users’ screen? And what is the implication for capturing and storing those? Deliverables – how will you share your learnings? Full on findings reports? Sticky notes on the wall? Participants - who will you need? How many? I’ll go into that in more detail next. And lastly, How will you access them? - via your sales team? Recruit via FB? Family and friends etc. The idea is to fill out this step in as much detail as possible to give everyone clarity re how the research will take place.
- Now regarding who to speak with, the canvas provides an additional step to help you if you struggle. In this table, you can list all the possible personas/customer segments you feel you need to access for this round. Then on the right-hand side column, you capture what you want to find out from them. Some of your assumptions or research objective can be copied here. Remember that different user types/segments/personas may answer different parts of your research goals and objectives.
- What we’ve done or recommend is that links to any artefacts you create should be included in this board if you decide to use Miro. For example, links to your cloud storage or research repository, discussion guides, email templates. No matter what you have, include them here so they’re all in the one place
- Now, we haven’t quite finished. Remember our good old gnarly problem? There’s a word in there that’s very important: “continuously learn..” And remember that I said research is ongoing - often good research not just answers your biggest assumptions at that time, it often yields more questions that you didn’t think about. What’s great about this framework is that, any learnings you have feed right back into the board, either as new objectives or assumptions you need to tackle next.
- We typically just duplicate the template and stick a copy below it. Then feed any insights or new questions back in as objectives or new assumptions, and we do the process over again for the next round. You get the gist. Every new research unpacked some other questions, often at the next level down.
- I can tell you this board has been one of the most popular assets my team produced and shared widely within the organisation. We’ve got BAs using it, PMs using it, and even a commercial person who often talked to their customers using it. And these are people who sit within areas where we have no UX research representation. And here are some quotes from these people: It's really helpful for those of us who don't have a lot of 'formal' experience with conducting research as it helps to consider things from all angles and ensure you're taking the best approach. [Client Solutions Consultant] There is a load of information and guidance that is important to build a robust research project and if followed step by step can go a long way in helping one answer the questions. [Product Manager] I used it as a guide to help me get ready for some client interviews I was doing [Client Solutions Consultant]
- Gnarly problem: How do I balance my time to continuously learn about our market and customers while also doing the delivery work and managing my stakeholder demands? Problem statement: HMW ensure product teams plan good enough user and customer research with little support from UX researchers and designers. Solution: User Research Kick-off Canvas Outcome: Save time and streamline your research planning, enable continuous feedback loop, and ultimately increase likelihood of getting close to user and customers. And hopefully, you’;; go from this freakishly stressed out and scaring looking PM to a gentle loving relaxed version, all thanks to ME!!!
- Best of luck and let me know how you go.