What are the best ways to scale user research practices?

Scaling user research is like automating a factory: streamline processes, use robust tools, and build a research ecosystem. Automate repetitive tasks, employ user-friendly platforms, and foster a culture where everyone participates. This accelerates research, expands insights, and ensures it's woven into the fabric of your organization, propelling user-centered growth.

These are some ways I have used: 1. Implement User Analytics Tools: Integrate user analytics tools such as Google Analytics, Mixpanel, or Amplitude to continuously gather quantitative data on user behavior. 2. User Feedback Automation: Utilize in-app polls etc to collect user opinions, pain points automatically. Trigger them based on user interactions or specific events within your product. 3. Heatmaps and Session Recordings: Implement heatmapping and session recording tools like Hotjar or Crazy Egg 4. User Research Vault: Create a central vault for storing past research findings, which can be accessed by product teams. 5. Feedback Loop: Build automated feedback loops that allow user insights to directly influence product development.

The key to User Research is about discovering the user painpoints and figuring out how to solve them. Even though the best form of user research, user interviews are hard to automate, organizations can try the automating the associated process like identifying the target customer & automating the surveys and analaytics to scale the process. Automation can also help the organization to standardize user research process and maintain quality across products.

Scaling user research practices is crucial for delivering user-centric products as companies expand. Key steps include creating a clear research strategy, centralizing resources, integrating researchers into cross-functional teams, and considering Research Ops. Additionally, document findings, provide training for non-researchers, standardize processes, and foster a user research culture. Invest in research tools, adopt remote methodologies, and establish relevant metrics. Prioritize research, consider outsourcing, and encourage continuous learning. Feedback-driven improvements and adaptable, user-focused approaches are essential for effective scaling.

User research is an essential part of product management. With a plethora of tools available in the market, it is important to look at tools on their own merit. Some key questions to ponder: - what kind of data points are captured? - how much of it can be streamlined? - what can be automated? - what kind of reach can you get? - what types of user research methods are supported? - can it scale with your research requirements? - does it play well with other tools in your toolkit/tech stack? - can it help me understand at a deeper level? - does it help capture user emotion and behavior data? - can I automate recruitment or reach? - can it provide faster and quicker TAT? Choosing the right tool will help make or break your team.

User behaviour is a constantly evolving variable in product management and is important to keep up with changing user needs. As a lone generalist, there are certain limitations for a Product Manager to understand the users like lack of domain knowledge or certain biases. In such scenarios collaboration can make a huge difference to the output. Getting a perspective from cross-functional teams like engineering, design and sales can add more depth to the research and minimize the chances of any anchoring bias the PM might have.

You can supercharge your user research if you collaborate with other teams. Even though we PMs consider ourselves to be the closest to our users, some teams can be inherently much more in tune with what our users want. For instance, an operations manager based in the field will be more privy to typical everyday issues the workers of a construction company might face. If a PM were developing an application to help these workers in the field, they can certainly collaborate with the operations team and delegate part of the research to them!

User research does not necessarily have to be always done by user experience researchers, depending on the maturity of the organization, you can delegate the research aspects to product teams, design teams, usability engineers, etc. Conduct workshops to teach PMs, designers, and other teams the basics of user interviews, usability testing, etc. Creates user-centric culture and diversifies data sources. Use AI and tech like eye gaze tracking, transcription, generative AI, natural language processing, emotion detection, and analytics to automate the analysis of large unmoderated, moderated, and task-based studies which then frees up researcher bandwidth.

One of the most critical types of people to include in the research is your engineers themselves. While not all engineers will get excited about it, those that do may drive more innovation because they can better combine their knowledge of feasibility with their newly gained understanding of the user's problems.

Having a dedicated Research OPS team is a game-changes. 70-80% of user research is not analysis or running surveys/interviews. It's setting up systems, collecting participants, scheduling, organizing findings, following protocols etc. You don't need highly qualified researchers for this busywork.

As a product manager, it is important to prioritize what you want to get feedback on and how soon you want to get feedback. You cannot conduct research on every single thing in your product and given the limitations of team bandwidth, recruitment cost, TATs, etc, you need to prioritize user research on features that give you the most bang for the buck. Clearly identify the key questions and unknowns that research should focus on, tied to product goals and roadmap. Avoid "nice to know" areas without a clear impact. Say "no" to peripheral requests. There are multiple frameworks available for prioritization depending on what your team follows; you can use one or more methods and evaluate where you want your research budget to be invested.

For generic user research, it is always advised to prioritise the open-ended questions first and capture the user's perspective as deep as possible. For user research focused on certain capabilities or painpoints, I personally prefer to use a framework like MoSCoW to identify the questions that are crucial for me to complete the research

I have found that over-protisation can be very dangerous when engaging in research. It's more likely that you'll find very specific answers in broader questions. Do not try to do small A/B testing on a color of the button unless you already have a full understanding of WHY your audiences uses your product.

Keeping user in the loop from Product conceptualization can solve the PM a lot of back and forth. Wireframe or prototype can be used to align the user with the overall flow and experience of the product and their feedback can be captured and recorded using NPS or customer ratings.

Once you have the user research process defined and enabled across different teams, it is important to scale user research that helps iterate and validate your product decisions. Embed in sprints by integrating bite-sized user research activities into existing agile cycles and workflows. For example, 1–2-day guerilla tests between sprints. Makes user perspective an integral part of rapid iteration. Use methodologies like unmoderated usability tests, and task-based tests to gather user perspectives anytime. Requires less time to schedule and conduct vs. live sessions. Combine asynchronous self-serve testing with selective live remote moderated sessions. Gives a broad qualitative dataset along with the ability to probe deeper insights.

Coping up with the evolving user needs demands improvement in user research practices as well. - Documenting the research practice and data can be a good start to the transformation process - Using personas and user stories to Map the user painpoints can be helpful - Retrospective team meetings with stakeholders on user research process improvement - iterative approach of revisiting the process frequently to identify gaps and resolve them.

Gamify the user journey by creating a game where users arrange pointers to construct their desired path. Focus on specific problems users face and gather feedback on potential solutions. Analyze gathered insights for patterns, categorize feedback, and prioritize areas for improvement. Implement iterative changes based on user feedback, ensuring continuous product enhancement. Valuing the user's perspective is essential, making their input foundational for successful product development

User Research at scale needs more than researchers. It needs a strong operational support - Research OPs. The key challanges in research are: - showcasing your findings and making them useful to your stakeholders - streamlining the flow of participants - managing the workflows - Archiving information so it can be found 5 years in the future All of these should be done by Research OPs teams, rather than more researchers. You wouldn't hire 40 developers to built a product faster - you'd hire a good mix of product, dev, devops and UX.