Guiding your team strategy with User Research Principles
We often hear that Ops is all about process, efficiency, speed and scale but does saving time and money have a real and lasting impact? What about quality? Are we doing the right work or are we scaling poor quality research? Is the work visible? Are we learning from our insights or are we repeating the same studies? Does anyone care about governance or are we skipping over the ‘boring’ work in favour of speed?
For the last seven months I’ve been leading the User Research team at Babylon Health in London. We are distributed across three offices and in two time zones (UK/US). The researchers are embedded in Tribes across the user experience. We also have a small centralised team who focus on the whole end to end service.
dscout’s User Research Maturity Model
This is dscout’s User Research maturity model. The team has definitely been in expansion since 2018, growing from one user researcher a few years ago, to a team of 18 at the start of this year. As well as growing, the research craft has really levelled up. Moving into 2020, we’re moving into the integration stage.
I’m the Interim Director of Research so my role is temporary. When I joined, my brief from Jane, the Director of Product Design, was to bring the team together, focus on career progression and fix Research Operations. Where did I start?
I went back to something I had helped the Research Ops community put together. Whilst we were doing the work to understand what Research Ops is, we asked some other questions. One of the things we asked was, ‘what are the challenges of operationalising research?’
We learned that as researchers, we face a lot of common challenges. We were able to group these into eight areas. We called these the Eight Pillars of User Research.
The Eight Pillars of User Research
The four pillars on the right are often where the pain is felt and can be the trigger for introducing Research Ops. They are all about how research can be systematised and scaled — the core of ops. This is where you can have the most impact in the short term. The four pillars on the left are all about how the research gets done. How research happens and what supports it — the context and the capability. These things are in tension and you can’t really think about the things on the right, without considering the things on the left.
If we bring in Research Ops as a layer it needs to support all of this. When I arrived, this is how it worked at Babylon.
Babylon Health User Research when I arrived
The leadership tasks were covered by the Senior/Lead researchers, the Research Director and Jane. The administrative tasks were covered by the researchers themselves mostly but also with support from the Design Ops team. I had to think about the full breadth of this at Babylon without a dedicated Research Ops Manager or team. How did I know where to focus my efforts?
I did my research of course!
At first I focused solely on getting to know the team to understand what the challenges were. I spent a good 2–3 months in one to ones and other meetings; asking questions, observing and listening. By talking and asking some key questions I started to get an understanding of how research happens.
I also used the Researcher Skills Framework workshop materials to benchmark the team and get an understanding of everyone’s skillset.
By the end of that I understood what their skills were, the work they were doing and what the teams were like that they worked in.
Next I worked with the team to do an audit. I needed to understand what I already had. Once I started to look around I found there was a lot that had already been done. The audit we did had a particular focus on GDPR but I also dug into everything else to uncover things that weren’t running as smoothly as possible. From here it was clear where we needed to focus and which things I needed to help fix. Now I had an understanding of the gaps, I was able to get started!
The biggest pain points definitely centred around the core Research Operations tasks. This was where we started to fix things. But very quickly we needed to tackle other challenges. There were other pain points around how the team were working, best practices and the methods. We created some programmes of work to tackle these.
Since those early days, we’ve moved to this model. We still don’t have ops people or programme managers, but we have this co-ordination layer.
Babylon Health User Research after I arrived
I have created a ‘leadership layer’ comprising of myself and the Research Leads. Alongside me, they lead initiatives for the team and pull in other team members for support. We co-ordinate the work in our team meetings and use a Trello board to track progress.
This all sounds great doesn’t it? Why do we even need a Research Ops person if we have this co-ordination layer and everyone is managing?
Research Operations is hard
This stuff is really hard. The bigger the team has grown, the harder it has got. There’s even more to do. Even with a team of 16, it’s still incredibly difficult to find the time to work on this extra work. Ideally we need dedicated Research Operations support.
Without extra headcount available, we needed a way to show the impact of undertaking this extra work and the risk to the business if it continued. This would enable us to build the business case for extra resources.
We needed a way to track what we were doing and show the impact. I thought I could do this by shining a light on this work. We started to talk about what we were doing in our company Showcases. But just highlighting risks on a Powerpoint slide doesn’t prove anything or get buy in. I realised I needed to bake it into our objectives.
We already had a team vision but no tangible way of translating that into action. I went back to the challenges I had discovered in my conversations and audit and mapped them. Four key themes emerged:
Efficiency
Visibility
Quality
Connectedness
We used these themes as a springboard to create some team principles. These are V1. Principles are incredibly hard to get right but rather than spend a lot of time talking and tweaking, we decided to stress test them.
We started to use these ten principles to help guide how we work and where to focus our efforts. Let’s look at this in a bit more detail and I will show you how these principles helped us to set objectives and guide our strategy.
The first three principles all related to our first theme of efficiency:
Provide the means to support the craft
Be consistent in our approach and enable research to scale
Understand the constraints and be careful with resources
The challenges that were associated with these were a lack of consistency across the community of practice, a lack of support for recruitment and administration, managing access to approved tools and technology and access to participants. To tackle these challenges, I created our first objective:
Objective 1: Standardise and scale our Research infrastructure to improve operational efficiencies.
This objective has led us to tighten up and refine a lot of the Research Operations Processes. We’ve overhauled Consent and Data Management with new tooling and creation of a Standard Operating Procedure. We’ve streamlined recruitment, scheduling and incentives with another new tool. We’ve created standard processes and an equipment inventory for our labs. We’ve also created a dedicated Confluence space for Guides, Processes and on-boarding (taking it out of Google docs).
The next two principles were tied to the second theme of visibility.
Give teams the evidence to make better decisions
Develop organisational knowledge
The challenges associated with this were little visibility of priorities across the team, repeating the same research and overlaps across teams. To help us improve, I set this objective:
Objective 2: Provide visibility of the User Research roadmap and outputs across the organisation in order to ensure our efforts are aligned, actionable and co-ordinated.
Our outcomes so far have been the creation of a company wide User Research tracker and Research backlogs or Roadmaps for every Tribe. This objective also became an individual objective for many of the Lead Researchers. This enabled them to be more proactive and open up a discussion around prioritisation and planning.
The following three principles related to our third theme of quality:
Know what good looks like and advance the craft
Be the guardians of integrity and rigour
Measure the impact and prove the value
The challenges I had discovered were that we had several instances where researchers or designers doing research were working in teams of one and had little opportunities for collaboration with other researchers. By democratising research we were risking poor quality research — we needed to raise everyone’s game. To help with this I drafted our next objective:
Objective 3: Create and implement a programme of training, templates and critique to improve quality of User Research across the organisation.
The team are really trying to push themselves to work well as a community of practice and keep improving and evolving as user researchers. There have been lots of initiatives started here including:
Mixed Methods Research
Playbook
Collaborating with Product Analytics, Market Research
Democratising Research
Training, templates and tools
Raising the bar on quality
Learning Huddles
Critique groups
Our final two principles were all about Connectedness:
Break down the silos and join the dots between the insights
Bring together the community of practice
The challenges here are silos of research, a lack of shared understanding of our user groups and no company wide framework for research. The objective I have set here is:
Objective 4: Develop a company wide framework and taxonomy for research to ensure we have a joined up approach to building organisational knowledge.
We’ve only just got started on this one but some of the work we are doing here is leading Service Discoveries, creating a Jobs To Be Done framework and Experience Principles. This work is critical and how we will mature the craft and show a lasting impact in the organisation.
It’s still work in progress. We’ve definitely made progress into ‘integration’ but there’s still more to do. By investing in a well-functioning Research Ops layer, we have helped the work of the team stay relevant and impactful. Our next steps are to become ‘operational experts’ and hire a dedicated Operations person, increase our horizontal ‘cross company’ research capacity and to iterate and improve our Research Library.
It’s easy to grow a team but much harder to help one mature. Delivery of business as usual research can be relentless and you can feel like you’re a hamster in a wheel. Incremental improvements to the craft can be hard to discern. It’s too early to say whether this will have a lasting impact but aligning the team around shared goals is definitely a short term success.
Giving the team a clear vision for how their work impacts the big picture has certainly given them the motivation and permission to get a huge amount of ‘extra curricular’ work done. By being intentional about this and shining a light on all this good work, we are ensuring that it isn’t invisible to the rest of the organisation.
Our very own superhero, Research Ops Rea!
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This is a transcript of the talk I gave at the Design Ops Global Conference, May 2020.
