Challenge we faced

• We’re a small, centralized research team that sits within our organization’s Strategy team. For years, we’ve wanted to invest more in enablement, esepcially for our Technology teams. However, with limited resources and a steady stream of high-priority research requests from executives, we struggled to make progress.
• We’d experimented from time to time with enablement efforts, but we hadn’t seen meaningful change in behaviors or research fluency. For example, we built templates, shared them, and put them in our internal knowledge library – but team members quickly forgot where to find them, and they got lost in the ever-growing library. We gave basic research training to the Design team, but that wasn’t enough to impact the Technology org as a whole – their Product and Engineering counterparts didn’t share the same context and didn’t buy in.
• We knew we needed to become enablers as our company grew and large-scale research questions were increasing, but our past efforts hadn’t been the best use of our limited resources; just focusing on the top priority research had been more impactful than the enablement efforts we’d made thus far.

Signals it was time for a change

• We earned strong executive buy in. After seeing the impact that well-scoped, well-timed research made when led by our team, Tech leadership was ready to have their people dedicate time to it as well. We showed them clear measurable outcomes – that enabling teams to do research will reduce time-to-impact for our customers, and allow us to scale research impact without significant investment in new headcount.

We had the resources. Leadership buy-in allowed us to invest upfront to roll out enablement efforts at scale.

• Other Technology processes were changing at the same time. There was a large initiative to improve our product development lifecycle and implement new related processes. Our research enablement efforts could attach to those and reinforce them, rather than being their own disconnected initiative.

How we’re addressing

In the past six months, we shifted gears and made a concentrated investment in research enablement across our ~400-person Technology org. This case study shares how Research and Research Operations partnered to build and scale research education, operations, and tooling across Product, Design, and Engineering. In particular, this case study will focus on our design and delivery of multi-day hands-on skill building workshops for the Technology org, and an accompanying research playbook.

How we’re measuring success

We measured insights fluency of our Technology organization using a self-assessment survey (~n=175), which we’ll re-administer at the conclusion of our workshop series in January. This will provide clear data on change in knowledge. Also at that time, we’ll be formally evaluating behavior change via usage metrics of our playbooks and templates, usage of Research Office Hours, and Research Support Requests. Lastly, we’ll be evaluating with Technology leadership to gain understanding of new research taking place across their org, and whether and how it’s impacting decision making.