2-day virtual workshop
October 9-10 2024, 8:00am-12:00pm PT
While it’s true that UX research, data science, market research, and other insight-generators fuel decisions in today’s product organizations, too many of their most critical insights fail to drive action. Across the industry, we focus on gathering more insights and making them more findable—but we miss the boat on how to ensure our research learning remains active in design decisions and planning conversations.
Getting more done from existing research can’t fall solely on the shoulders of the people who generate customer insights. Given that understanding and communicating customer needs is central to what designers do, activating known insights is also a DesignOps Challenge.
In this workshop, we’ll explore ideas to better orchestrate learning across different research sources in your organization. We’ll dig into some knowledge management essentials that can lay a foundation for a more connective research community across silos. And we’ll discuss concrete operational ideas that can increase the visibility and integration of insights in product development practices – driving more of the research-based customer impacts that your designers want to see.
Target audience
This workshop is tailored for:
- DesignOps pros looking to increase the uptake of key customer insights in design decisions and related product plans.
- Design leaders seeking specific ways to better integrate diverse insight sources into their teams’ workflows.
- ResearchOps folks searching for ways to increase the collective impact of customer research by connecting the dots across available sources.
Regardless of your role, if you want to dig into new operations that could be amplifying the ongoing use of varied research knowledge – then this workshop is for you.
NOTE: This workshop is less applicable to those:
- Working in a startup organization with limited research created or documented.
- New to the field, with less than 2 years experience in a tech environment.
Take-Aways
- Recognize research waste – Name and identify untapped research wealth in your organization.
- Forge new connections between researchers and teams – Expand your idea of customer insights and who generates them, get the word out to increase collective visibility, and align new studies across research sources.
- Establish basics for connected knowledge – Review a range of current options for managing research assets, then tackle some cross-disciplinary basics that you can build from later. (Note that this workshop is not a deep dive on choosing or implementing research repositories.)
- Develop persuasive cases for top insights – Assemble evidence for crucial unsolved customer problems, preparing them in advance or as an input to emergent trends in leaders’ thinking.
- Choose key deliverables and decisions to target – Identify the recurring touchpoints where it would be most impactful for research learning to be present, then explore how new operations could make it happen.
You’ll leave the workshop with the slide contents and a range of models in a Mural board that you and your class will have annotated. These models will include a host of action ideas that you can bring back to your teams.
Optional Homework
- Investigate the research sources that your designers and partners use to understand customers – look beyond UX research to identify other types of insight-generators.
- Seek out different types of design and planning deliverables where research could be better integrated.
Agenda
Day 1
Introductions
Course Overview
Section 1: Increasing research-informed planning as a focus for DesignOps
- Understand research waste in tech
- Capture stories about wasted research in your organization
- Frame research waste as a problem DesignOps can invest in
- Think about who could come together to form a larger research community
- Take stock of existing research that could be reactivated
Section 2: Building cross-silo community and visibility
- Start conversations about building more research community for shared impact
- Increase visibility of new research outputs and opportunities to participate
- Connect related threads of new research efforts across silos
Day 2
Day 1 Summary and Day 2 Overview
Section 3: Preparing important undressed insights to influence planning
- Consider the larger landscape of research knowledge management in tech
- Lay some minimum knowledge management foundations for your research community (Note that this workshop is not a deep dive on choosing or implementing research repositories.)
- Distill your most critical “unsolved” customer insights into “citable insight summaries”
- Turn key events in your organization into opportunities to distill more insights
Section 4: Integrating known insights into existing processes
- Understand what getting in sync can look like
- Inject research into design processes
- Inject research into planning decision points owned by others
Reflection
Conclusion
