Building a Research Library
Shifting How We Organize and Share Research
Background
Project based research was not working at our organization.
Product teams involve research too late.
Business stakeholders pressure for decisions to be made quickly.
There often isn't adequate time to conduct research. Even after research, the product team doesn't have time to react to our findings and change their approach.
Our Goals
Identify how we can make research more valuable in the current state
Plan to shift the culture to be more proactive through showing the value of research
Process
Planning
As a research team, we agreed that our most successful research projects had been those with lasting power. We'd done generative research in a few product areas that was continuing to provide value to product teams well beyond the scope of the initial project. Stakeholders were slowly, but steadily coming to us for answers about user behaviors in those areas of focus.
But, we weren't well equipped to answer stakeholder requests. Our information was siloed in different project folders in our research repository. It felt like we were scrambling to pull together loosely related themes to assemble into a share-out. It felt rushed, and it always felt like some context was missing.
We had not been taking full advantage of the capabilities of our research repository tool (which starts with "Dove" and ends with "tail") to draw insights across projects, and we decided to create what we called our Research Library.
Creating the Library
We thought about our stakeholders as our users and recalled the questions we'd been commonly asked to understand the types of information they needed.
The themes that emerged became the data types in our Research Library.
User information, User journeys, Pain points, and Quantitative data
We reviewed our past share-outs to identify what information was important and context that we may have missed. For example, we decided on the following template fields for pain-points:
priority
before and after screenshots
description
source (which company or office)
source data (pieces of raw data as support)
assumptions (what we believe)
questions (any missing pieces)
Making improvements
As we surfaced our existing knowledge in the new format, the gaps in our product knowledge became more obvious. To continue to provide value, we needed to constantly be learning and have the most recent, relevant data possible.
We introduced the concept of continuous discovery, and we are conducting weekly, open-ended discussions with users and adding themes to our Research Library.
To make sure we are collecting relevant information, we decide what to focus on based on what's upcoming on the product roadmap to anticipate and prepare for future requests.
And, to make sure the Library stays relevant, we have a working process for archiving expired data. For example, we added statuses to the pain point cards to label them as "discovered, in-progress, and solved."
Outcomes
We are continuing to build out additional product spaces in our library, and even collaborating with Business Analysts and other product team members to add their expertise.
Next Steps
We plan to work with the BAs to establish a process that aligns the pain points in our library with the product backlog.
We hope that quicker, more robust share-outs sell the value that research can provide over time.
In the long-term, we hope to enable anyone in the organization to access the library and find the information that they're looking for.