[ad_1]
To align with product, research must recognize and balance design and business perspectives.
In July, 2015 I was working as the first researcher at Instacart when Max, one of the founders, asked if I’d like to go to a “Designer Dim Sum” with John Maeda. (Yes! Yes, obviously. And thank you.) As our group walked out of dim sum brunch, I asked John about continuing education: to keep growing, should I return to school for a master’s degree in design? I only had an undergraduate degree in cognitive science and human-computer interaction.
John said to me “Don’t worry about design school. You already get it. If you want to grow your career, get a good MBA. Right now, you smell funny to business people. With a good MBA, you will smell all right to the business people.”
I did not, for better or worse, take on any further education in design or business. But the seed John planted began growing immediately: why do I need to get in with “the business people” — and what the hell does he mean, smell funny?
Consider research as a sensing mechanism that enables the team to respond effectively to external context — that may mean acting on hidden opportunity, mitigating risk and avoiding failure, or just creating, packaging, and shipping better product.
Last week in Where UX Research Is Working, I said that researchers are trained to observe the customer context and feed that back into the organization to support the team. But that’s not the starting point. Because what we need to observe and how it’s fed back into the organization, to be productive, is dictated by the current, specific situations the team and the organization are facing.
Rather than beginning with the outside context, good work must begin by understanding the internal context of the organization.
And as we work with any situation inside the organization, we inevitably confront the…
[ad_2]
Source link
