Raising UX Maturity with systematic use of insights
How might we establish a culture of insights collection to drive innovation and performance?
Context
- FinTech Start-up within a very conservative industry
- Niche product and customer base (HNW Individuals)
- Agile Product Development Framework and “fail fast culture”
Problematic
- Cultural disparity between product team and the rest of the organisation
- Pressure to move fast, to drive innovation and new business model
- Low UX maturity within the organisation
Expected Outcome
- Use UX Research insights as growth hacking factors
- Gain Stakeholders trust and support
- Establish a user-driven business development culture
When UX Research becomes a growth hacking asset
1. Define the problem
Taking research insights out of the lab
I was hired to consolidate the UXR team efforts and make our work more impactful, structured and systematic. A year later, we were at a crossroads:
- facing an significant shift within our business strategy
- relying on grounded user insights to manage our expansion on the market
- but struggling getting all stakeholders on board
- spending tremendous efforts on selling research
2. Treat Stakeholders like users
At a structured stage, the whole product team has embraced the research process and made it almost systematic. A main blocker remains the pressure from the business side:
- to deliver quickly and being agile
- seeing potential blockers in research activities
- relying on internal knowledge to take decision
- lacking of trust for the research process
Shifting from a structured to user-driven maturity stage can only be achieved with the collaboration of all parties involved. Therefore my efforts focussed on:
- analysing the needs and motivation of the stakeholders
- aligning those with my research process
- establishing a systematic testing process to help the squads and PMs in their planing
- make insights to growth hacking factors: measurable, actionable, impactful
Besides raising considerably our competitive advantage, this approach enabled us to:
- get a UXR involved for every project kick-off
- set-up a monthly Voice of the Boss Sync Meeting with the management
- establish a direct correlation between the business strategy and the research strategy
- develop an insight collection process to address strategic questions
3. Integrate UXR to the iteration
1 day every 2 weeks: when regularity is a token for sustainability
Since the squads working on the product development are tight to 2-weeks sprint, I worked out a fixed, bi-weekly testing day, in collaboration with POs and UXDs. Besides being a remote moderated usability study, the Crowdhouse Testing Day:
- is accessible to anyone in the company (as observer)
- enable squads to gain user insights with low planning effort
- has a fixed format to combine low effort but high performance
- helps squads raise confidence in their initiatives
4. Capture customer feedback
A tremendous amount of user feedback is gathered by sales, support and customer acquisition teams, yet never reach the product team or only in very unstructured and filtered way. This has several drawbacks:
- the product team misses on direct relevant customer feedback
- customer feedback reaches us in a random, incomplete way
- business units feel disconnected from the digital product
- hence their understanding for the user-centric approach remains low
While the Voice of the Customer cannot replace grounded user research, it can be an opportunity to connect with stakeholders. My approach relied on setting-up the basis for collaboration:
- aligning with all customer facing business units
- establishing common ground and document the insights
- exposing the value of capturing user feedback in a structured way
- feed these insights into the product roadmap
Once a systematic, regular and fruitful collaboration has been established, we could see a direct impact on the product development:
- seamless collaboration helped us flag and fix issues quickly
- feedback reached us in a more structured and actionable way
- business units feel valued and want to impact the product development positively
- user feedback is perceived as an opportunity to grow and improve
5. Turn UXR to a strategic asset
Why is UXR a strategic asset for the organisation?
The How To Real Estate Magazine was published in 2021 and distributed to our customers and prospects. Besides articles related to the real estate market, investment trends and market evolution, 2 pages were dedicated to the work of the UXR team. UXR had become an asset for our communication.
- user-centricity shows our customers we care about them and are willing to build a product for them
- User Research remains a young discipline in the eyes of the public: we are pioneers
- a start-up within the real estate industry can have the same weapons as a web giant
- and with regular testing activities, we show concrete and constant effort to improve