How to thrive as a UX research manager

*I originally presented this as a talk at User Research London 2022

I want you to think about the worst manager you ever had.

Can you picture this person? It could be your current manager. It could be a manager you had when you were a teenager. What made them a bad manager?

If you are thinking of a negative experience, you might be feeling pretty awful right now. If you are affected, take a deep breath and try to clear your mind. Now, do the opposite.

Close your eyes, and think about the best manager you ever had.

Can you picture this person? Again, it could be your current manager. It could be a manager from years ago. What made you think of them? Why were they the best?

Now, let’s talk about you.

Are you already managing researchers, whether or not you have a formal title?

Would you like to have this role in the future?

Or perhaps you don’t want to be a manager?

Why is management so important?

Let’s start by looking at things from a broader perspective, to understand more about the power and solemnity of this role.

In their 2022 report on the State of the Global Workplace, Gallup found that 21 percent of employees are engaged at work, and 33 percent of employees are thriving in their overall wellbeing.

21 percent are engaged at work. That doesn’t sound great.

In another recent report, Gallup found the biggest source of employee burnout was “unfair treatment at work.” This was followed by:

-an unmanageable workload,

-unclear communication from managers,

-lack of manager support, and

-unreasonable time pressure.

So employees' main reasons for burnout can be traced back to bad managers.

People leave managers, not companies. We’ve all heard it before. Chances are, if you have a bad manager, you probably don’t like your job.

If you love your job, and you’re engaged at work? Gallup has found that business units with engaged workers have 23 percent higher profit than business units with miserable workers. Engaged workers come to work, and they stay at their jobs longer. These companies also see higher rates of customer loyalty.

People management is important. Not just to the people being managed, not just to the manager, but also to the company as a whole.

In other words, everyone wins when companies have good managers.

Your management journey

Let’s talk about three important parts of your management journey: What’s going to change when you decide to take on a management role, how you can thrive once you’re in the role, and things to consider before you take the plunge.

The focus here is on your responsibility for your people. That means your reports. How your new role will impact them and you.

There are other important things to consider that won’t be covered here. Some include:

-Feedback, and the best ways to provide it

-How the UXR maturity of your company will impact your role

-Stakeholder management

-Research evangelism or advocacy

-Research operations

All of these are essential parts of UX research management, and are better explored elsewhere.

Why am I so passionate about this topic?

I’ve spent nearly 20 years in management roles, first in a university where I managed large lecture courses and student research projects, from the bachelor to the post-doc level. In the university setting I never had the word “manager” in my title. It took a career pivot into industry for me to realize that I had been developing and using those skills throughout my career - managing research craft, and managing people.

I’ve worked as a founding lead UX researcher-turned-manager and as a hybrid lead UX researcher/manager. In these roles I’ve achieved buy-in for UX research across the product organization, rapidly grown UX research teams, and created research vision and strategy for impactful research.

Now, I’m a consultant. I’m talking about management because I’ve realized that I am obsessed with getting things set up right.

As a consultant this is mainly about making sure companies are insights-ready - creating an environment where a research practice can thrive. This process involves creating research vision and strategy, and prepping operations. It also involves creating the best conditions to mature a team, getting the right people in the right roles, and getting them to stay and grow with that team. Management is absolutely crucial there.

What’s going to change?

Let’s start by talking about what’s going to change. Let’s say you’re getting ready to make an internal move. A promotion. Your manager has hinted that a role is opening, and she thinks you’d be a great fit. You’d be inheriting an existing team.

Or maybe you have been in an IC role for a while - maybe as a lone UX researcher - and your company is suddenly accelerating hiring. You’ve been tasked with growing a team to expand on what you were previously doing solo.

In these scenarios, things are going to change in your daily work life. Let’s focus on three key areas you need to keep in mind: Perspective, Priorities, and Hierarchy.

If you’re lucky, your existing manager will also address these issues, especially if you’re about to become a first-time manager.

But something else might happen. You - or your manager - might immediately focus on the tasks that will change. Namely, you’ll be responsible for hiring, managing, and evaluating a team of researchers.

I’ve had these conversations with my managers, and I understood the urgency to focus on tasks. Imagine hearing the following: You have a headcount for three researchers and you have to hire them in the next four months or we lose the budget!

Or: If you’re their manager, you should really have 1:1’s with the whole team. If it gets too much you can cut this back - 30 minutes every two weeks is fine.

These important tasks will take up a lot of your time. But: there are larger issues surrounding these tasks, and they will fundamentally change the way you work. Let’s dive in.

1. Changing…Perspective

You know how you can use a touch screen to zoom into a photo or map to see a detail and then pinch your fingers to zoom out again? I love that feature. I sometimes find myself doing it when I’m reading something on paper. Have you ever done that?

This zooming mechanism is a useful metaphor for the perspective you will need to take as a manager.

You’ll no longer focus on a handful of research projects where you are the craft expert, or a handful of stakeholders you know well. You’ll be zooming out…and out…and out….to your entire organization and the impact research has or could have on that ecosystem. As you move up, you zoom out your perspective.

But you won’t stay zoomed out. Regularly, daily, usually multiple times a day, you’ll be zooming back into people - into that individual person on your team and their specific needs.

Why all this zooming in and out? You’re now responsible for a research team, and its development. To ensure your team excels you’ll need to come up with a vision for UX research at your company. We’ll talk about how to do this a bit later. Your vision needs to be in line with the company's vision, but it also needs to resonate with your reports. Zoom out - zoom in.

2. Changing…Priorities

All that zooming in and zooming out? It’s there for the company, but it’s also there for your team. It’s how you’ll ensure that you choose the right people, and they - and additionally you - can thrive on this team.

The priority that will change the most drastically is your responsibility for people.

In Resilient Management, Lara Hogan says, “One of the hardest assumptions to kick when you start out as a manager is that everyone behaves like you and has the same needs as you.”

We’ll come back to how you can put this assumption aside, and discover the uniqueness of each of your reports.

3. Changing…Hierarchy

Let’s get real for a minute. Whether we want to admit it or not, management is a lot about hierarchy. Or perhaps better put…ego.

This role probably represents a promotion for you. That’s exciting, and something to be proud of. It feels like - it is - a major step up in your career. But let’s be honest. There is some ego involved here. You get to update your LinkedIn profile. You’re probably - hopefully - getting a higher salary. Maybe some new perks. You get to wake up in the morning and think, I am a manager.

This is all normal, and perfectly OK. I did it too. Remember all those years I spent managing in academia without the title? It felt great to finally get that management title. But that change you’re experiencing, which I also realized really quickly? It isn’t just about you. It’s about everyone around you, your friends, your family and especially your team at work.

This change of hierarchy happens not only with your team but also with your own manager. Keep in mind, your boss might be managing a manager for the first time.

How you can thrive

With a continued focus on your people, let’s talk about some ways that you can thrive as a UX research manager, based on these same key areas: Perspective, Priorities, and Hierarchy.

Remember, as Gallup also pointed out earlier, this isn’t just about your success. It’s about the success of your team. When they thrive, you thrive.

1. Vision: An essential part of your perspective change

Let’s go back to zooming out and zooming in. The process of creating a vision is one of the clearest illustrations of the perspective change you will undergo.

You need to know - your boss needs to know - her boss needs to know - how do you see your UX research practice contributing to the success of the company? The best way to communicate this is to create a clear research vision.

Vision is used in different contexts. There’s the vision you have for your team. The role UX research plays in a particular product vision. Instead, I want you to zoom all the way out and think about how your vision for UX research aligns with what your company’s overall vision is.

To craft this vision statement, you’ll need to zoom out and understand the existing company mindset toward users and research. This means interviewing top leadership, and observing how they bring insights into their decision making. You will excel at this process because you are a researcher, and this is an internal research project.

As you create your vision statement, remember: It must consider the perspective of your stakeholders, who will often be business-oriented: they want growth, they want success, and these goals may not be fully aligned with research insights. At the same time, this is your chance to get the perspective of and advocate for your research team. A vision is meant to be aspirational, and it’s up to you to get buy-in from broader leadership and your current and future research team.

It’s likely that no one asks you to think about vision. As we talked about earlier, it could be that you’re asked to focus on the tasks - like hiring and evaluating your team members.

But for UX research - which is often a new function at a company, and also one that requires a great deal of stakeholder engagement in changing existing perspectives - vision is essential.

2. Use your researcher empathy to refocus priorities

As a people manager, your team is your priority.

You are trained as a researcher. That means you have fine-tuned your ability to empathize with others. We are taught this is mainly empathy for our users.

As IC researchers, we learn that we also need empathy to understand our stakeholders’ perspectives, to find the best way to collaborate and share captivating research insights.

This empathy will also serve you well as a UX research manager. There are three things you can do to draw on this empathetic perspective when refocusing your priorities: Focus on how your reports will feel when they leave your team, view the 1:1 as an exclusive space for their growth, and create and regularly steer a plan for their future success.

First: what do I mean by focusing on the end? Well, management is like being in a relationship that you know will end someday. It’s a little strange, right? We don’t enter romances or friendships expecting them to end. But it’s different at work. Your team member is in the role because you both felt it was a good fit. They will follow a growth trajectory. If things go well, they will eventually outgrow the job you hired them for. That’s a success, and it’s valuable to communicate this to them explicitly.

Second: the 1:1 is an exclusive space for your reports. Here’s what happened to me. I was a couple months into being a manager, managing people who were previously my colleagues. Just before our 1:1, I was wrapping up a meeting with a particularly difficult stakeholder. I was frustrated and ready to vent. My colleague-turned-report hopped on Zoom. I took a deep breath and…you guessed it…started venting.

This was unfair to her. First thing I needed to keep in mind: the 1:1 was never about me. It was about her. It’s never a conversation between friends, no matter how friendly you are. The 1:1 might be your team member’s only chance to step out of the day-to-day and take a bird’s eye view of their progress, celebrations, and challenges. It’s not only about whether interviewee #6 has been rescheduled or how the analysis is coming along. The 1:1 is their only chance to speak to the person who has a great deal of control over their work situation and advancement.

Third: focus on your report’s future success. Once a quarter, set up a discussion where you zoom out and talk about their dreams and goals. Why is this so important? Again, it clears the air. It could be that your report wants your job someday. Or maybe they want to be doing something entirely different. If you’re there to help them grow, they will feel like you’re advocating for them, not just the role or even the company.

3. Thrive in a hierarchy shift

How can you thrive in such a dramatic hierarchy shift? Start by addressing the elephant in the room. Things have changed - you’re the boss! This change can be tricky, especially if your reports were previously peers. This is going to feel awkward. You’re now existing in an artificial hierarchy that wasn’t there before.

Embrace it. Embrace the awkward conversations that will follow. Let your reports know that you don’t plan to avoid discomfort or conflict or tension, you want to address it with them, and ask them to do the same.

Remember that story I shared, about starting to vent to my new report about a stakeholder? That led to a really important conversation about how our interaction had to change. Because she felt able to express that openly, we were able to grow our new relationship.

You can ease this transition by setting the tone with your first 1:1 questions. There’s some excellent advice on this in Lara Hogan’s book Resilient Management. She provides a series of questions for getting to know your report, my favorite being the question about how to know when your report is grumpy. Lara also suggests you cover topics related to “feedback and recognition” and “goals and support.”

This change will also take place with your own manager. If your manager doesn’t initiate, you're going to have to ask her the tough questions: How will you both ensure that you get a 1:1 focused on your development, and also have time to discuss your team’s challenges? What are her expectations of you in this new role? How is your team evaluated, and how are you evaluated in relation to that? In his book The First 90 Days, Michael D. Watkins has a great chapter on how to “Negotiate Success” including steps to negotiate - with your manager - your own 90-day plan of what you’ll focus on and how you’ll get it done.

Finally, aim to be a humble manager.

Remember - you don’t know everything. That’s OK! Even if you’ve been at the company for a while, you’re still new in the role. You might be tempted to throw your weight around but this will not be well received. It can be scary to say you don’t know.

It will be even harder to stay open and curious when some people resist your work. Do your best to understand their motivations. Initial adversaries could become your greatest allies, if they feel understood.

Before you take the plunge

Ready to take the plunge? Here are some final tips before you do so:

First: Educate yourself about management. I’ve mentioned some of the books that have most inspired me, and I recommend them wholeheartedly. But it’s not just book learning. It’s peer learning - find others going through the same challenge. Find mentors. There are many platforms out there designed just for this sort of support. If your company offers internal training, jump at the chance to learn.

Second: It could be that all these new responsibilities aren’t your sole focus. Instead you are also going to have to essentially continue your old senior/lead job in addition to these new responsibilities. What should you do? Push back. The hybrid UX research manager/UX research lead role is unsustainable.

In The Making of a Manager, Julie Zhuo explained this so well: “Your role as manager is not to do the work yourself, even if you are the best at it, because that will only take you so far. Your role is to improve the purpose, people, and process of your team to get as high a multiplier effect on your collective outcome as you can.”

If you do the craft, you are contributing an additive amount not a multiplicative one. If you are in a role that makes this a necessity, your organization is not getting your best in this job. Your reports will not get the full attention of a manager that they need, and you will be operating in two very different work contexts, simultaneously.

Pushing back, by the way, is an excellent opportunity to practice your managing up skills by bringing this up to your manager.

Now if you’re considering this role, or already in it, I urge you to make a plan to survive this hybrid state. That plan is a lot about time management. It should not entail you working nights analyzing interview transcripts and preparing insights decks because your days are filled with meetings. That is not sustainable. My suggestion is to start from the people - prioritize your team, the time you need to spend with them and alone working for them, and then work backward from there to see how much time - if any - you can still contribute to IC work.

Finally: Let’s talk about self-reflection and self-care. Nearly everything about your daily work life will be different. Your long blocks of deep work time will mostly be gone. You’ll be in a lot of meetings. Your focus will have to shift all the time. Company politics will suddenly become very present in your environment.

Some people thrive, and others find out it’s not the best fit. It might turn out that management is not a good path for you. I’m sure you’ve heard it before, but I want you to hear it again: It’s OK if this is the case. I’m not the only one saying this. More and more, companies are recognizing that management is not the only place to put excellent performers. Some of us just do better in expert individual contributor roles.

Have the courage to reassess if it’s the best thing for you and if it’s not, pivot back to an expert IC role. That’s also best for your team or your future teams.

A word on self-care. You know on an airplane, when they ask you to put on your own oxygen mask before helping those around you? Because you won’t be much help to others if you don’t care for yourself first?

It could be a slightly overused metaphor. But it really does fit. As a manager, it’s others you are responsible for now. You are no good to them if you’re not taking care of yourself.

Why do you want to be a manager?

Before you agree to that promotion or take that job, ask yourself why. What is your motivation for taking this role? Why do you want to be a manager?

The ultimate way to thrive in this role is to make sure you can articulate an answer to that question.

I know some of you might feel like you don’t have a choice - if you want to move up, you need to become a manager. It’s a promotion - of course I’m going to say yes!

I get it. I really do. It’s not something you need to decide today. The decision can happen at any time - before you’ve been asked to be in a management role, or when you’re already in one. You will also grow and change over time and so might your perspective on the role. What’s not a good fit now might be great in a few more years.

Just remember, this decision is no longer just about you. In a management role your responsibility to others is explicit.

Why do you want to be a manager? Your boss may not ask. The organization may not ask. It is your responsibility to figure it out. Your motivations will reflect in how you do your job. You won’t be able to hide that from your team.

A final visualization

Earlier, I asked you to think about how the best manager you’d ever had. Remember this person? Think about a positive moment you had with them. How does that make you feel?

If you’re going to be a manager, keep this in mind: Someday, your reports could be visualizing you. Remembering how you made them feel, and what you did to make them feel that way.

Like Gallup tells us, if things don’t go well, you could very well be the reason that they leave the company. But if you thrive, you could be the impetus for their professional success. You could be changing lives.