Workshop:

Summary: 

• To create a thriving research practice, your company will need to be insights-ready. This workshop provides the steps necessary to get you there.

• Concrete outcomes of the in-house workshop include a detailed status quo assessment and an insights-readiness assessment with actionable next steps.

• Prep work: A key contact helps me define the attendant list, and participants fill out a brief pre-questionnaire (app. 20 minutes).

• Maximum 15 attendees, in-person or remote.

• Duration is eight hours including breaks, spread out over one day or two half days.

You already know that a deep understanding of your users and customers will allow you to make more confident decisions, putting you far ahead of the competition. 

What you might not realize is that simply hiring a researcher or training employees to do research isn’t enough to set up your company for success. 

When you introduce research without being insights-ready, researchers will end up on dead-end projects with little to no impact on important business decisions. 

Hiring researchers is a significant investment. Hiring researchers to complete projects with zero company buy-in is a huge financial loss. 

In order to succeed and create a thriving research practice at your company, you need to get your company insights-ready. 

This means diving into your existing company culture: Do your employees have a shared understanding of who your users/customers are? Do they have a shared idea about what research is, or the function research will hold within your organization? How do your employees currently make important business decisions, and do they integrate user insights into this process?

This workshop provides the steps necessary to get your company insights-ready. Getting insights-ready means increased confidence in decision making. It’s also the first step toward building a successful UX research team, attracting top research talent and ensuring your future talent will thrive. 

Who’s it for? 

Any company that:

• Wants to become insights-ready and is prepared to do the work necessary to optimize their business

• Has no formal research function to drive user insights, and wants to know where to start before investing in a formal practice 

• Is planning on the short term to hire their first researcher, and wants to be well-prepared to gain the maximum benefit from their expertise and counsel

• Has a research practice that’s struggling to create the expected impact and wants to improve insights-driven decision-making at all levels of the organization

Outcomes you can expect from this workshop

• Status quo assessment:

  • Key points on where your company converges and diverges on targeted aspects of user/customer knowledge

  • Clarity on how your company defines research and understands its role, and how these assumptions could impact a future research function 

  • An analysis of existing decision-making processes and how user insights are currently integrated (or not) into these processes

• Insights-readiness assessment:

  • Based on the status quo assessment, an insights-ready ranking from sparse to satisfactory

  • Concrete strategies to get your company to a satisfactory insights-ready score

  • Actionable next steps for preparation toward a highly impactful research practice: one that is a valuable contributor to the product development and innovation process, and contributes to more confident and effective business decisions

Who benefits?

• Attendees will vary based on your company size and where you’re at in terms of research and insights integration. As part of our workshop prep, we’ll work on defining this list together. Typical attendees include:

  • Founders/C-suite

  • Company-wide leadership

  • Managers and employees in user-adjacent roles, like product managers, customer success/support, market researchers, data scientists, etc.

  • Employees curious about the mindset shift needed for research to succeed

Who am I?

I’ve built UX research teams from scratch and upskilled existing UX/user research teams, for both B2B and B2C digital product companies. These teams produced insights that transformed decision making, prioritization and roadmap planning. I have 20 years’ experience as a PhD-level researcher and leader, both as a professor in the academic world and in UX research leadership roles. I’ve used my skills as a facilitator and research advocate to gain trust and consensus, from junior designers to corporate executives.

Time investment

• Eight hours including breaks, spread out over one day or two half days

• Key contact will work with me in defining the workshop attendant list

• Participants are requested to fill out a brief pre-questionnaire (app. 20 minutes)

• In person or remote