By Paula Bach (opens in new tab)
Note: This article was originally published on September 17, 2018, on Medium
How organizational structures can support user research in scaling customer obsession
The origin and path of ideas
Where do ideas come from? In most companies, leadership dictates strategies and business direction. Ideas can also come externally — from feedback channels, business and market opportunities, and technologically driven innovations. When ideas come from within, however, teams often try to validate them. This leads to confirmation bias and a configuration that squashes the customer perspective.
We often fail to start with identifying customer problems and rarely make time to explore new ideas based on unmet needs. Of course, most companies bring customers into their processes at some point, but it’s with an inside-out perspective.
To create value and deliver for our customers and our business, we need to become outside-in organizations.
What does that mean?
An outside-in organization creates processes and organizational structures that let designers, product managers, engineers, marketers, and others orient their viewpoint as if they were a customer looking in at the organization’s products. This helps us optimize processes for a customer-first viewpoint rather than technology-first or even business-first viewpoints.
The converse, an inside-out organization, has processes primarily viewed through the company’s own eyes. Looking out at customers as they use the products results in a process oriented to the needs of the organization. Many teams fall victim to this inside-out trap, but making the switch starts with changing which processes are celebrated.
How organizations reinforce the inside-out perspective
Our stakeholders need new ways to think about customers, and user research has a role to play in leading the outside-in movement. Let’s look at leadership reviews and launching a product or service as two examples where many organizations fall short.
In leadership reviews, teams attempt to achieve a green light to continue projects. Leaders often don’t understand user needs because they are so far removed from the process. They decide whether to fund a project by jumping right to technology and business needs without thinking about the customer.
While these reviews do incorporate user data, it’s often in the form of telemetry and other feedback channels where customers ask for and upvote features. It’s difficult to extract needs from feature requests, though, because one suggestion can be related to many different problems, or many suggestions can indicate the same underlying problem. This information often comes from data and analytics teams and user research knows how to tease out these differences. More often than not, teams are good at getting at the “what,” which is necessary — and then user research can come in and help with the “why.” Knowing the “why” helps shape the depth and quality of ideas because it gets at user needs.
Proposed projects in leadership reviews therefore gather data that support project continuation rather than how the project meets unmet needs in the landscape of other offerings. Because of the vision and strategy set forth by leadership, teams create elaborate videos or demos showing how the project looks and feels without questioning its value or usefulness.
Nobody asks, Is this the right thing to build for our customers? Then, once the project is greenlit, work starts. If research identifies issues after the project is in motion, it’s nearly impossible to stop.
Even if leaders fund projects that are useful for customers, launching deadlines render user needs an afterthought. Engineering is optimized for launching on time. When no one weighs the effects of decisions on user experience, technical direction and limitations trump the customer perspective. Again, if research highlights a problem after a course has been chosen, it’s too late to change.
Tensions exist because this process doesn’t allow for knowing who the customer is, understanding her problem, and shaping ideas around solving it. Even if iterations are needed to ensure that an interaction flow is usable or delightful, it’s too late because teams must launch. The consequence? The company launches experiences that are not in high demand, that customers can’t use, and that aren’t needed.
If teams viewed their products through the customer’s eyes, decisions and inquiries would be supported with organizational structures that celebrate customers, thereby enabling an outside-in organization.
As modern business thinker Peter Drucker says, “If you want to do something new, you have to stop doing something old.”
How user research can help
The Microsoft Research + Insight team’s framework orients us to achieve the goals of an outside-in, customer-obsessed organization at scale. It includes the following focus activities for user researchers:
- Research execution: Traditionally what we know user or design research to be. It’s the bread and butter of our discipline.
- Activating insights: Timeless research generates insights (opens in new tab) that can be reused and infused throughout the organization on an ongoing basis.
- Measuring research impact: Our research has impact when customers are at the forefront of decision-making. We must know how our research contributes to decisions and how that affects the customer experience.
- Integrating into the engineering processes with planning: Being proactive about infusing the customer perspective into engineering processes above and beyond one-off studies helps fill gaps and challenges inside-out processes.
It is difficult for a single researcher to shepherd across all four activities. We must reorient research teams so that researchers who specialize in different activities can scale. This helps researchers who spend time on the high-value work of tactical research partner with other researchers to plan, execute, activate, and measure impact, and see whether decisions are being made from the outside in.
How do we know if our approach is working?
Our goal in helping partners shift to outside-in is seeing them take the time to get to know their customer, speak to her needs, and iterate on solutions. When leadership reviews recognize and celebrate the customer perspective, we know we’ve done it. When launching a product or service is a way to delight customers, not just an end goal, we know we’ve done it. And when process iterations are celebrated rather than fought against, we really know we’ve done it.
How are you building an outside-in organization? Tweet us @MicrosoftRI (opens in new tab) or like us on Facebook (opens in new tab) and join the conversation.
Paula Bach is a Principal User Research Manager on the Customer Insights Research team, where she manages a team of researchers digging into next-generation browsing. For over a decade, Paula has produced and evangelized customer insights to help teams make more human-centered product decisions. She earned a Ph.D. in Human-Computer Interaction at the College of Information Sciences and Technology at Penn State University, a Master of Science at Michigan Technological University in Technical Communication, and a bachelor’s degree in Psychology and English from the University of British Columbia. During her career at Microsoft she has helped shape code review and software diagnostic experiences in Visual Studio; documented workflows of data scientists, data engineers, and data analysts for Power BI and Azure Data Factory; studied launching and switching efficiencies in Windows, and examined issues with mobile and cross-device experiences.