Research 101 Training

Background

This is not a case study. I offer up this short vignette to share my experience delivering a Research 101 Training.

I was working for a multinational company of over 90,000 employees, with keen capabilities in the physical sciences. Product Management, however, was a new and upcoming organization. While human-centered design was foundational to the newly formed PM group, in such a large organization it was still being spread among PMs throughout .

I was asked to speak to a group of Product Managers attending a week long bootcamp. In this session, the topic was Discovery and the role it plays in product management. This was an exciting speaking engagement for me — just the kind of captive audience I wanted.

Approach

I started off with a bit of user research, given I had the attendees email addresses. I simply asked three questions:

When you hear the term “Product Discovery,” what comes to mind?
What are the top barriers product managers face at [company] today?
What does success mean as a product manager at [company]?

I aimed my talk at Product Manager audience, using slides from previous speakers, and adding information from my experience. I received eleven responses from my survey and presented to an online room of approximately thirty.

Outcomes

I learned from survey responses that most Product Managers had the right concept about Discovery but a few considered this phase of research to be about a market scan, developing product requirements, and used a heavy business-focus language. Most named barriers were not tightly related to Research but of those that were, the issues were a lack of use cases, low product use and adoption. Finally, with regard to defining success - I was quite surprised to see most answers related to the end user and the user experience. Only one defined success as acceptance by the PO/business team.

The real outcome aside from my survey was the feedback received from the audience afterwards. They highly valued the methodology slide and asked a lot of questions throughout my presentation, especially as I tried to make the case that “Good design = good business.” Critical feedback from which I learned, was to be more concrete in two ways: 1) offer at least one use cae and 2) be succinct and clear on how implement continuous discovery in a project.