Revitalizing Research Training for Cross-functional Teams and PWDRs

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Hi, fellow Champions! Hope everyone is doing well (and staying cool if you’re in heat wave territory 🥵 ). I posted this to the Re+Ops community, but I figured I’d leverage y’all as well. I’m working on some work streams for evaluative research training. My org has 3 dedicated UXRs & a ReOps pro (me waving-from-afar-right), plus a number of PWDRs (People Who Do Research) including designers, product managers & engineers. The overall goal here is to revitalize our existing research capabilities by educating our cross-functional partners on how to craft effective research plans by leveraging existing templates & workflows. This will allow PWDRs to lead smaller (tactical) research projects, allowing the UXRs to focus on execution & analysis of larger (strategic) projects. I want to be able to reach as many people as possible, both who are already doing research & those who aren’t. For those here who’ve created guidelines for evaluative testing for non-researchers, are there projects you included that should/shouldn’t leverage self-service? What about these projects makes them ideal (or not) for self-service research? Additionally, how do you measure the success of outcomes within evaluative research training processes? 🤔

  • Avatar of Jeremie Gluckman
    Jeremie Gluckman
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    Thanks for all the great context, Heather! Naki Ossom would be great to connect with about this! Would you like me to introduce you?

  • Avatar of Jo Squire
    Jo Squire
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    Really interesting topic. We are just re-evaluating the last 12 months of us following a similar structure. We pulled together plans, and templates for evaluative research and basically allowed PWDR free range to go conduct evaluative research themselves. Looking back what we found was:

    • There is still a need for a researcher to check the brief and decide if it is a suitable self-service study or not.

    • Allowed for us to make sure the methodology and approach was correct

    • Sometimes this checkpoint resolved in the research not going ahead (risk wasn't high enough, and better to launch and learn)

    • Something worth pointing out is that most evaluative research actually contained a bit of discovery (it tends to be that way in my org), so it's never a true evaluative study. This was also a key reason why the check-in with a researcher was really important

    Hope that helps!

  • Avatar of Jeremie Gluckman
    Jeremie Gluckman
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    Thank you Jo Squire! 🎉