Why user research is a product

Who is user research for? And what does it help them? And why do the answers to those trivial questions matter?

I’ve always found it helpful to treat user research as a product:

• Who: It’s a product for PMs, designers, engineers, marketers, sales people and many others in your organization
• What: It helps them make better decisions, more quickly, about what to design, build and sell

Why is this helpful?

Once you start treating research as a product, you very quickly realize that you have a ton of great product concepts and tools you can use make research more impactful:

• The ­minimum viable research required to achieve a particular objective
• How to incorporate continuous improvement into your research process
• The role of spontaneous discovery in research
• The ‘integrations’ that your research outputs need to have to connect them into other parts of your process and systems
• Broadening the impact of your research by marketing it better

I spoke last week with Nimrod Priell on his podcast Like at the End of the Funnel about some of these concepts, and you can listen to the full episode here.