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?

Peter Parkes
1 min readFeb 18, 2021

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.

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Peter Parkes
Peter Parkes

Written by Peter Parkes

Founder of Qualdesk, formerly at Made by Many, Skype and Expedia