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After helping build out the research practices at three enterprise startups, I’ve realized that there’s a set of core challenges. Regardless of the industry or company size, the same challenges kept emerging. Educating colleagues on the value of research, recruiting good research participants, sharing research findings effectively, standardizing the feedback collection process, and measuring impact are core functions you’ll need to figure out.

But if you’re aware of these challenges going in, you can learn from others’ experiences and set yourself up for success.

Why you should establish a research practice

User research focuses on “understanding user behaviors, needs, and motivations through observation techniques, task analysis, and other feedback methodologies”. Understanding your users’ needs and challenges will help you focus on the right problem(s), find product market fit, and build more relevant and intuitive products.

Overall, user research helps your company:

• Ensure you’re solving actual problems and building something that people will actually use
• Gather relevant information to focus and direct your design and product strategy
• Reduce bias and provide data to enable more informed decision making
• Shorten the development time frame and save costly rework

While Designers and Product Owners can lead some user research, ultimately it’s best to establish a formal research practice and bring in trained researchers in order to scale. Once your company realizes that they need to invest in research, you can build out the research practice. Read on to understand the core challenges you’ll likely face and how you can approach them.

Building an effective research practice takes time and dedication, but it will be worth the effort!

Core challenge #1: Educating others on the value of research

The first challenge will be explaining your craft to colleagues. While many people will be familiar with basic usability testing and “validating” designs, you’ll need to teach them about the wonders of generative research as well. You’ll need to teach people what research is, how they can partner with you, and when and how they should involve you in various projects.

Cartoon shared on LinkedIn

Tactics I’ve found useful:

• Hold a “ways of working” meeting with core stakeholders to explain your role, how you can help them, and how you can work together.
• Involve your stakeholders as early and often as possible. Collaborate and partner with them so they’re involved and invested in the research.
• Actively socialize your successes by showcasing a case study at a lunch and learn, sharing design and product progress in periodic newsletters, and/or showing internal stakeholders and participants how you integrated their feedback into the product.
• Cultivate partnerships and nurture advocates. Did your support make a Product Owner more confident and effective? Invite them to share their positive experiences with others and even leadership. Did your research make clients feel more heard and valued? Have their Account Manager jot down a glowing quote and share it with Sales and Support to help recruit more research participants.

Core challenge #2: Recruiting research participants

Ask any Researcher and recruiting high quality participants will likely be a top challenge they face. Particularly in startups with smaller client rosters and research budgets, recruiting can be a challenge. But if you can’t find participants, then you can’t do research.

Over time, focus on building trust and demonstrating value, and you’ll soon gain respect. As colleagues learn more about research and its value to the business and your clients, they’ll be more likely to connect you with users to interview.

Tactics I’ve found useful:

• Build cross-functional relationships with people who can help connect you with users. Introduce yourself to Customer Success, Client Relationships (i.e. Account Managers), Client Partnerships, Sales, and any internal teams who use the product.
• Show don’t tell and pull back the “black curtain” of research. Run internal research sessions or invite folks to join a client session so they get more familiar and comfortable with research. Once they understand what research entails, they’ll be more likely to connect you with users.
• Make it easy for people to help you! Do the leg work and draft an outreach email that colleagues can send to clients. Include what to expect in a research session, the time commitment, and if they need to prepare anything ahead of time.
• Get scrappy. Look through Salesforce to find clients and review Pendo/Amplitude/Google Analytics to find users you can reach out to.
• Secure a budget. Build your case by tracking how long it takes to recruit for a study and continue to demonstrate the value of research. For best results, start small and then consider increasing your budget ask over time.

Core challenge #3: Effectively sharing findings throughout the organization

Once you’ve done great research, you need to collate your findings, share them with stakeholders, and persuade them to act. Your findings need to be clear, concise, actionable, and engaging. Explore different mediums and channels to share your research to help you find what works best for your team.

Additionally, developing a central research repository will allow you to store and share your findings with the wider organization. This can reduce duplicative work, increase transparency, and help ensure everyone’s on the same page.

Tactics I’ve found useful:

• Experiment with the type of deliverable in order to find what works best for this team and this project. Deliverables could be research reports, key findings documents, analysis in Miro, comments in Figma, workshops, or highlight videos. Play around and see what works. Use variety to your advantage to keep teams motivated and inspired.
• Experiment with the type or combination of communication channels you use. This could be research readout meetings, sharing findings with the wider team over Slack, posting research in a company-wide meeting or forum, or distributing a newsletter.

Core challenge #4: Standardizing and centralizing the feedback collection process

While the research team will conduct research, synthesize the findings, and collate insights, there will also be a plethora of client feedback trickling or even rushing in. Does your product invite users to leave Feedback directly? Is Sales conducting win/loss reviews of deals? Is Customer Support inundated with help calls over a new feature? All of this feedback is valuable, and it needs to be considered and synthesized as well.

Across the organization, you need to collect, review, group, prioritize, and act on feedback. But what does this process look like? You’ll need to work cross-functionally to determine the best approach for your company.

Tactics I’ve found useful:

• Understand the current process by conducting stakeholder interviews. Where and how are people currently collecting feedback? Where does feedback come from? How is it collected and stored? How often is it reviewed? How is it acted upon?
• Determine your key stakeholders (likely Leadership, Product, Design, and Engineering) and build a coalition. Work together to determine your goals and needs in standardizing feedback.
• Explore potential solutions to aggregate feedback centrally. This could be anything from formal tools like ProductBoard or Pendo Feedback to a more informal central Google folder.
• Determine the feedback review process and iteratively refine and improve it. Check in with stakeholders regularly to discuss how things are going, provide ongoing support, and make adjustments as needed.

Core challenge #5: Defining, measuring, and tracking research impact

Finally, you’ll need to measure the value you bring the organization. While you’ll likely have strong qualitative and anecdotal evidence, businesses often crave quantitative proof. Explore how you can pair qualitative data with quantitative metrics to build a solid case and quantify your impact.

Work with Product and Design to determine what user interactions and outcomes you care about most. From there, you can select relevant metrics and begin to measure and track your impact.

Tactics I’ve found useful:

• Start small and collect baseline metrics on core interactions. Then over time explore additional metrics and touch points to develop a more holistic evaluation framework.
• Explore what metrics work best for your situation. Consider Goal Completion Rate, Customer Effort Score, Customer Satisfaction, Net Promoter Score, Net Value Score, System Usability Score, HEART framework, Product Market Fit.
• Develop a framework. Collect multiple metrics so you can triage the data and get a more holistic picture of your product. What can you realistically measure? What metrics can you act on? What are your short and long term goals?
• Determine your review process and cadence — who will review the metrics? How often? How will you act on the results?

In building out the research practice at three different enterprise B2B startups, I’ve come across these five core challenges at each company. It takes time, dedication, patience, and creativity to address them, but incremental progress begins to compound and over time your influence, partnerships, and expertise will be increasingly understood, respected, and sought out. Knowing what to expect can help you prioritize and prepare, and hopefully you can learn from others who have faced similar challenges. Keep your head up and best of luck!

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The UX Collective donates US$1 for each article we publish. This story contributed to World-Class Designer School: a college-level, tuition-free design school focused on preparing young and talented African designers for the local and international digital product market. Build the design community you believe in.