Project management for UX researchers
5 key skills for successful and impactful research
“It’s crucial to wear a project management hat regardless of what roles you’re in.”
Project management skills are key in my day-to-day responsibilities to ensure impactful research and success. As the first UXR hire of my current company, and a research team of one, it’s important to grow my knowledge and skill sets beyond the role of user research. At the end of the day, people and context are what matter the most. I’ll go over 5 tips that I’ve learned from so many talented coworkers and online resources, particularly along the lines of strategic planning, prioritizing, leadership engagement, effective communication, and influencing without authority.
1. Get a bird’s eye view
Make sure your research supports larger objectives, and is aligned with the company’s vision and mission. Pay attention to the company’s and your team’s high-level roadmap and OKRs. On the one hand, this helps persuade stakeholders to begin a research project by tying back to strategy. On the other, with a growing number of user research requests or needs (which is a great sign that you’re making an impact), this helps you mitigate conflicting priorities and use your time wisely.
Also, learn about how your team is measuring success of the product. What metrics are you using? What is the acceptable threshold? What do you know now, and what’s unknown? Asking good questions helps you design research with the most useful results for validating or signifying decisions that your team needs at the moment.
2. Practice active listening
As UX researchers, we’re good at listening and building rapport with users. It’s not always intuitive to us, however, to apply the same techniques on our team stakeholders. Socializing with stakeholders, and listening actively in meetings and conversations helps you manage good relationships, understand their expectations when setting the goals of a project, and identify potential research needs along the way.
3. Be proactive
When initiating a research project, it’s our responsibility to elicit the team’s input upfront, especially of key decision makers, on their vision and expectations of which direction this research should go and how it could be impactful. You can’t invest enough time in meeting stakeholders, aligning on goals, and getting their buy-ins. Otherwise, regardless of how well you executed the research, you’ll see research reports dropping into the team’s lap and no one knows what to do with them.
4. Develop capacity planning skills
To complete a research project, there are a lot of people involved. For instance, legal teams review and monitor consent forms of a study. Designers prototype interactions based on study tasks. Project managers loop in product roadmap, milestones and any changes along the way. Not to mention how much time recruiting and scheduling might take.
It’s important to hone time estimation techniques and identify dependencies when planning. Take into account team members’ workloads and capacity by talking to them and consulting about effort estimates. Add buffers for tasks that are out of your own control. This ensures that you’d be able to hit the mark and deliver timely.
5. Establish communications
Conduct a stakeholder analysis to identify who the stakeholders are, what their roles are in the project, and best means of communication throughout the research process.
For example, consult high impact stakeholders’ opinions and inputs on the project plan as early as possible and make sure they feel looped in on key decisions. They might be senior managers or directors in the company. This helps set the foundation and gain support for a project.
Second, provide timely updates on progress to active players in your research, such as project managers and designers. Set up regular check-ins and make sure documents (such as research plans) are up to date and available whenever needed. This ensures your research meets its goals of informing product decision making.
Finally, there are additional stakeholders who aren’t directly involved in your research but will be impacted by the decisions made (such as engineers working on another product area). I usually schedule optional brown bag or Q&A sessions to raise awareness, send out summaries to keep them informed of key research results, and make relevant documentations easily accessible for those who are interested. This helps advocate user research and foster collaborations.
Summing up…
Thinking strategically, prioritizing, engaging leadership, communicating effectively, and creating an impact are what make a UXR strong. It’s an ongoing learning process and I hope these tips will help you be more successful.
Definitely check out Google’s Project Management training program on Coursera if you’re interested in honing project management skills. I’ve learned a ton from it!
🍏 Thanks for reading. Happy researching!
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