This is a guest post written by Monica Viggars

In this series of articles, our expert coaches answer your burning product-related questions. This month we’re kicking things off with Monica Viggars. Monica has worked across large organizations including The Guardian and Microsoft. She has been coaching for over three years.

Question: How do you incorporate user research into annual objectives? Anon

Monica: I’m going to assume when we’re talking about objectives here that we mean in the more generic sense of goals. I couldn’t help wondering whether the person asking this question works in a business where the leadership doesn't value user research as much as they do, so they’re trying to figure out a way of getting it more focus and attention. But personally, I don’t feel that user research should be an objective or key result – instead, it’s a route to achieving those objectives or results for your business or your users.

It may help to instead ask, how, as product managers and leaders, can we help our businesses better understand the importance of user research and product discovery? And how can this help us achieve our objectives?

On the first point, the way I’ve tackled this in the past is to try and involve the leadership as much as possible in the process – so inviting stakeholders in to observe when you’re running user research sessions. Seeing it with their own eyes – that’s when they often have that lightbulb moment. They may discover, for instance, that some of their own assumptions weren’t quite right and that their users or customers feel differently. Getting them closer to the process is key to helping them understand why it’s important. I also recommend having them input their own ideas and involving them with prototyping.

On the second point, while user research is the process and not the objective, what you can do is to set yourself learning objectives or a learning roadmap by defining the problem space and being clear about what you need to learn and why. In that roadmap you can outline what you aim to explore across each quarter or over a period of time and how you will use user research to help you.

Finally, there’s a third way in which we can think about this question, which is that sometimes objectives can be used to facilitate a change in process. So, for example, if learning cycles are taking too long at your organisation, you might create an objective to speed up the time you spend getting to grips with customer problems. You could then use this objective to outline how you're going to measure success around speeding up user research to facilitate this faster learning pattern.

Unfortunately, there’s no magic wand, and the tension is that stakeholders often want something tangible, whereas user research is always going to be more uncertain because you don't know what you're going to find and what that will mean for your product. But if you remind people of the process and take them along with you, I find that always helps.

Got your own product-related question or a niggling problem you need help addressing? Submit it for an upcoming Dear Coach here.

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