Mature and Immature Research Cultures

You can add more research tools and resources with more money. You can even hire freelance researchers or entire research agencies who'll happily produce research reports for a fee. However, you can’t buy your way into a mature research culture. The research culture comprises the behaviors, values, expectations, attitudes norms around research where you work. A mature research culture is one of learning, innovation, testing, discovery, and iteration across all the relevant stakeholders of a product.

A mature research culture is when products are built through testing, discovery, collaboration, and iteration.

You can visualize research culture as the intersection between your stakeholders or business wanting to learn and their ability to actually learn.

You might work in an immature research culture if your stakeholders or business aren’t interested in learning (aka building products in the dark) but also don’t have the capability to learn. Recruitment is unreliable or unsustainable or you have access to very few methods or tools.

Many researchers work in a stagnant research culture. There might be interest in research, but no practical or sustainable ways to conduct that research. The sad part is that a stagnant research culture can be temporary. It might eventually devolve into an immature or resistant research culture. In a stagnant research culture, it’s even more important to showcase the value of research before this devolution.

Without effort, a stagnant research culture might devolve into an immature or resistant one.

The goal is to build and maintain a mature research culture. Qualities and attributes of this kind of research culture are listed below. You can also use the list below to recognize your research culture's maturity.

Qualities of a Mature Research Culture

• Reliable and sustainable recruitment pipeline (aka 30% or greater response rate)
• A brand or recognizable identity when recruiting participants
• Different amounts and types of study compensation or incentives
• Established, valid, and capable way of conducting large-scale quantitative research
• Long-term research strategy (across quarters and years)
• An evolving and consumed research repository
• A research talent development ladder (such as from junior to senior researcher)
• Curious and involved stakeholders
• Reporting templates (for tactical and strategic research)
• Collaboration and joint research across different data-based teams (such as with data science, employee analytics, or finance)
• A mix of tactical and strategic research

Research cultures can grow over time when you conduct both tactical and strategic research. But what exactly is the difference between the two?

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Tactical vs. Strategic Research

You conduct experience research to understand how to improve the product experience. The current and future state of the product is measured by goals (as discussed in Topic 1). The more near-term or operational things to be done are examples of tactical goals. Tactical goals are based on the current product and its problems. They tend to be simpler and focused on what needs to happen this week, this month, and this quarter.

Examples of Tactical Goals

• Increase sign-ups by 10% by the end of the month
• Reduce friction in the cart to decrease cart abandon by 8%
• Retain 5,000 more news subscribers this quarter

On the other hand, strategic goals are used to give the entire company direction and purpose.

Examples of Strategic Goals

• Propose potential non-European markets to enter in the next three years
• Identify technology trends in the consumer healthcare space to help the business adjust their five year roadmap
• Launch a new wearable product by 2024

Based on the goal your research is designed to support, you’ll run either tactical or strategic research. Tactical research is focused on goals and problems that have to do with things like preference, discoverability, or usability of features or products. Strategic research is focused on the larger market a product exists in and unmet needs that the competitors, the business or the product doesn’t address. You can get a closer look at both in the table below or in the next handbook, Recognizing Fruitful Questions.

Fruitful focuses on tactical, product-focused research for two reasons: first, businesses spend a lot of their time, energy, and money on making decisions to reach day-to-day tactical goals, and second, tactical research can lead to direct product improvements helping you quickly showcase the value of experience research to stakeholders.

You might be conducting both kinds of research based on how your team is structured. But your long-term goal should be to help stakeholders conduct their own short-term tactical research as effectively as possible. This allows you to focus on big, ambiguous, and complex problems or the problems that stakeholders can’t or don’t want to study.

Tactical research builds research culture; strategic research strengthens it.

In fact, your research culture is primarily built through tactical research. Stakeholders learn about the product and make smarter, daily decisions to improve the lives of those that use the product. Having posters on the wall about “empathy” doesn’t translate into better user experiences or more meaningful products. But the regular act of learning and discovery will.

But what if you can only conduct tactical research? What if you struggle to even run a single tactical study at all? Struggling to get meaningful research of any kind can be a real indication that you don’t work in a research mature culture. That means you have to look to build and foster one.

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You must build your research culture

A mature research culture can’t be bought or grown overnight. Think about some of the most successful research organizations out there. Companies like Google, Netflix, and Microsoft have mature research cultures and have fostered a culture of learning and discovery. But this didn’t magically or randomly happen. A mature research culture was built slowly and steadily over years with different researchers.

You hold the power to grow your research culture and make it fruitful.

Take stock of where you are now. You hold the power to make research fruitful. Use it. Get creative, and don’t get discouraged if things don’t pan out. Building and sustaining a research culture is a long-term process, built over months, not days. Below are some additional pieces of advice on slowly growing your research culture.

Ways to Grow your Research Culture

• Focus on small, tactical, qualitative studies to start
• Make it easy for stakeholders to view research live (like during a usability test or interview)
• Work hard to maximize a little budget
• Involve stakeholders whenever and however you can
• Budget tasks to improve research operations every quarter
• Create and use a research roadmap and backlog
• Report in different ways (not just in emails or with long slide decks)

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Handbook Closing Thoughts

The best part of research is once you learn something valuable, it’s hard to act like you didn’t learn it. Businesses that build products with research can recognize bad ideas and issues coming in the future and make changes now to avoid them. Products built without research tend to have more features, more buttons, more headaches for businesses, and very little value for the people they set out to help. Even one round of interviews can help your stakeholders reframe the problem and catch bad ideas. And make no mistake, good research can not only catch but kill bad ideas.

The purpose of research is learning. What gives research its focus are the research questions you set out to study. But what exactly are research questions?