Process of Rapid UX Research Ops & Continuous Discovery using JTBD & Innovation Sprint
Continuous Discovery, Continuous Research, Rapid Research, Research Program, Research Process or Operations (ResearchOps). No matter the term you use, it’s all about the same concept.
ResearchOps is a systematic, repeatable, quick process to gather, and share information as a team and act upon it in the most efficient way, a process, talent, education, and tooling that can be used in product discovery, agile, sprints, venture design, corporate or startup studio, and anywhere where some degree of research, innovation, scientific approach is needed regularly.
And considering the current state of the world, it’s everyone and everywhere. Like how you were building software or manufacturing cars where you followed a lean, agile, repeatable process again and again…
Research and innovation is no different. The productivity of knowledge workers over the past century didn’t improve much and now everything is changing faster than ever. Having a basic research, scientific, data-driven mindset and skills today is becoming a basic expectation of an educated person. Humanity and every organization, public or private, is on the lookout for better ways to learn, share knowledge, and discover new opportunities, technologies, products, or services by minimizing risks, waste, and resources needed to achieve higher impact.
The faster you learn, the faster you earn.
I am writing this short story for executives, decision-makers, and beginners into applied research and continuous innovation in business who want to minimize risks and increase the ROI of research and innovation. If you want to understand how the process works end-to-end and how to replicate methods of every most successful startup from Silicon Valley in history, if you want to build your startup and become an entrepreneur, if you are a solo or a junior researcher in a new company without peers and don’t know where to start and how to organize all that chaos, if you are a marketer or any professional who is learning about research, if you are a UX consultant or strategist who works with clients, if you a leader or an executive, a C-level who wants to establish a startup or corporate venture design studio in your holding or corporation, then keep reading.
This is a second story in Innovation Sprint series.
Process of Rapid UX Research Ops & Continuous Discovery using JTBD & Innovation Sprint
Applied Scientific Method in Practice in Business
Before I begin, let me ask you to close your eyes and go back to when you were at school in physics or science or biology class where you were introduced to the “Scientific Method”.
You probably were asked to take specific tasks, questions, assumptions, and equipment and formulate your hypotheses, observe what you see, and write down observations in your journal or notebook. Then analyze the results and present what have you learned.
Since you were a kid you have been similarly learning everything. You were observing, or speaking modern professional language - “collecting data” everything around you. You were finding some patterns in this data and forming new mental models in your mind, analyzing that data even if you were not recognizing that. This is what it means to “learn”.
Now in the age of Artificial Intelligence (AI), computers “learn” the same way. Engineers give a lot of data to them. Algorithms then analyze all that data. Other algorithms then form mental models in the end.
And guess what? Businesses can “learn” in the same way. People, collectively, can learn similarly.
Below is a reminder how what the Scientific Method looks like, and how it can be applied in a business setting. It is a circular process like lean startup, or agile. It’s not linear. You start from no confidence and evidence at all to more clarity, confidence, and evidence.
In business and practice, research doesn’t end with doing analysis, sitting inside the office, and some interviews. Research ends only when you take it into the real world by running any kinds of tests or experiments in the real world, or a lab at least. If it’s an early-stage startup concept, then you have to prove that you can also acquire your contacts, users, and customers, and recruit your own participants.
ResearchOps in Practice with ATHENNO Innovation Sprint Process
Last two diagrams can you help understand how to structure this complicated process more linearly.
Below is the first diagram. The overview of the process.
This continuous research process can help you align your organization, and integrate it with agile or product delivery or development in a regular cadence, however, it is better to think about absolutely everything you do even on the delivery, and production side as a continuation of your research in a form of long-term experiments. Change your mindset from building to learning. Everything you do is a learning opportunity, an experiment, a prototype. Even if you call it production or generally available. Anytime you open Netflix, it runs experiments and you are a participant.
How to do Research - Example of JTBD Innovation Sprint Process
Now let’s zoom in on the main part. You probably don’t have many problems about how to define your goals, right?
What does business research mean? What do UX researchers do? How exactly do we discover opportunities? Test assumptions?
I will use the JTBD method as an example. Keep in mind that there are many different research methods for different situations and you don’t have to do JTBD alone or every time. The underlying Scientific Method for Business works similarly no matter what kind of experiment, study, or test you have.
Lastly, the Diagram 2 below:
Keep in mind that in business… research, even JTBD research shall never stop with Opportunity Score. You have to look into data, the market, and your situation holistically.
Then you continue similarly in the solution experimentation phase, where you will have different types of studies, experiments, and tests and they will be taking a realistic shape of something people can interact with, even if it is just a landing page or a single feature MVP, or a skeleton of an EV self-driving around Singapore, Shenzhen, London or New York.
ResearchOps holistically requires:
Right research talent and education
Right processes
Right methods and there are many different types of studies, tests, and experiments for different situations (from social listening, interviews, fake door landing page tests, and MVPs to usability tests and A/B tests)
Customer Panel which acts like a Mini-CRM for your research team so they could rapidly recruit participants from your loyal customer and user base.
All kinds of tools (to manage research, recruit participants, hire and test researchers, manage experiments, design experiments, perform research, log observations, gather data, analyze data, visualize data, do data science, prototype, organize research repositories and artifacts and so on)
All sorts of databases, repositories and artifacts like Surveys, Opportunity Maps/Scatterplots, JTBD Reports, Segment Summaries or Persona Archetypes, Service Blueprints, Journeys-to-be-done with Personal Metrics or Journey Maps, Job Stories, Questions Banks, Insights Repositories, Knowledge Base, OKRs, Interview Reports, JTBD Behavioral Forces and a Timeline, Observations, Hypotheses, Screening Criteria, etc.
I’ve seen many people and organizations who tried to build their systems from scratch and everyone always underestimates how much it requires. Research is not just a bunch of templates, documents, or diagrams. You need to have actual researchers to perform research and, like with engineers, you don’t want to tell them how they shall do their job, they are experts in their job themselves and know how to do it better than you. It is not something you can learn quickly yourself in a week. I am sorry.
Research is an entire ecosystem. Think of your entire dev department, product managers, design systems, agile process, management tool, DevOps, CI, QA, automation, Git repositories, API docs, PRDs, specs, hosting, IDE, logs, databases, licenses, and so much more. This is what ResearchOps is about. It is way more than just one person and a bunch of templates and no, you can’t use your current tools and linear management systems to roll out continuous research in your organization. Research and knowledge is not linear, it is multi-dimensional.
This was the second story in the Innovation Sprint series. If you need a refresher on a recommended weekly and monthly schedule with kickoff and update meetings in Innovation Sprint in the form of a Lighthouse, or you want to see Innovation Triangle, Market Score, etc. again, then check the first episode out.
Process of Rapid UX Research Ops & Continuous Discovery using JTBD & Innovation Sprint
Thank you for reading this story.
