Democratizing Research: What Giving Away Legos Looks Like in Practice

In many organizations, research is seen as a checkbox in the development cycle, rather than an ongoing process of building knowledge and understanding of your customers. This leads to researchers themselves being a bottleneck for many teams and frustration on both sides.

Some organizations have taken a different approach - choosing to view research as an activity and a practice that many teams and roles engage in, allowing researchers themselves to be “player-coaches” on their teams - alternating between providing guidance and being in the field. This workshop will help attendees understand what the role of a researcher is in these kinds of situations and how to build programs and processes that empower partner teams to take part in (and own) research activities themselves.

Through a number of case studies and activities, we will cover:

How to identify where you and your team provide unique value to your organization
Which partner teams are best set up to own research activities (and how to help them)
How investing in the right training and enablement will scale your research efforts AND strengthen the research culture at your organization
What a healthy relationship between research and non-research teams looks like when it comes to using data, informing decisions, and building product roadmaps

This workshop is ideal for experienced researchers and research leaders who are interested and capable of bringing change to their organization’s research practices and want a better understanding of how this can be done.