Everyone Does Research: A Case Study on Inclusive Qualitative Research Methods for Product Teams at IBM.

IBM Design’s mission was to shift how it approached product strategy, but it led to friction between multidisciplinary teams grasping for a unified vision. Learn lessons from assembling a research team that broke bad data analysis habits and started inclusive generative and evaluative techniques. When I started doing UX research as a designer, we often felt our work and results were ignored by developers, architects, and product managers. After a series of stressful releases full of heated arguments between our multidisciplinary teams, I invested the post-release downtime to better understand the questions sought by the whole team. This lead to reorganizing the research, so that we conducted to include design, product management, and development. The research team gathered and surfaced data that each of the disciplines where focusing on separately to help construct a clearer direction for the product.