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As a former educator, I enjoy helping those I work with gain clarity and insight. I work from where you are, not from what I know. Whether mentoring junior researchers or training cross-functional partners on democratized research practices, I aim to deliver knowledge that will keep you growing as a practitioner of your craft.

Coaching Sessions: Case Study of 3 Questions for PMs Working with UXRs

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TL;DR

100% Product Manager’s participation in monthly de-risk coaching sessions.

Role

Cross-Functional Team Lead

Duration

Monthly over 1.5 years

Methods

Subject-Matter-Expert Interviews, Surveys, Design Review, Human-Centred Design, Feedback Review

Tools

Airtable, Slack, Figma, Confluence, Google Docs, Polly.ai, Google Meet

Reach

14 Product Managers (3 Director; 4 Senior PM; 6 PM; 1 Associate PM)

Situation: The Problem

I hold monthly coaching sessions with Product Managers (PMs) at Wattpad to ensure Research and Product share the same drivers and blockers. In a previous session, I toured the PMs through Experience Research offerings - methods and tools - so the PMs better understood when, why, and how we use each. For this particular session, I surveyed the PMs to discover their needs, and then modelled future sessions.

Task: What Answers Do We Need?

For this session, I wanted to know three things (and suggested they select all that apply, visible by the percentages):

  1. What’s working for you with your UXR partnerships?

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Getting insights I need (78%)

I’m able to make more informed product decisions (78%)

I understand our users better (56%)

UXR is essential for identifying potential future product opportunities (56%)

Time to insights has improved (33%)

  1. What could be improved in your partnerships with UXR (qualitative, open-ended question = text results below)?

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Working more closely with data scientists

Limitations to research discovery

Knowing what questions to ask

Product use cases

Product discovery, improvements, and problem identification

  1. What would I, as a PM, like to know more about (select all that apply, visible by the percentages)?

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Appraising risk (78%)

User workflows (56%)

Research limitations (44%)

Insights interpretation (44%)

Asking research discovery questions (33%)

Developed Slide Deck to show results.

Action: How I Solved The Problem

Prioritizing the results above, I designed and offered the following resources to not only improve the PMs and our product offerings, but also to bolster cross-functionality.

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  • Weekly User Chat Guide & Resources (Voice of the Customer program, discussed here in my portfolio)

  • Video tour (using Loom) of how to access and use our Insights Repository Airtable.

  • UXR Office Hours - biweekly sessions to hone PMs democratized research craft.

  • Developed a Research Risk Matrix tool to illustrate low-and-high lift research (not incl. in above screengrab, but here).

Result: Metrics Unlocked

The survey results aided in strengthening the Research team’s cross-functional relationship with our PM partners, because we could tailor how we work with them for each product vertical.

After this single session:

  1. PMs 50% more confident in drafting questions to ask Analytics or to develop user survey questions.

With coaching support overall:

  1. Shipped more, sooner.

With better awareness of what features or iterations require rigorous testing vs. minimum viable research to bypass additional inquiry, with the Research Risk Matrix.

  1. Tighter and better aligned research & product roadmaps.

Decreased timeframes for desk, competitor, and market research.

Next Time: Scaling Considerations

Concision over verbosity. In the past year I’ve edited my communication processes, aiming for easier explanations in as few words as possible. I know this will increase participation and usability of my stakeholder surveys, research decks, and presentations.