Scaling User Research practices through product team training
5 training sessions to get the team going on user research and discovery activities.
.jpg)
Agicap scales at lightning speed and its product is constantly evolving : opening to new company typologies, launches of new European markets… The product team went through a major shift: for a decision making process that was part of a fast product development cycle, it was mandatory to acquire trust in user research activities.
At that time at Agicap, the Product team was made of 4 PM, 4 product designers and 1 Product Success. Being more confident, better skilled and better structured in Product Discovery was definitely a number one goal. Agicap has always been conceptualised with and for its users. However user research lacked rigor and efforts were not enough dedicated to the discovery phase.
The team was missing that push to get to it as they felt the gains/reward did not match the amount of time and effort invested. They knew we needed to go further...
Our challenge was double :
In this course of action, the first step was to get a better overview of the team’s needs in terms of training. Because a team is first of all made of individuals, with their unique soft skills and experiences (training, former jobs), we had to understand who they were to figure out how to make them grow.
We collected their individual feedback through a survey to create an adapted training for each of them.
We also strongly believe that the success of a training depends on participants’ engagement. Therefore, we picked 1 research topic, based on a team’s real need for discovery, and made it the guiding thread for the 5 weeks training.
We were ready.
We made a habit of gathering every week for 2 to 3 hours to go through the entire User research process :
Discover or rediscover the User research toolbox. This first session allowed the participants to acquire a common language and to be able to link the right activity to the right need.
Which problem should we address and with which user profile? What do we already know about this problem? What do we expect to learn? Where are our blind spots? Because we know for a fact that a well-framed process is key to a quality and impactful user research, the team understood and tested the framework we proposed to efficiently scale the different topics.
Get access to our discovery framing workshop on Miro.
Master exploratory interview techniques are key: how to write an interview guide? Which research questions need to be asked for which objectives and hypotheses? Which posture to adopt during the session? How not to be biased in the discussion?
Once theory was mastered, we could move on to practice!
Step one : we first re-listened to former interview recordings moderated by the team to analyse what were the moderator’s mistakes and axes for improvement.
Step two: we co-created a moderation guide based on our User Research subject and organised a live interview with a moderator (one of the PMs). The rest of the team was observing from another room. We then debriefed on the moderator’s qualities and possible improvements.
The team learned to generate test hypotheses, to build a protocol based on immersive scenarios, and to gain confidence on posture and observation techniques.
Now that the team leart how to collect evidence (week 3 and 4), they needed to be more powerful in insight generation. We help the team gain a common understanding of what an insight is, how we determine them, why and how to centralize user knowledge to support decision making.
Agicap trusted us to make the Product team grow on User Research activities and when we are writing this article, 8 months after this training, the progresses they made deserve to be celebrated :
