How to Scale Research When You Don’t Have Enough Researchers

Product discovery is research. In most organizations it manifests as a democratized version of research that “anyone” can do. There’s a truth and a danger to this. The truth is that anyone can do some level of research. The danger is that the research done in these contexts ends up being done poorly or ends up with badly drawn conclusions. To reduce this risk and ensure that the research we do is high quality we have, wait for it, researchers on staff. However, I have yet to come across an organization that had enough researchers to fulfill the demands of product teams. There are always too few researchers and they are always stretched thin. Requests for more researchers on staff usually fall on deaf ears. There has to be a way, therefore, to use the folks we do have on our team to bring higher-quality research practices to more of the organization. Here are a few thoughts on how to do that. 

Train other team members

This may sound outside a typical researcher’s job description and also potentially terrifying but the reality is that if we want better research work being done we need to teach our colleagues how to do it. This means that researchers on our team start holding lunch sessions to go over basic customer interviewing techniques or how to write an interview guide. It means that they offer demos of the tools the team has access to and can use to run surveys or hold moderated/unmoderated panels. 

The goal here is to acknowledge that our colleagues are going to do research work. It’s also to make sure that they know what they’re doing. We want the results of the work done by non-researchers to be something valuable they can base decisions on. 

Hold regular office hours

Another tactic teams I’ve worked with over the years have used is to hold regular office hours. This means that on a regular and repeatable schedule, at least one staff researcher is available for others to meet with. For example, every Tuesday and Thursday between 3pm and 5pm there’s a researcher available to answer any questions regarding the product discovery work anyone else in the org is doing. 

The goal here is to make sure that, once empowered, our non-researcher colleagues have someone to go to to ask clarifying questions and make sure what they’re doing takes into account any training they may have already received from you. This way no research work can go too far without being vetted by a professional researcher. 

Lots of other ways to scale research

These were just two quick ideas for scaling your research practice. There are lots of others (e.g., you could build a GPT trained on your staff researchers’ best practices as well as their research artifacts and findings). Since we need to do product discovery work on a continuous basis and since many product managers are not trained in basic research skills, these are the fastest and easiest ways to bring your colleagues up a level in their field work. It won’t be better than your work. It won’t replace you. It will, however, ensure that better information flows into the product teams allowing them to make better decisions and build better products.