How we grew User Research from zero to central insights agency within the company

This article was first published on Medium on Jul 30, 2021

In 2016 I joined my company as their first and only UX researcher. Today I am the Head of a department that serves all teams with knowledge about our users. Here is what I learned in the last five years.

Establishing and growing User Research as a discipline and team within a digital product company has so far been the most challenging and exciting task in my professional life. During the last five and a half years I observed different phases as the team grew. In this article I want to share with you what I learned in each of these phases.

Year 1 — Explanation and Experimentation

I joined OneFootball in June 2016, a few weeks before the EURO in France. The company counted 60 people and I joined the design team as the first full-time UX researcher. At the time, the mobile app had a solid base of 3 million monthly active users and was built by well established design, product and engineering teams, all sitting on the same floor in our Berlin office.

Onefootball iOS app design in 2016

UX research was added as an additional step within the design and product definition process. I was working hard to get involved, leading to a key question from stakeholders in product management:

Why slow down the development process with UX research when so far we were quite successful with our ideas and solutions?

And this question is absolutely reasonable. You can build very successful products without UX research, and many companies like Basecamp do. If your company culture has established around top-down guidance and strong individual gut feel confidence, you might wonder why a UX researcher is adding value to your team. Ultimately, I was yet another person who had an opinion and who took his time to test features before we went live.

I learned three things in this initial and critical phase:

As the first UX researcher in a product team, prove your value by testing the existing experience. Without slowing down the development of new features, show what needs to be improved within the existing product.
Foster conversations about the product experience by showing your work publicly in your company. The more colleagues observe real people interacting with their product, the quicker they will understand why UX research is important.
Don’t try to force yourself into every single decision. Focus on the relationships with people who want to work with you and ask you for advice, let the others do their thing. They will come to you sooner or later.

While slowly and carefully involving myself in the exploration phase for new features, I went through all aspects of the existing app, from the onboarding to content consumption — and discovered a list of issues and potential improvements. I live-streamed all user interviews for all employees to watch, and let them submit questions I would directly ask the participants. I made everyone feel part of the testing, virtually sitting with me in the room. A lot of colleagues watched the interviews, even those who did not actively work on the product. All of a sudden, everyone was excited to think about how we can improve the product experience, after witnessing how real people struggle. It was exciting and it put the focus back on product management to better test their features before going live. I did not have much convincing to do — the users did it for me.

My first user interview setup: Two cameras, a phone holder, a lot of tape, any random meeting room.

Year 2 — Building bridges

I was still by myself, the only UX researcher in the company, slowly turning into the guy who can help you understand our users.

I kept testing all features, all flows of the product, and more teams outside Product and Design got in touch to learn more about our users. From Marketing and Sales, to our own Newsroom and Social Media team, they all asked for support on their individual questions.

I was lucky to have a boss who gave me maximum freedom, I was never kept from working with anyone outside my own team. I could move through the company, involve myself in any conversation, build bridges and relationships to literally anyone. If you are leading User researchers and you are reading this: Let your people do what they want. Restricting them to only do “design research” is a waste of talent and potential. User research is so much more than a support role for design. It can change the way an entire company moves — if you don’t lock them behind hierarchy and responsibility restrictions.

Getting so much freedom to explore every corner of the company was the single best thing that could have happened to me. By now I proved the concept of UX research, I have run plenty of interviews and surveys and most people knew what quality they could expect from me, and I was able to help so many more teams. Every day I had to dig into very different problems, and I learned to much during these intense months:

Build positive relationships with as many people as you can, be the one who makes things happen, who wants to help, who people trust. They will open their brains and hearts, they will involve you in their thinking process, and you can give them confidence in their decisions by applying your research skills.
You are successful when other people are successful. And it will most often be the others who get the public praise. Accept it. As a UX researcher, ego is your worst enemy.

I believe as a UX researcher you will build honest and long-lasting relationships, because you are a giver, you help others get back on track, you provide confidence to others and they will trust you and your advice. If you want to be an excellent User researcher, make other people’s problems your own problems. I love this job so much because I can help others being more successful, which is a feeling that makes me extremely happy. I could not work in jobs where you must push others down to lift yourself up. If you agree, you will enjoy Give and Take by Adam Grant.

Year 3— Standardizing tools and processes

To be honest, before I was given the mandate to grow a team of user researchers, my processes were pretty freestyle. I never pretended to be the best slide designer, so my presentations looked horrible for a person who was part of the design team. But now, hiring my first user researcher, taking a leadership role, becoming a manager, I was no longer by myself. So far, as long as I knew where to find a certain project, no one cared about the messiness of my Google Drive. But now, it was time to clean my stuff, to define standards and processes, to be strict with others and with myself.

Having one additional team member was a huge step forward. We could split responsibilities, run interviews together, be each other’s note-takers, share ideas and together execute more research than I could myself.

Together we explored the best ways of working, and even though it is a startup cliche, it certainly applied at the time: Everything changes constantly, and that is OK. We started with JIRA and Confluence, we built presentations in Keynote. We moved away from Keynote because you could not share them easily, so we used Google Slides. We hated using JIRA, so we tried Wunderlist. We moved away from Wunderlist and put post-its on the wall. Soon after, we moved all tasks into Notion. We got better and better in quantitative research and started reporting all survey results in R and Markdown. Today, we built our own User Research website that will soon act as the central repository for all our projects.

Yes, everything changed all the time. It was a bit messy sometimes. But we kept improving our workflows, we learned from mistakes, we accepted change as part of growth, we soon hired our third team member and we became one of the best connected teams in the company. There wasn’t a team we did not support with research. Here is what I learned:

When you plan to grow a User Research team, think about repositories early on. One of the most difficult tasks is to make sure everyone can find your insights, can scan through previous research, can read through your archive of work. I did not focus on this topic early enough, so we stored hundreds of projects in Google Drive folders and no one, not even ourselves, could quickly filter projects by topic or related team. So much knowledge got lost because no one knew it existed.
Start documenting your ways of working, create team internal wikis. Where do you find the NDAs, how do you book the agency to recruit participants, how does your R script work, where can you find the slide template. Also, start discussing your ways of working. Too late we initiated a weekly Research Critique in which we reviewed each others’ work, and sometimes went deep into code level for individual data analysis. Create space so everyone in your team can be a teacher and a student.

Year 4 — Adapting to cross-functional teams

As the company grew, from 60 when I joined to over 250, it is natural that fewer people know each other and teams work more independently. That was the time when it got harder and harder to keep track of everything that happened around me. The company was growing quickly and many things got kicked-off in parallel. It was clearly different from the old times when we all finished projects over beer on Friday nights, were all good friends and it was easier to keep track of things.

I was now the User Research Lead, with two full time user researchers, two working students and three customer care specialists — an operation I was also responsible for. While the product and engineering departments changed its structure from functional teams (design team, iOS team, etc.) to cross-functional teams (News team, Scores team, etc.), it was my goal to define dedicated user researchers for all cross-functional teams. With limited capacities, each researcher was the point of contact for multiple product managers and designers. At this point of time, I believe I made a very good decision to not structure my team by methodology expertise. Let me explain:

My goal was to allow my researchers to become true experts in the different cross-functional areas. Whenever for example news consumption related research was requested, the same person was in charge of research planning and execution. Over time, this researcher gained a lot of knowledge about this particular part of the experience and built a great relationship with the stakeholders within the cross-functional team.
Now, in order to structure your team like this, the researcher must cover qualitative and quantitative research projects. While other companies have dedicated user researchers for qual and others for quant, I grew my team members to cover the whole spectrum of methodologies, so that they could stay with the cross-functional team at all points. If you split your research team by methodology expertise, different researchers will jump in and out, depending on the current necessity. I believe, UX researchers must become mixed-method and overcome their fear of numbers to stay relevant.

Independent from product related research work, this year brought a true milestone. I was honored to work on the definition of a new brand for OneFootball, and present our research work at multiple sports and research conferences.

The old Onefootball brand and logo

The new OneFootball brand and logo

Presenting our brand research work at Sports and Research conferences in 2019

Year 5 — Expanding beyond the company

OneFootball has direct access to 11 million monthly active users. Not only did other companies from the world of football become interested in us thanks to our reach, but also because of our internal user research capacities. By addressing our users through in-app messages, we are able to run surveys and collect opinions from tens of thousands of users, literally over night. That lead to some interesting collaborations, especially last year, when I was able to work directly with big brands in the industry, such as Sky, Betway and Adidas, to learn more about the interests of digital football fans and translate our learnings into recommendations for other brands. We also managed to work even closer with our business units, support the growing Direct-to-Consumer business and establish User Research as a strong partner for our Sales operations.

What has started as a one-man show in June 2016 is now a central insights agency within the company. I am honored that I got the chance to grow my passion for user research, build a team and work with many different people over the years.

After 1948 days, I will leave OneFootball by the end of September 2021 and start working as a Freelancer User Researcher. I learned so much during the last 5.5 years and I hope I was able to share some inspiration and practical advice to others who are currently a team of one, or starting to grow User Research in their own companies.