With pandemics, limited budgets, and tight timelines, it’s even more important to do research in a scalable and safe way. In this  #mtpcon Digital APAC session, Anna Lee Anda, User Researcher at Zendesk, covers practical tips and lessons learned to help you and your team start conducting valuable research immediately.

Anna uses the session to cover the six phases of research:

1. Planning
2. The set up
3. People involved
4. The call itself
5. Turning data into insights
6. Sharing results

Watch the talk in full or read on for the overview. Mind the Product members can also watch the recordings of all our #mtpcon Digital Americas talks here.

Before we get started…

#mtpcon session recordings like Anna’s are for Mind the Product members but today we’re making an exception. Even if you’re not a Prioritised or MTP Leader member you can enjoy this session recording and overview — this one’s on us! If you enjoy it, see our Mind the Product membership options for practicing product managers, leaders, and even teams. Explore membership

Planning

When conducting research, it’s essential to know what you want to learn from your participants. However, as Anna points out, one of the most important questions you need to ask is, does this topic you’re asking need research?

By asking questions such as do, you have enough data already? Is there already some research data within your organization that you can leverage? Or how big of a risk or assumption are you taking by doing or not doing the research? “One thing that’s helpful is to have your team plot this out in terms of the overall question. Or if there are tonnes of questions, the types of questions that you need to answer,” Anna says.

As Anna explains, the farther you move through the three development phases of discovery, development, and validation, the problem you’re solving, the clarity of your research becomes much clearer. Anna also points out that more time needs to be spent on planning and write-up in a typical research project timeline rather than collection and analysis.

The set up

Some of the tips Anna provides for correctly setting up your virtual and physical spaces for remote user research include clearing your desktop, signing in early, and having proper lighting.

When using a whiteboard or collaboration document, Anna also advises using a template that works in different time zones and people know what they need to do. However, she also adds that it’s essential to run your team through the board, test it out and send it in advance.

People involved

Having a good mix of participants can lead to better insights. Find them from community forums and tickets, sales and success teams, and from your database, such as people who are frequent and infrequent users from different locations.

The call itself

Before the call, it’s critical to plan the interview. We want to find out what should be asked since you might end up asking for opinions, making the customer do the work. “What you want to do is think about your overall project creation, and you want to break it down to things that show or help you learn behaviors,” Anna explains.

Data to insights

The goal of turning the data you gather into insights is to reduce the time between what you heard and learned. Therefore, you should have multiple people with different roles attending the session, agree on categories that match goals and objectives, and use tags to filter and sort data.

Sharing is caring

Sharing the right data means that you need to make your data evergreen and update participants with a slide deck or report, spreadsheet, email, or Slack summary.

The key takeaways from this session are that when planning, determine if it needs to be researched. Set up your physical and virtual spaces and get different types of people involved. Ask around the subject matter during the call itself and agree on tagging in advance for data and use the right formats to share information.

Discover more content

Browse our library of keynotes and sessions from #mtpcon Digital Americas or use our Content A-Z to explore even more product management topics.