I'm Hannah, a UX research lead at IBM. 
And I believe that everyone is a researcher.*

*Note: it takes education and practice to become a professional researcher.
But as researchers, we should empower our product teams to participate in the process of understanding our users.

Every team I’ve joined in the last 4 years has not had a consistent approach for: 
1. Identifying key opportunities in the market to improve their product strategy and prioritization from a user-centric perspective.
2. Quantifying their users' change in satisfaction with the outcomes they are able to achieve using new features and products that they ship.

Their data inputs for key decision-making included things like:

• Feedback from top clients

• Executive requests

• Market research

• Gut instinct

• Opinions from the team (sometimes includes user research)

• Feasibility assessments

As a result, I’ve made it my mission with each of these teams to communicate the value of user research, and work towards delivering a sustainable, unified framework for both identifying key opportunity areas and quantifying changes in user satisfaction.

These experiences have also taught me never to assume that the value of research is understood.
In order to help stakeholders gain value from user research, I regularly work with them to:

1. Assess gaps in knowledge about their user base.
2. Communicate the value of closing those knowledge gaps in order to mitigate risk when making critical product decisions.
3. Build a sense of ownership of the research by regularly engaging them in data collection and synthesis.
4. Deliver actionable findings which have direct impact on product decisions.
5. Develop strategies for tracking the impact of product updates.