When a product team prioritizes one feature over another, they are choosing what risk they’re willing to take on. When taking on any risk, it’s important to look at the data to predict your odds of success. 

Every team I’ve joined in the last 4 years - Watson Campaign Automation, Emerging Technology Experiences, and IBM Cloud Platform - was making risky prioritization decisions based on input from a select few top clients, ignoring their broader user base. As a result, they were often missing the mark with the broader market at large, by developing products based on the opinions of a select few.

Each of these teams had one thing in common: they hadn’t worked closely with a user researcher before I joined. When conducting their roadmap planning, the data taken into consideration looked something like this: 

Upon joining a new team, my first priorities are:

• Communicate to stakeholders the value of closing knowledge gaps in order to mitigate risk

• Assess the team’s gaps in knowledge about their user base

• Build relationships with user advocates (support, sales, client reps)

• Closing those knowledge gaps

I accomplish these things by having candid conversations with stakeholders about their current assumptions and open questions. From there, I create a research roadmap focused on answering those questions. At first, I often encounter a healthy dose of skepticism. But as I deliver research and the associated recommendations, teams begin to act on a few those recommendations. 

As I build trust with teams, they begin to embrace these new datasets as a permanent part of their risk mitigation process: roadmap planning. 

In order to sustain that success, I help teams build up processes and behaviors that allow them to:

• Have candid conversations about risk

• Get regular, direct access to users

• Diversify their data collection and usage

• Expect clear research recommendations 

• Conduct their own user research

• Measure impact with business and ux metrics