Case Study — Creating a UX Research Roadmap to Align with Product Strategy and Development Lifecycle

“What is the most efficient and effective user research we can do to inform and validate product strategy throughout the year?”

The product team for was working on a ground-breaking product- a digital therapeutic for kids who suffer from ADHD. I’d worked most of the time at at the company as a product director of healthcare services for the complimentary apps for caregivers, teachers, and healthcare providers. After launching a successful beta test of the apps MVP, I worked with another UX leader at the company to continue creating data-driven, user-centric digital healthcare products.

Together, we laid out a user research roadmap to accomplish two goals:

• Gather user feedback on beta test and planned product builds to optimize product and prioritize issues.
• Generate and explore new ideas to inform product discovery work and design iterations.

Actions

To accomplish this goal, we:

• Interviewed the product owners and reviewed development roadmaps so that we could understand when user insights were needed for product discovery, design, and build to ensure that methods and insight delivery align to product milestones.
• Interviewed team members and presented current research knowledge to identify additional research questions.
• Brainstormed research methods that answered the questions; culled the list to find the most effective methods that aligned with key dates so the team could use the insights.
• Created a draft of the research roadmap with clear research goals, proposed methods, and schedule; reviewed with executive stakeholders to ensure aligned with their questions about users and knowledge.
• Vetted and interviewed vendors for specific research methods to scale research efforts across several product lines and milestones.
• Launched research roadmap to product team with knowledge sharing meetings and intranet knowledge-base. Continued to present updates at leadership meetings.

Results

As a result of our efforts, all product stakeholders had a clear vision of how and when they would receive user insights to make and validate product decisions. We also had a framework to plan and execute on user research projects.