To Set Research Priorities with Leadership, Show Your Team’s Value

It's not unusual for research teams to feel pressed to prove their worth. After all, research takes time, resources, and money. So how can teams demonstrate that their company is getting a return on its investment? And once you’ve achieved that, how can you partner with leadership to navigate research resources and priorities?

In this conversation, Dscout Customer and Community Marketing Manager, Colleen Pate, sat down with experts at JPMorgan Chase and Enterprise Mobility to cut to the heart of the matter.

Greg Marinelli is an Executive Director of User Experience Research at JPMorgan Chase.

Dr. Nikki Smith is an Experience Research Manager at Enterprise Mobility.

Jump to…

• How the research teams are set up
• How research works with other teams to deliver insights
• Why business thinking is so critical for researchers
• How business thinking has been helpful in growing a career
• The four types of delivering impact for UXR to drive
• How to build cross-functional partnerships
• How teams can use business thinking to own their impact
• How to estimate the value your team has added
• Wrapping it up

Colleen: How is the research team set up at Enterprise Mobility, and how has your team's role been defined?

Dr. Nikki: CX has been around for a while and a couple of large companies were starting these CX departments. We were thinking about the structure and I wasn't at Enterprise at this time, but I've seen the evolution of it and I’m proud of where we landed as we have a discovery practice.

We figured out what the pain point is. How big is it and what impact could we drive from solving that pain? Then we have a generative part of our practice in which we're understanding the context expectations of our customers and starting to define and find what those measurable opportunities are for us to get to the solution.

We have typical evaluatives in our practice. This is where you would see more traditional UX. We want to understand how people interact with the [product], and how we can make it better.

Then we have a part of our discipline that talks and handles how we optimize this experience. I'm excited to say that design and product are along with us every step of the way in each of those different disciplines. We've been able to have really strong partnerships with those teams and loop them in at the point of us deciding our research objectives, concept testing, as well as evaluation.

Greg: I think similarly at JPMorgan Chase, we're a giant organization. We have close to 300,000 total employees. Having been at Chase now for close to seven years, when I joined, the UX component of Chase was under 100 people, which is still a substantial size. We have about 1,000 UX practitioners now working full-time on Chase products and about 140 researchers specifically.

That's quite a large organization holistically. I will echo Dr. Nikki's sentiments that one of the reasons that we're able to be successful is because we have integrated with what we call our “quad partners”. The quad is Design (representing designers, content strategists, and researchers), Product, Tech/Dev, and Data and Analytics.

We make decisions together. We think about what types of items we want to research together, what we want to learn together, and what our strategic priorities are together. We're all working toward a common goal.

Your research teams work with other teams and deliver insights to inform the rest of the business. How does that work?

Greg: Our research is only valuable if it's actionable, which is when we talk about the ROI or the impact of user experience or user experience research.

One of the primary ways we provide value is by making sure that our work is actionable and that both our partners and our team can do something with our research. The phrase that I like to use is, “We don't produce book reports.” We don't simply talk to customers and then write down a list of things that they said.

We are effective when we're able to identify those insights and turn them into recommendations that are actionable, tangible, and tactical. We talk a lot on our team about what we're not going to do as well—this idea of research acting as a risk mitigation team.

This is something that I focus on with my team as a large impact and ROI driver. We have a thousand ideas at Chase of things we could do, but we can only do three of them, right? We can't do a thousand ideas, so what we say “no” to, or maybe, “not yet” to, is almost infinitely more important than what we say yes to.

Part of our job as a research team is to help our partners decide where they should spend their resources, priorities, and time.

If one of the things we're able to do is say, “Here are a bunch of things that are probably not as valuable to the customer experience, probably not as impactful to our usability metrics, and probably won't drive revenue or decrease expenses in the way that you're hoping,” then we can also say, “Let's not use our time, money, and resources there. Let's use it on other things that will provide more value.”

Being able to steer our partners to more valuable projects is an impact and return on investment for our work.

Dr. Nikki: Let's say you're not close enough to where you know the ROI and you don't know some of these numbers and you can't talk in terms of finance and how it's gonna maybe drive impact on the bottom line. What you can do is always bring it back to, “What are the implications to the customer experience if we were to do this? This is what we think the experience will be and this is what we think the impact will be based on that discovery and generative research that we had done before.”

“Should we not do this? This is what the implications are going to be for the customer experience.” Even if you can't drive it back to the things that Greg touched on, you could drive it back to say, “Let's put this on the table for the roadmap this year and then push this back this year.”

This will impact the experience. We know that because we're the researchers and we're the ones talking to the customers, but also using some of your big data to validate some of that as well to tell the story.

Even if you're not close enough to, or have enough of the business acumen, you can always drive help. Your stakeholders understand the implications by helping them understand what the customer experience is going to be.

What is your take on business thinking and why is it so critical for researchers?

Dr. Nikki: When I consider business thinking, I'm asking myself, “Why should the company care? Why would my stakeholders care about this piece of information?” It may not be anything that's specifically driving ROI, but ultimately it will.

You want to be able to talk about not only the specific ROI but also make sure that you're thinking about how the customer is engaging with us and the implications. You want to understand what's important to your stakeholders, and what's on their roadmap so that we are working on the same thing.

Prioritizing the same thing because research is working on something in a silo. There's a lot of work and a lot of lift to get someone to care when they don't already. If we align ourselves at the beginning about what our priorities are, part of that is business thinking, right? Not just thinking about what's in front of you, but having the foresight to see around the corner and be able to align yourselves with your other partners.

Greg: The language we use is very important. I'm sure all of us have been involved in a conversation with one of our partners where they've been trying to talk about research and have clearly demonstrated that they don't understand what we do, our best practices, or they don't understand the outcomes that we are trying to achieve through our research.

Let's think about it in the reverse context. You have your business partners, data analytics partners, or tech partners, and you're going to them and talking about their work and their priorities.

If you're not using language that is familiar to them, that is, if you are showing yourself to be naive within their area of expertise, it's a lot harder to form those relations and to trust the recommendations that you're providing.

Instead, if I'm able to go to my partner and talk about the percentage of engagement that we might grow as a result of this work. If I'm able to talk about contribution margins across our organization that may be affected by a different distribution of how we do research. All of a sudden their ears perk up and they say, “Okay, you understand what I'm thinking about. I'm willing to listen to you now. You've shown yourself to have spent a little bit of time understanding what I do.”

[As shown on the image below], some of the things that we recommend reading through shareholder reports and 10ks.

Go to finance meetings and listen to how they talk about earnings and expenses. Get familiar with how these business metrics are calculated. It's one thing to say, “We want to affect our return on investment or NPS or year-over-year expenses. Do you know how those are calculated? Do you know the things that go into those?” Have a better understanding of what will be helpful. Build better partnerships.

Dr. Nikki: You have to be clear in your language and use plain speak more often than not. Sometimes decks are created and the design team and product teams are looking at it like, “What does this mean for me? What should I do with it?”

Insights should be insightful. It should encourage and inspire action.

If we're not using that business language, we're not showing that we've leaned in and are partners in this. We want to lean in because our research can't sit on the shelf.

Someone has to do something with it and that someone has to be able to understand it. That's why it's so important for us to lean in.

How has business thinking been helpful for both of you personally, as you've been growing your careers?

Greg: I am not the most skilled researcher at Chase. I take great pride in my ability as a researcher to talk through research with the people who report to me and my peers, but some people have spent more years researching than I have.

One of the valuable skill sets that I bring to my team and my organization is my ability to connect the research and the strategic work that we do to our business functions, and to our business priorities to be able to speak that language to build these relationships to understand how we can make an impact.

That's been impactful and helpful for my career. If you are trying to go up the corporate ladder, you will hit a plateau at some point unless you start learning about finances, business goals, and business values. You cannot progress higher. You will hit a wall and you will not be allowed to progress if you do not show the requisite skill or ability to learn some of these things.

You'll get to a point where it's too essential that your job is far enough removed from the actual research and your job is now more about resourcing, prioritization, and strategic vision for the organization.

You need to be able to understand these things to be in those rooms with those folks having those conversations and advocating for yourself and your team.

Dr. Nikki: It's helped me position the work that I do strategically because I'm having those conversations with other partners and mentors. I'm asking them, “What's important to you? What could you do if you understood this more? If we were able to get you some feedback from customers on how they felt about that, would that information be helpful?”

I'm not positioning myself to go out and curate research studies. I'm trying to get into their heads and understand what's important.

Sometimes when people hear research, they think that it’s very academic, rigorous, and takes forever. But if you say, “What questions do you have or what feedback can I give you? Or if you had a bit of a deeper understanding of that, would that be helpful?”

When I reposition it through these relationships and conversations, I then have been able to use that and position myself and the team to say, “You need us and you need something like this because you said you had these questions. You said you needed this deeper understanding and Product is saying they're not sure how customers are going to receive and interact with this to make sure they're building the right system.”

Research is important because we can figure that out for you in a way that gives you not only just the answer to the question but also the context around it. Having that business language helps me position myself and the team.

In terms of how research delivers impact, four types were mentioned (listed below). What would you say about what to focus on?

Greg: This is a framework that I use to think about the different types of impact that my team and our UX team has.

I like to think about impact as having direct results and indirect results. Typically when people think about the ROI of our work, they're thinking about business results like, how much money did we make? How many expenses did we save? Those are business results. How many customers did we add?

But there are also customer and user impacts. These are usability scores. These are engagement metrics. These are the metrics that we look at to understand whether a customer experience is more or less successful.

There are also equally important indirect results that we, as either individual researchers or research managers, should be following and tracking just as importantly:

• Are you making a process impact?
• Is your work changing the way that your organization is working?
• Is it changing the way that your partners think about the process of decision-making?
• And finally, are you building empathy?

This seems like the simplest one, but it’s really important. Are your partners learning more about your customers? That is a return on your investment. You might not be able to tie it to, “We generated X amount more revenue.” But over the long term, you are building an organization that understands your customers better and as a result, can more naturally make informed contextual decisions about what they should and should not do.

That's our job there. The error that too many people make is they only report the direct results, and they think that the indirect results are not important. Inversely, at the end of the year in either their goals or their self-reviews, they talk about the indirect results, and they don't take credit for the direct results of the team.

We know that cross-functional partnership is essential for a research team’s success. How do you both go about building these as leaders and seeing research as an opportunity for collaboration?

Dr. Nikki: It's easy to reach around a corner. It's easy for me to say, “Go talk to your partners and figure out what's important to them.” But more importantly, before you even go over there and have that conversation, you need to figure out who you are as a team, what kind of vision you have, what you stand for, what your outcomes are going to be defining, and the discipline of research.

In many cases that's already defined for you, but you have to be very clear on what your team is, what they're doing, who they are, and what they're delivering, so that when you talk to these partners, you can communicate that to them, and it's very clear.

You have to be consistent in your messaging. I've been in a lot of situations where you can tell that my team is new to a large organization. So we're like a small startup in a large organization and I have to do a road show or I kind of position myself to do a road show.

And I say, “I'll go and have the conversations and figure out what is on the product roadmap, what's on the design roadmap, and then I'll create our research roadmap that's in alignment with that.” Then I'll say, “Here's our research team. Here's what we're about. Here are some projects we've done in the past insights we've driven. We've driven some solutions. We've done different types of research methodology.”

I have about three or four slides, and at any point at any time I could go to any team and say, “This is how I think we can help our partner together.” It's very clear to them. The message is consistent, so when design and product are talking to each other, they know exactly what research can provide for them.

Greg: Every time I'm having these conversations, especially with new partners. It's about starting with the value to my partner.

I'm rarely saying, “Here is what I want to do. Here is what I think we should be doing. Here's how you can help me.” It's “How can my work help you make better decisions? You're really important. Your decisions matter. What can I do to help you make better decisions?” and forming a partnership that way.

Dr. Nikki: Something that's super helpful that I don't see often is examples of how that's worked in the past. Sometimes, when you go into these conversations. I've noticed they don't have a frame of reference to give you.

They might be just setting up a new designer product team or working with a research team is new for them. It's more important for research teams to say, “Here's how we have done this in the past. Here are some projects and frames of reference so that they can say, “Oh, okay, we want to do something like that.”

How can teams use business thinking to own the impact that they're making?

Greg: It's tied to this first bullet you have up here about research as a team sport and product design and the work that we do generally speaking as a team sport. For example, let's pick basketball.

There are five people on the court on a team. If you don't have a full team and you only have three people on the court, in theory, you could play—but typically, you forfeit that game. Either the whole team is there participating or nobody plays and nobody wins.

One thing that marketing research and marketing generally have been very good at, historically, is pointing toward a project and saying, “We were involved in that project where we were a player on the team.”

The team won the championship or the team went 11-2, right? They don't have to say, “I did this specific work, and that contributed to a net two and a half wins over the season.” They say, “We as a team went 11-2 and won the championship and without us, the team probably doesn't win the championship because we can't field a team.”

It's the same thing here. We need to take ownership of the success of our full team, not just the specific research projects we do. So if your team launches a new product or you launched a new product this year, without you, that doesn't happen, or it doesn't happen as well.

If you decided not to do something, you decided that—not some ambiguous stakeholder off in a corner. Take ownership of that.

You don't have to say at the end of your review, “I made this decision to launch this product.” That's not true. Please don't lie. Don't do that, but take ownership of your part on the team. That's the point that I'm trying to get across here.

Being an advocate in advance is one way you can do this. One thing that we are particularly keen about here at Chase is we bring the whole team together to talk about planning, prioritization, and resourcing.

Let's take an example. “If we don't have enough people from research to support this project, we're not going to do it. But here's the amount of money that we're leaving on the table, potentially, by doing that.” That's advocating for yourself in advance. That shows the impact of your work.

Before you've done any work you can say, “If you don't let us do this work, or if you don't hire an additional person to do this work, here's all of the return that you're leaving on the table, and instead, if you invest this money, here is the return on the project.” That you can scope and plan out now.

We're very keen on doing that. We're very specific about it. It’s one of the best ways that we show the value in our work because it's not just us advocating for it. It's our product partners, our data, and our engineering partners all sitting together, all looking at our senior leaders and saying we need these people or we can't do the work.

Dr. Nikki: It doesn't make sense for us to have these partnerships if all we're doing is asking them how we can help them and we're not then using that to help us tell the story of, “How did we help them? How did that research move conversion?”

We need to lean into the conversation of making sure that we understand how research can drive business value, but also using our partners in product and design to circle back so that we can tell the story about more than that we did 50 research studies. I promise you, no one cares.

What you need to do is say, “We lead creative insights that drove action resulting in a 15 percent lift and conversion.” Or you can say, “Helped de-risk a product launch based on feedback from key customer segments.” There are no numbers involved in that, but it tells a better story.

You're using your teams out of your partnerships to be able to chime in and add on. That way you can see from end-to-end what your work is doing. That's where you create those success stories.

Having those relationships and success stories about how we drove action and what that action resulted in. Because I talked to my colleague, I can tell a better story. That’s how you start and for me, that was the lesson from marketing, 'cause marketing tells a good story.

How do you estimate the value that's being left on the table or the value that's been added, and go about getting real dollar estimates when quantifying value for the business?

Greg: I work with my finance partners who spend all day thinking about how to quantify these things. We will sit down again as a quad. So it's not just us.

It's our product partners, engineering, and data partners, because part of the calculation of this is, what headcount might we need to accomplish this project? How long will it take? How many hours? What sort of tech resources might be included? What sort of new infrastructure might we need to purchase?

Then we try to estimate the outcomes of this initiative. We're going to add X number of customers. We're going to increase digital app engagement by X amount. We have internal metrics that we use. We know roughly, the average lifetime value of a given customer.

Sometimes those lifetime values change based on the type of customer, but our finance partners know that information. They can look at that information and say, “All right, if we add X number of customers, if we increase engagement by this amount, we would expect to grow revenue by Y percent, or we would expect to decrease expenses by Z percent, or we would expect a 10 percent decrease in customer complaints.”

We know that every time someone calls our call center, it costs money. Great, we're gonna reduce calls by X percent times the cost of a call equals a savings of X dollars. If we're reducing that many calls, maybe we can reduce the number of call center employees we have. That saves us Y number of dollars.

It's line-by-line thinking through implications like this and getting to an actual number. Here's the hidden secret. That number doesn't have to be perfect. No one's looking at that number in six months and saying, was it correct to the penny value?

What you're trying to do is get to somewhere directionally, so a leader can look at that number and say, “All right, I understand the rough estimate of what this is expected to cost or the value to us. I can make a more informed decision based on that.” It's the same as the rest of your research.

You are rarely in research getting to the perfect answer. You are decreasing the amount of risk in the decision that partners are trying to make. By quantifying the business results, the money, the revenue, and the customers, you're de-risking that decision.

Wrapping it up

There are countless ways to quantify or demonstrate ROI for your research efforts. Regardless of the approach, considering the impact your team makes is a great place to start. Think with a business mindset and understand how your insights drive business value.

Not every team may have the time or resources to quantify value in hard numbers, but activating insights and acting as a partner to help leadership decide on their resources, priorities, and time all bring tremendous value.

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