Leisa Reichelt - The Five Dysfunctions of Democratising Research

Design Research - Day 1 So, you want to scale research in your organisation? Here are the biggest and scariest problems you'll almost certainly face and how to overcome them. The good news is that more and more organisations are embracing research in product teams. Whether it is product managers doing customer interviews or designers doing usability tests, and everything in between – it is now fairly simple to come up with a compelling argument that research is a thing we should probably be doing. So we move on to the second generation question. How do we scale this user centred behaviour? Often the answer is designers and product managers do the research. This is often known as ‘democratising research’. This sounds sensible, but there are some fairly structural issues in how we work that can undermine our best intentions. At best, it can render our research wasteful and inefficient, and at worst it can introduce significant risks in the decision making that our teams make. In this talk we’ll cover how these dysfunctions come into being, what risks they pose and what we can do to overcome them.