"Strategic" & "Tactical Research" - How Did We Come Up With That?
Javier Andrés Bargas-Avila
UX Director at Google, Coach, Lecturer, Speaker and Woodworker
As a coach to UX researchers, one question that I regularly get is the question of how to conduct more strategic research. It’s often along the lines of:
Then, the researchers run off, conduct a 6 months research program, and come back with a fancy report that describes their users, pain points, and needs. The research is acknowledged by their cross-functional partners, kudos are given, and the report starts to collect dust in an archive.
No product roadmaps are changed.
No strategy is influenced.
Then they get frustrated and ask: “Why does nobody listen to us?”
Here’s the problem:
UX researchers often inflict problems upon themselves by creating job ladders that are self-detrimental. As UX researchers become more senior, they are expected to influence our products strategically, while junior researchers impact them tactically. This means juniors influence “how” we build something, while seniors influence the “what”.
This in itself isn’t the problem. The problem happens in the next step, because many researchers (and their managers) erroneously bucket research methods into strategic and tactical.
To them, these are all tactical research methods:
• Usability studies
• Interview studies (remote or in-person)
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• Heuristic evaluations
And these are all strategics research methods:
• Field study
• Diary study
• Ethnographic study
This assumption is flat out wrong.
Our cross-functional partners aren’t waiting for researchers to apply fancy strategic methods - they need strategic insights. It’s not the method that makes research strategic or tactical, it’s the insights that can be rather tactical (how should we build something) or strategic (what should we build).
You can run a small lab study that leads to a breakthrough idea affecting the entire product roadmap. Or, you can run a large field study that might only produce minor tactical suggestions. Our partners need insights to shape strategy, not six-month-long studies.
So how did we end up in this situation? We (UX research) created it ourselves. By erroneously bucketing methods into strategic and tactical, instead of focusing on the insights, and classifying them as strategic or tactical.
To break this problem and become better partners, we need to move beyond classifying methods, and focus on what teams actually need:
Insights that help us develop better products.
Currently pursuing UX Researcher| Experienced Software Developer
2wInsightful
Head of Product Design • HX CXO • AI/ Gen-AI/ LLM/ Prompt Engg. Solutioning • AI Governance • Leadership • Data-Driven Decisions • Building HP Teams
2wAbsolutely resonate with this! For any UX researchers, they can sometimes get caught up in aiming to produce what they think of as “strategic” research, hoping it will make a more significant impact. But often, it’s about delivering the right insights at the right time - tailoring research to be actionable rather than simply ambitious. It’s a timely reminder to stay focused on what truly drives value for the team and end-users. Cheers
UX Leadership - Google
1moSo agree. And, there's additional issues: it's not only that methods are bucketed into 'tactical' and 'strategic'; but there's also the mis-aligned belief that the methods themselves (incorrectly associated with the type of insights - as you have pointed out) are themselves aligned with 'easier', and 'harder' .. which is also, imo, plain not correct. Those 'easier' methods get aligned with the more junior roles, and those 'harder' ones with more senior roles - if not explicitly, implicitly (part of the commonly held beliefs of the profession, and of partners closely related to us, such as designers and product managers). This assumption is not appropriate, and again, it's our profession has created this issue.
UX Research Leader | Strategic Thinker | Empathetic Collaborator | IC and Management | Qual and Quant | Cisco, Ex-Google, Ex-Apple, Ex-Neuroscientist, Ex-Professor
1moWell said! I've been asked this same question too, and your answer is the perfect response.
Social scientist | Research | Behavioural science
1moStrategic and tactical are not research terms for me but corporate ones, that only introduce more confusion. Something that starts as "tactical" could actually become "strategic", and this is one more reason for me to don't like the terms. I think it is much more important to have a plan on how to prioritise projects with well-defined criteria that you can explain and defend if necessary, instead of naming projects as tactical or strategic as without defined practical criteria, these are just empty terms. But establishing even this rather obvious thing for me as a researcher, is very often impossible as we are not the owners of our own practice as to decide how to structure it to make it actually useful for the business. And this is the main problem, as the only way to actually influence business strategy or product development and design for real is to have a seat on the big table and ownership of the craft.