The research coach role: what it is and why it matters

Slightly delayed due to starting 2021 with a nasty dose of COVID (Stay safe, try not to get it, it isn’t nice). I thought I would take this opportunity to write some thoughts about my new role as Research Coach here in the Redgate Product Division and outline some early thoughts and plans for how I see the role progressing and offering value as we tackle the new year. It’s going to be an interesting journey establishing this new role and I hope to blog regularly on how it’s going.

Why introduce a research coach role?

Talking to our customers and testing our ideas, concepts, products and features is one of the most important activities we do at Redgate. It’s what helps us understand our customers’ needs and supports us through every stage of product development, in order to release new product/product iterations and deliver value. But it’s hard. Proper research takes time, requiring planning, analysis and synthesis to turn data into actionable insight; guiding our strategies, validating our ideas and ultimately shaping our solutions. As we know, research and design are a team sport, but it’s often hard to carve out the time and space to Level Up everyone, at the same time as conducting the regular research necessary to both steer in the right direction and support the immediate needs of our customers.

Product Designers have traditionally led this end-to-end process, as supported by the wider teams. However, an over-dependence on designers to be solely responsible for the team’s research activities can throttle their ability to deliver detailed, high-quality design outputs; as reported in our recent divisional survey:

The aim of the Research Coach role is to support, assist and Level Up the whole team’s research efforts. Through a combination of supporting Designers with their current activities and spreading the load by levelling up Engineers (and the wider team) in their core research practices; ensuring the Designer is neither a bottleneck or dependency on team’s doing good, regular research.

The research currently undertaken by product division can be quite variable from team-to-team, both in terms in terms of frequency and quality. My aim for this role is to help everyone get to the stage where we’re doing high-quality research and testing on an ongoing, ‘product’ not project basis. The overall aim is of course, to helps us work more effectively, make better, research-informed decisions, and deliver more value to our customers.

How will this work?

As this is a brand-new role at Redgate, there is going to be a lot of learning to be done as we understand the most effective way to support the teams, this is a not-quite ResearchOps role, although there will be lots of crossover and similarities. However, broadly we are thinking about a 4-stage process. This will ensure we can walk before we run, and scaling up from helping individuals, to the wider division in a logical order, building on previous work at each stage. These 4 stages are:

1) Understand and Unblock

2) Structured support

3) Create and Collate

4) Scale & Operationalise

Stage 1 –Understand and Unblock

This is the first stage, and will therefore be the roughest around the edges, but perhaps the most important as you have to start somewhere! I’m going to treat this role as my own personal UX Research project, identifying the journey’s and processes different teams go through, and where the pain points and opportunities for improvements lie. Like most research projects a good place to start uncovering these is by finding out and helping people overcome their key, biggest blockers that are stopping them right now, so that’s where we’ll start.

I plan to be on hand organically for any teams to approach me with immediate needs, whether that’s listening in and feeding back on a session with a customer, helping to plan or casting a second pair of eyes across a call plan, or offering a perspective on an analysis session. This will give me insights into all the various teams, the things they need to speak to customers about and their approaches. It will enable me to see all the good work we’re currently doing, socialise that more widely to share good practices across teams, as well as offer perspective, support or advice on areas that need it.

Stage 2 — Structured support

In this stage (around Q2) I hope to work really closely with teams for the full duration of a research cycle. The core aim of this will be to a) support the designer and free up some of their time, and b) support the levelling up of the rest of team to feel comfortable with taking on more research activities. Our recent survey identified some of the key blockers are confidence and knowing how to start, so I hope to be able to coach and encourage people through those in order to really start to get to grips and feel confident with what needs to be done.

Over the course of these first 2 stages I expect that we will create documents, templates and artefacts to support our thinking, and represent the different techniques and approaches for each of the individual teams. Alongside the ongoing ‘Research of Research’ that I’ll be doing, I hope that these elements will combine nicely to support Stage 3.

Stage 3 — Create and Collate

I see Stage 3 is where we’ll be able to pull together what’s working across the teams and generate documents, templates and other similar resources in a central place. This will enable teams to pull from a selection based on what will be best for their current needs. Also, this will hopefully provide the consistency in structure and content (whilst still allowing for the individual nuances needed for research projects). By this time, we’ll have moved into a ResearchOps phase, providing teams with the tools they need to effectively conduct and articulate any type of research, from Discovery through to usability testing.

Stage 4 — Scale and Operationalise

I envisage this stage is where I’ll really move into supporting the division (and wider business) as a whole rather than individual teams. Using the insights I’ve gathered from working closely with individual teams and hopefully improving the research processes along the way, this will be an opportunity to rise up and look more widely at what approaches, techniques, resources and tools will be most effective to drive the division forward.

Whether this is creating a self-serve library of resources, or developing detailed and accurately managed customer panels, or a centralised insights repository is yet to be determined, but this is the stage I hope that people will ‘start to fish’ for themselves, whilst contributing to the whole more effectively.

Beyond that, I hope that over time we’ll start to see more joined up findings, cross pollination of ideas and insights across teams, more effective understanding of both buyer and user personas and a deeper picture of what it means to be an enterprise customer of Redgate. The aim is to gather all the pieces of the jigsaw together, so everyone benefits from seeing the wider picture.

After that, who knows where we can take this!

Where does the role sit?

I will primarily remain a member of the Design Team and report to our head of Design Matthew Godfrey, but Redgate does have a coaching team already, so will also spend a lot of time with Gareth Bragg and the other coaches to offer what assistance I can to the divisional improvements in line with their OKRS. I’m yet to see exactly what is planned in this regard but hopefully I can bring a perspective and some creativity to this area as well.

Overall, it’s an exciting time for me personally and hopefully a positive step forward to improving our research practice and Redgate which will ultimately lead to better outcomes for our customers. I’m going to need to learn, implement, review, and iterate a lot over the next year or so as the role develops, so please reach out if you have any questions, ideas. or experiences you’d be happy to share, would love to talk more about this!