Creating and maintaining an outcome-based user research roadmap

How to organize your research so that it's aligned with the business

👋🏻Hi, this is Nikki with a 🔒subscriber-only 🔒 article from User Research Academy. In every article, I cover in-depth topics on how to conduct user research, grow in your career, and fall in love with the craft of user research again.

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Demonstrating impact is critical to our jobs as user researchers, especially recently. Everywhere you look, it’s all about impact. Showing impact, proving impact, sharing impact.

Often, the impact gets tied to the output of user research. Were the insights impactful? Did they spur action? What about the product changed? How did the stakeholders feel about the report?

I played the dangerous game of waiting until the insights came from the research to see how impactful the project was. This approach led me to hoping my research would impact teams and the organization rather than knowing I was conducting the most influential research possible.

At one point, I ran several studies in a row that had landed on my desk without really thinking about how they tied back to the larger goals of the team and the organization. When it came to performance review time, I had done a lot of stuff, but there wasn’t much to show. It was disappointing for me, but a fantastic lesson.

A few months before, I had started a user research roadmap and backlog to organize my upcoming projects better and share them with my stakeholders. I’d “grown up” with product roadmaps being important, so I simply took the same concept to apply to my research projects.

However, over time, I saw my research roadmaps fall into the same trap many product roadmaps do — they became like “feature factories” filled with projects focused on outputs rather than outcomes. I simply threw research projects on the roadmap, not thinking too much about how the project tied back to the outcome or the business.

While this worked for a while, it ended up not serving me. I was frustrated churning out projects as teams churned out features. The work felt disjointed from the “bigger picture,” but I didn’t want to let go of my roadmap. Although it wasn’t the most ideal, it gave me such a great place to plan from and was so helpful in transparency on what I was working on.

What’s an outcome-based research roadmap?

An outcome-based user research roadmap is a living, ever-evolving document that shows the work a user researcher (or user research team) is focused on and how it specifically relates to a larger business objective. It mainly includes projects the team will work on in the next quarter, half-year, or year.

The biggest difference between a general roadmap and an outcome-based roadmap is that, instead of feeling like a feature factory, all of the projects on the roadmap are tied to a specific outcome.

The roadmap demonstrates the different outcomes the team will work on and how they will achieve them.

What do you mean by outcome?

Outcomes can be difficult to measure in user research, but it is essential to consider how our work ties to larger team or company-based objectives/goals.

When simply putting projects on my roadmap without thinking about the larger goal, I spun my wheels doing the same work repeatedly and always failed to answer the question, “How does user research relate to business?”

When it comes to outcomes, you have to look to your colleagues, teams, and organizations to help you. User research is a support system for decision-making and risk mitigation, so the outcomes of your research should support teams in the decisions they have to make and the risks they might be taking.

This concept can be tough to understand, so let’s look at some examples:

Example one:

Imagine we are working with the retention team at Pokemon TCG Live (add me if you play - my username is nicolerothier), and the team’s outcome is to “improve our day-7 app retention rate by 10%.”

Essentially, when people sign up for the live Pokemon Trading Card Game, we want them to return to our app within seven days because, once they pass that seven-day threshold, they are more likely to play for longer and purchase more cards from the store.

There are a million ways that we could likely brainstorm how to do this. This means there are a million risks they could take to try and move this metric. That’s where user research comes in and where we can start to tie our research back to an outcome.

Our research project becomes about mitigating the risks the team are taking when they work to improve this metric. It gives them more of a path or guidance toward making better decisions that resonate with users. So, within this project, our outcome would be:

“Reduce the risk of wasted time/energy when creating solutions to improve our day-7 app retention rate by 10%.”

You could also just tie the project directly to the team outcome, but I always like mentioning risk mitigation, help with decision-making, or reducing choice because it really is the essence of user research.

Example two:

For this example, I will demonstrate the difference between a more feature-based research project versus an outcome-based research project.

Imagine we are working with a conversion team (focused on increasing conversions in our product) at a company called Spooky World, where we sell year-round Halloween decorations (anyone??? Let me know if you want to go in on this fantastic idea). The team’s questions are:

• “Should we add a quick buy button?”

• “Should we add product reviews and photos?”

• “Should we include tips on how to decorate? Or maybe create a blog?”

• Should we let users connect with each other and talk about tips? Should we create a Spooky Community?”

These questions focus on features rather than an outcome or users. They can lead to many usability tests that, ultimately, don’t add much value to an organization or a product. When you go into a performance review, these types of projects can sometimes feel like low impact while still being a good amount of work.

Instead, you can reframe these questions to a larger outcome. Let’s take the quick buy button and the product reviews and photos feature. Instead of just talking about features, we could look at this like: “Improve conversion rate by 5% by simplifying the purchase process.”

Or, if we take the blog and community idea, we could tie it to a much larger objective of “Increasing customer basket size by 10% by helping customers understand how to use decorations together.”

Either way, we aren’t focused on “adding a button” or “creating a community,” but rather, we are mitigating risk by helping users and moving business metrics.

Example three

The final example I want to share is when you run into research projects that feel like they aren’t particularly tied to an outcome, such as generative research. A lot of the time, generative research can be lofty and abstract or could have a lot of potential outcomes across multiple teams.

For this example, let’s imagine we are working at Lego, and we are trying to understand our customers better by doing generative research to uncover their pain points, goals, and needs. We’re focusing primarily on parents because…money 😁

Within this context, what is our outcome? There are a few things we could tie this to:

1. Break down exactly how this project could impact the current outcomes/goals your teams are working on. Generative research helps you gather a lot of useful information that could help all the major metrics (AARRR metrics, for instance). For instance, generative research could absolutely help with improving retention rates by understanding unmet needs.

2. Look further than team-based metrics toward higher-level organization metrics. Generative research helps identify avenues for growth and innovation, which tend to be larger company goals.

3. Take into consideration internal outcomes for your team/yourself. You could have a goal of conducting more generative research (e.g. balancing evaluative and generative research better), so that could be an outcome you could include in the study.

Try not to tie it to a deliverable because that’s an output rather than an outcome, so if you are looking to create an output, what is the outcome that output will achieve? For example, the output of a project is a persona. The outcome of the project is what that persona helps the team do. If we created a persona at Lego, we would want to tie it to an outcome such as creating user-centric product roadmaps or increasing retention rates by understanding and addressing unmet needs.

What’s in an outcome-based research roadmap?