The UX Research Leadership Quagmire
For a lot of people (myself included), becoming a UX/user researcher sucked. Here are a bunch of reasons for this in no particular order…
- Employers don’t know how to evaluate research candidates
- There’s no straight-forward journey into UX research, unlike software engineering or design
- To be a competent researcher, you also have to get really good at stakeholder management, time management and all other forms of self-management
You get the idea….
But then the moment of glory arrives! You’ve mastered stakeholder management, you’ve figured out how to position your undergraduate degree in psychology as the perfect educational prerequisite to research, and through trial and error you’ve taught recruiters how to evaluate your research skills.
You got the job.
You’re good at research, your team loves how you keep them focused on customer needs while managing business constraints. Team members join in on the synthesis sessions and stakeholders eagerly await the results of your studies. You’ve made it, you’re a research star! You’ve been promoted to senior researcher.
What happens after that? Become a Sr. Senior Researcher? 🤔
At some point you realize that there’s nowhere left for you to grow to. Our colleagues in engineering and product have directors, VPs, and even C-suite executive roles to grow towards, and as researchers we have nothing.
Of course, there are a few companies that buck this trend. Facebook, Airbnb, and Shopify have more senior roles for research but those companies are few and far between. The vast majority of us researchers are going to have to recognize that there is no way up.
I wish this was the part in the Medium-post-hot-take where I let you know the solution and we all go back to sipping our americanos in peace knowing that the problem is solved — but this isn’t the case. 😢
I think we’re going to see an exodus of top research talent into new roles. Some of us will go to product roles, those of us with designer backgrounds might go the route of ‘UX’ leadership. Either way, we’re going to lose much of the most experienced talent in our community — those who have the most to offer the swelling ranks of junior researchers — to other departments.
The desire to grow and learn (and earn more💰) is a powerful force. If researchers can’t find a way to do that in research, they’ll find it somewhere else.
I think the long-term solution is pretty clear. We’ll see research departments start to spring up in technology companies as research moves from providing product and design insights to supporting the entire business (marketing, customer success, business strategy, etc). Matt talks about this a bit in his talk below from the 2018 UXRConf 👇
So what do we do now? Well, nothing I think.
The hope is that as researchers move into leadership roles in other parts of the business, we’ll have strong advocates in place to facilitate the creation of research leadership opportunities in the future. I think that’s something to be optimistic about. 🤷
But for now, that’s all it is
A hope (and maybe a prayer).
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