Increasing Research Maturity in Your Business
Maze published an excellent report, which is available here which demonstrates current research maturity and different types of research maturity in a business.
What is so surprising is how much potential growth and revenue is left on the table due to low research maturity or an ad hoc approach to research meaning that at a strategic level for the product and business, insights are not being fully realised.
Levels of research maturity
In 2023, Maze surveyed over 500 professionals across design, UX and product across a variety of industries and business sizes. The report found five levels of research maturity across the survey respondents.
“Limited - 2%: Research is only used to monitor and optimize products after they’ve been released
Sporadic - 17%: Research is conducted on an ad hoc basis to validate design decisions and improvements to the product
Developing - 45%: Research comes into projects earlier to explore the problem space and inform roadmap and scope of decisions
Systematic - 33%: Research is conducted continuously throughout the product life cycle to inform product and business decisions
Strategic - 3%: Research informs strategic decisions and helps organisations set long-term goals and priorities”
This report shows good news that research is coming into projects early on to deep dive problem spaces and the use of roadmaps is based on customer and user needs and that research. However, research is not reaching its full potential at levels four and five, where two-thirds of businesses are missing out on continuous discovery throughout the lifecycle of the product development process and an astonishing majority of businesses aren’t taking research to the top level of the business so it informs the company’s strategy.
Level up to level five
Make Products That Matter provides an overview of what research can be done at different stages of the product development lifecycle.
Source: Make Products That Matter
This table looks linear, but it’s not in practice.
Both slow research, which is project-based research such as UX or user research or market research, can be done at the same time as fast research which focuses more on the product and finessing it to meet user and customer needs.
Product discovery and continuous discovery not only happen from the commercialisation stage but always, which may feed into the slow research.
To improve research maturity in an organisation, research can be continuous but also democratised so it’s a team sport and shared activity for key players to be experts in the user and to have users in mind for their own role; whether it be leadership, design, marketing or development.
Summary
Raising the research maturity at your organisation can bring huge benefits such as data-driven decision-making and business advantages outlined below.
The main takeaway is to consider the research maturity level in your organisation because research brings huge competitive advantages, and opportunities to innovate and enter the market in an informed way as most of the guesswork has been removed. Knowing the customer at all levels can improve business strategy and lead to huge business benefits such as an increase in revenue.
