Building a startup is complicated.

There is an endless list of tasks that must be completed; a product roadmap to refine, bugs in the code to fix, user queries to respond to, features that need to be built, the next round of funding to raise and finding the right people to hire. At times, the whole experience can feel frantic.

Every team member knows that the product won't succeed without an obsessive focus on meeting users' needs. Most companies prioritise this end-user focus at the start and deeply consider the user when making decisions. The team is small and everyone has either direct communication with users or is working alongside someone who does. Internal communication is easy and everyone is singing from the same 'user-first' hymn sheet.

As the startup begins to scale, remaining close to the voice of the user becomes more challenging. The addition of a customer support function generally marks the end of user engagement for the rest of the team. Product Managers tend to be the final frontier; dabbling in ad-hoc user research alongside the growing list of product roadmap tickets they're inheriting and the new PM recruits they're trying to bring up to speed.

When ManoMano was an early-stage startup, everyone talked to users. Back then we even had a “phone-roulette” customer service and every employee - including founders - answered customers requests. As the company grew, engaging directly with customers became harder.

Chloé Martinot — Founder and CEO of Ouvrage, former CPO & User Researcher of ManoMano

Time constrained product managers generally understand the benefits associated with user research but they never quite get around to doing it. They're forced to push in-depth user research to the side because even the simple research operations like as recruitment can be pretty time-consuming. As a result, PMs either conduct lacklustre user research or begin making decisions on gut feel, neither of which are based on solid insights. Inaccurate and bias-ridden insights inevitably cause poor product decisions. It is around this time mistakes begin to happen which have a direct impact on users' experience and product trajectory. The connection to the user is lost.

The company eventually realises that they've lost their connection to the user and they're paying the price. In an attempt to salvage user experience, the company hires a user researcher who is tasked with damage control.

In summary, most companies hire a UX Researcher in a state of emergency.

Why a UX Researcher?

There are many product managers capable of conducting basic user research. However, if you want to get the best results, there's no doubt that it makes sense to hire someone specialised in research.

The reason for this is obvious; UX researchers are more experienced in research practices. They know how to use the most appropriate set of research techniques with the right sample size. They know how to ask quality research questions and avoid misinterpreting the data. They can pick up unspoken cues in interviews that are invisible to the untrained eye and they have a deeper understanding of how to uncover pain points, motivations and needs.

And perhaps most importantly, they come with an unbiased perspective.

While it is a necessary evil in smaller companies, having the same person do the research and make product decisions long term is a recipe for failure.

When should you hire a UX Researcher?

By now you might have guessed that hiring a UX Researcher in a state of emergency is probably not the best strategy. Instead, it would make sense to prioritise your research and proactively hire a UX Researcher before low-quality insights and poorly informed decision-making begin to infect your user experience.

So, how do you know when it's time to make that hire?

The trick is to detect the early signals of research neglect before they manifest as larger issues. If any of the following examples sound familiar, it's probably time to consider hiring a UX Researcher.

You understand 'what' and 'when' but not 'why'

This is a common mistake. Companies believe that big data is a silver bullet because they can track everything users do on their product. But making assumptions on data without a meaningful understanding of user motivations can easily lead a product team astray.

While product managers are generally good at answering what, when and how questions, user researchers dig into the data to discover the exact reason why users behave the way they do with questions like:

• Why do users choose to use your product over a competitor?

• Why is the bounce rate so high?

• Why are users using some features and not others?

Product managers and user researchers complement each other through a collaborative flow of information:

For example, when we were doing a deep dive on the tidal wave of interest recently in Mixed Methods Research, we came across a B2B software company that had a very interesting story.

They said that they could see from their data that less engaged users tended to use some features more frequently than engaged users, but they couldn't understand why this was happening. They hired a user researcher to investigate. Through user interviews, it was discovered that a segment of users only used their product to assign tasks to others. This insight instantly changed how the company viewed their user segments, predictions for future growth, their product roadmap and the success metrics they were using.

Shifting the research perspective from what to why was their game changer.

You are experiencing high churn

Retention is a powerful indicator of performance because it demonstrates loyalty through real behaviour (users have actually decided to stay), instead of predicting future loyalty based on users' own perceived level of satisfaction.

Bain & Company and Harvard Business School's Earl Sasser previously demonstrated that even a 5% increase in retention can lead to an increase in profits of 25-95%. Many companies shy away from putting customer acquisition on centre stage due to the high upfront costs.

But 'Early losses, long-term profits' should be your retention mantra.

Loyal users are more likely to refer others to your product, meaning retained users amplify profits even further. And if you plan to raise capital in the future, investors will focus on your ability to retain users because it's a great predictor of future success.

If you measure your retention rate and find that users are coming back time and time again then you have little to worry about. If on the other hand retention is low, then you have a serious research project on your hands that is best suited to an unbiased UX researcher.

When Xeropan - an app for gamified language learning - was experiencing high churn, they turned to UX research looking for answers. Their data showed that many people stopped using the app soon after downloading it. They figured that something about the onboarding process was throwing users off.

After hiring a UX researcher, they discovered through user interviews that users found onboarding difficult. People would skip over the annoying instructions at the start and attempt to explore it by themselves (I'm guilty of doing the same 🙋‍♂️) because Xeropan was doing such a good job of hyping them up to convert into users. But because the application was facing UX issues, users quickly got confused about features and there was no way to retrieve the onboarding instructions they had skipped. The UX team redesigned the onboarding process so that users could read the instructions any time that suited them. This change in design immediately decreased their churn rate and increased longterm profitability.

Need to save time on user research? OpinionX is a free research tool for stack ranking people’s priorities, helping you get real data to inform better decisions.

You don't properly understand your user segments

Many startups make the mistake of using generic demographics like age, profession and location to develop their personas. These data points are useful from a user acquisition perspective but they don't offer much value when segmenting already acquired users.

Instead, product teams should segment users into profitability groups with a focus on those who generate the most revenue. Pareto's principle says that 80% of revenue comes from 20% of customers, so you better know exactly who those customers are and go the extra mile to please them.

You can also find the commonalities between users who churn and create an 'at-risk' segment. Once you identify the actions or lack of actions that indicate a user might be about to leave, you can implement a proactive approach to prevent churn.

Once these segments are identified, user research helps you to understand the factors that differentiate them. These differentiation factors become your company's superpower, enabling you to position your product in a way that attracts top 20% users instead of bottom 80%.

You are not making time for exploratory/generative research

Exploratory research can often feel like a luxury. It's an afterthought in many companies compared to the evaluative research that's so highly regarded. Not having formal research processes for exploration is a mistake because it's this type of research that surfaces the most significant insights for driving profitable innovation.

Sometimes we just don't know what we don't know. It's only by using open-ended research methods that we can become informed on the full spectrum of problems that users experience and the feasible solutions that could enhance our products.

In a world increasingly dominated by entrepreneurial disruptors, identifying and developing what’s ‘next’ - seizing the disruptive, transformative, revolutionary and new to the world ideas - has become not only a precondition for growth but also a prerequisite for survival. The inspirations that lead to ‘next’ most often come in the form of surprising and counter-intuitive understanding.

Thomas Stat — Director of Design Labs at Gensler

Engaging in generative research is a habit of thriving companies with innovation deeply engrained in their culture. Companies that feel they don't have time for generative research due to the constant demands of everyday tasks are in survival mode and are waiting to be disrupted by competitors that generate disruptive ideas through user engagement.

Who should you hire?

When it comes to making your first UX Research hire it can be difficult to know where to start. The type of person needed will differ from one company to the next.

For your first UX Research hire, you want a generalist who is capable of using their research capabilities to solve any problem. Instead of hiring a specialist in either qualitative or quantitative methods, seek out someone with a history of Mixed Methods Research projects.

Your first user researcher will spend the morning conducting interviews with users to understand motivations and unmet needs, the afternoon designing a new survey based on the insights collected during their morning interviews, and the evening studying product analytics to see if what was said during the interviews remains relevant through statistical insights.

It is exactly this mixed methods research requirement that has given rise to the popularity of the Full-Stack Researcher role - the ideal first research hire.

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