Thanks to Daniel Elizalde for having me on the Enterprise Product Leadership podcast to talk about user research, especially in enterprise and industrial organizations. The audio (51 min) is embedded above, and available on the episode page.

We discuss the complexities of doing user research in a B2B context, the challenges of getting access to users, the need to understand customers’ pain (as opposed to only focusing on usability), and how to influence your organization to conduct more research. Steve also shares his advice on how to build a practice that encourages ongoing user research.

Topics

• Steve’s career background and the work he does today as an experienced user researcher
• What a user researcher does and why it is important
• Invaluable tips for user researchers
• Why companies struggle to understand their customers’ challenges
• How a company can become more user-centered
• How to enable a culture that empowers everyone
• Why you may want to bring on a user researcher or an external expert
• The nuances of being a team player and contributing to the success of the company
• How to challenge baseline assumptions to move forward and grow as a company
• The differences between B2C and B2B user research
• The challenges of user research (and how to overcome them)
• Why user research is not only incredibly invaluable but needs to be figured out for your company
• Why culture is critical to research
• How to support leaders in helping transform the organization’s mindset into a customer-centric culture
• Proactive vs. reactive research

Tips

• Keep in mind user-research is a skill. You can read about it, take classes, listen to podcasts, but you also have to practice.
• Practice can include: knowing when to do research, knowing what research to do, how to go about actually doing the research, learning how to leverage the research that you’ve done, and learning how to help others understand the research.
• And be sure to give yourself the chance to get better. All of this takes time. Be compassionate and understand that research is not just binary; there are many, many facets of it.