Co-creating research enablement with your tech org: a case study
Summary
- We’re a small, centralized research team that sits within our organization’s Strategy team. For years, we’ve wanted to invest more in enablement, esepcially for our Technology teams. However, with limited resources and a steady stream of high-priority research requests from executives, we struggled to make progress.
- We’d experimented from time to time with enablement efforts, but we hadn’t seen meaningful change in behaviors or research fluency. For example, we built templates, shared them, and put them in our internal knowledge library – but team members quickly forgot where to find them, and they got lost in the ever-growing library. We gave basic research training to the Design team, but that wasn’t enough to impact the Technology org as a whole – their Product and Engineering counterparts didn’t share the same context and didn’t buy in.
- We knew we needed to become enablers as our company grew and large-scale research questions were increasing, but our past efforts hadn’t been the best use of our limited resources; just focusing on the top priority research had been more impactful than the enablement efforts we’d made thus far.
Signals it was time for a change
- We earned strong executive buy in. After seeing the impact that well-scoped, well-timed research made when led by our team, Tech leadership was ready to have their people dedicate time to it as well. We showed them clear measurable outcomes – that enabling teams to do research will reduce time-to-impact for our customers, and allow us to scale research impact without significant investment in new headcount.
- We had the resources. Leadership buy-in allowed us to invest upfront to roll out enablement efforts at scale.
- Other Technology processes were changing at the same time. There was a large initiative to improve our product development lifecycle and implement new related processes. Our research enablement efforts could attach to those and reinforce them, rather than being their own disconnected initiative.
How we’re addressing
In the past six months, we shifted gears and made a concentrated investment in research enablement across our ~400-person Technology org. This case study shares how Research and Research Operations partnered to build and scale research education, operations, and tooling across Product, Design, and Engineering. In particular, this case study will focus on our design and delivery of multi-day hands-on skill building workshops for the Technology org, and an accompanying research playbook.
How we’re measuring success
We measured insights fluency of our Technology organization using a self-assessment survey (~n=175), which we’ll re-administer at the conclusion of our workshop series in January. This will provide clear data on change in knowledge. Also at that time, we’ll be formally evaluating behavior change via usage metrics of our playbooks and templates, usage of Research Office Hours, and Research Support Requests. Lastly, we’ll be evaluating with Technology leadership to gain understanding of new research taking place across their org, and whether and how it’s impacting decision making.
Key Insights
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Providing research materials alone is insufficient; teams need serious skill development to produce quality data.
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Co-creating enablement programs with the product organization ensures better alignment and adoption.
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Multi-day, interactive workshops aligned with the product development lifecycle enhance hands-on learning and retention.
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Embedding research support within existing communication tools like Slack improves accessibility and reduces friction.
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Offering tiered support—from full partnership to office hours—helps balance workload and meet varying team needs.
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Dedicated enablement efforts significantly increase confidence and engagement in research across diverse teams.
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Though resource-intensive, going big on research enablement yields disproportionately higher impact than additional effort.
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Sharing strategic research responsibilities with product teams generates more bandwidth for high-level company research.
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Leadership openness to investing team time on research enablement is critical for success.
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Continuous iteration and feedback integration are necessary to keep enablement relevant and effective in a growing organization.
Notable Quotes
"We thought she was in great shape and we were thrilled, then found out she didn’t know to BCC 500 customers—this still stresses me years later."
"We went very, very big instead of an annoying side project; it became the core of our research systems."
"Our past enablement was exacerbating issues because teams had resources but not enough skills."
"We are co-creating with the product organization to make sure everything fits seamlessly rather than being separate."
"We put heavy trust in our stakeholders and co-created the curriculum with them."
"Our bet was that distributing ownership would create more advocates and free bandwidth for strategic work."
"We tried hybrid sessions but quickly learned splitting virtual and in-person was better for experience."
"We underestimated the amount of work; each workshop took about 40 hours per person to prepare and run."
"Asking for help and engaging is actually a sign of growing confidence among teams."
"This process has moved us from facilitators of knowledge to owners of knowledge."
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