The Agile Researcher: A Survival Guide

For the last 20 years, tech firms have been operating in Agile. Agile is a method for delivering digital products and experiences that are more customer-centric, rapidly delivered, and frequently iterated. It’s no surprise that it emerged with the birth of the internet. Before Agile, organisations were said to work in “Waterfall”.

Large companies that existed before the internet are turning to Agile at scale (“scaled Agile”) to be more innovative and deliver more digital experiences.

The tension of Agile is that it’s not easy to get the application right beyond digital and tech. Working in Waterfall delivers consistent results (albeit without innovation) which shareholders value.

What is agile research?

Agile research is an approach allowing for the fast and continuous collection of feedback. When evolving into scaled Agile, companies ask themselves: “How might we adopt Agile so as we may be customer-centric and innovate while at the same time deliver consistent commercial results?”

In turn, the question they could be asking themselves is: “How might we deliver robust insights for both innovation and consistent delivery of results?”.

A misunderstanding in research about Agile is that it only means doing the same things faster. The fact is that client-side research changes with the introduction of scaled agile and not embracing it are missed opportunities. Below, we’ll explore the types of multidisciplinary approaches that accompany Agile that can enrich research and research careers.

Four ways to approach agile research

1. Embrace the minimum viable product (MVP) technique

What’s different: Scaled Agile often focuses on delivering frequent improvements to a product or service that is considered the minimum required to be viable. It is then iterated for improvement. When a product or service is an innovation and thus new, there is not much customer expectation of new features. However, when innovating on top of existing products and services, while the culture of Agile is about innovation (and much of the research becomes about innovation), you still need to stay focused on delivering well the hygiene features and services that customers expect.

Research implications: Going into agile will require you to:

• Execute feature and proposition screening in a rapid timeframe (within two weeks). A lean planning and testing cadence are valuable.
• Have a foresight program to scan what is happening globally to anticipate what types of features and innovations you should be testing.
• Deliver to the focus of innovation while also monitoring all attributes and functionality to understand usage and importance of the hygiene foundational dimensions.

2. Leverage multi-disciplinary teams vs. linear order-taking

What’s different: In many agile structures, you are working with stakeholders that consists of people representing a broad range of disciplines – e.g. product, performance, data, marketing, customer experience, and perhaps design. In Waterfall, research was often engaged by marketing or distribution who are often responding to the P&L owner (product). This all changes as you interface with all disciplines working on a common mission.

Research implications: The big upside is that research will provide more support for product and service design, user testing, and product and proposition as opposed to responding to a marketing interpretation of the business problem. In this way, research will be bought into the process earlier. This calls for a wide range of research practice areas.

However, there are a couple of downsides to this:

1. People from different disciplines may not be familiar with research.
2. Accordingly, stakeholders from the design and digital worlds who are only familiar with user testing will not understand the importance and role of more robust quantitative and evidence-based methodologies critical for providing confidence to make big decisions.

The bigger the risk, the more evidence is required.

3. Consider the digital experience

What’s different: Most innovation is often digital, requiring researchers to understand the digital experience.

Research implications: It is important you incorporate and understand appropriate measures and methodologies, such as those included below.

• Digital experiences have different metrics and frameworks. Measures of how easy the digital experience is (SUPRQ, BERT & task duration) are important. In this paradigm, a lot of effort goes into testing, before release.
• Understanding how these metrics deliver in relation to overall customer experience scores is also a must.
• Include prototyping more explicitly in the early stages of the customer experience research, even while prototyping is not too different from more traditional qual iteration research techniques. You may be the only person that realises this?
• Be aware of the trap of different worlds colliding. Design & UX researchers tend to use a different language than traditional researchers, and this will take time for both to understand. UX researchers tend to do more task-based research whereas traditional research will often use projective methods to understand underlying goals and aspirations.

4. Work in sprints vs. annual planning

What’s different: In Agile, annual planning is replaced with shorter-term sprint planning. Sprints are usually three weeks and planned quarterly to provide more flexibility. When things don’t work, they get improved or killed (failing fast). The business will still have a view of what it wishes to achieve in a year, but “how” to achieve those goals in a more of a team sport within squads that have specific “missions”.

Research implications: We have seen in Waterfall projects that take two weeks to initiate to discover the real business problem, maybe a week to get into field, two to three weeks in field, and another two weeks for results to come through. That is nine weeks. Many research agencies are still built on this research “buyer-model”. Nine weeks is three sprints which are too long without any results. You will need to do more research internally to match the Agile cycle. Specifically note that:

• Business problems will come to you in more bite-sized chunks, necessitating research to be completed more in stages. Stakeholders will not be committing to big initiatives upfront, rather wanting to “test the water” and discover potential. We also call this “just enough research”.
• You need to deliver results iteratively during projects, giving squad members exposure to the fieldwork so they can engage with the customer and increase their empathy for the customer.
• You will do more showcase presentations of the big take-outs instead of running through a 100-page presentation with people losing concentration. This is even true in COVID!
• With a multi-disciplinary set of stakeholders, you will be needing to do more synthesis of data and evidence from multiple sources – e.g. internal data from systems, external product comparisons, and academic research to provide a more holistic view of the world.
• The overall change in timing and delivery pattern of Agile and the greater amount of digital work will require you to:
  1. Have easy access to a customer community where you will be able to initiate work rapidly and capacity to scale up or down quickly.
  2. Utilise tools in-house – e.g. UserZoom (quant user-testing) and Lookback (qual).
  3. Test in a weekly cadence (meaning develop the prototype, test it, and have results back later in the week). This type of cadence requires many elements of research and tools to be pre-prepared. This means for certain types of research such as user testing and design research, researchers usually need to be embedded in other teams.

Agile is here to stay

In summary, there are many great opportunities with adopting Agile in a client-side organisation. There is a more diverse range of disciplines in operation and therefore to be integrated into research work. A benefit of the impact of these new approaches and alternative frameworks on methodology and interpretation from a range of areas such as human-centred design, tech, and analytics.

Agile also calls for more research to be executed internally making it exciting place to be. Synthesising these different types of research and providing the “so what” and “now what” will allow client-side researchers to focus on more strategic activities.