A researcher and an engineering working together on a research activity.

Collaborating with Your Team for Research

by Laura Klein • 11 min read

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Research on siloed teams is often the responsibility of a small number of people. On agile teams, we often involve more decision makers in research, which is a little trickier than it sounds. In this video we’ll discuss the idea of team research and talk about some ways to make it easier and less disruptive. 

Transcript

The Take Away

Collaborating with team members, especially engineers, can drastically improve the types of research you can do in a short period of time. Involving other folks helps to develop a deep customer understanding throughout the team, and it can avoid technical delays by surfacing potential issues early in the design process. 

It obviously won’t work for every single team, and some company cultures are actively hostile toward it, even in organizations that claim to be agile. But it’s worth doing as much as you can to spread the work of research out between other team members. 

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© Interaction Design Foundation, CC BY-SA 3.0

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