Judd Antin

True stakeholder alignment for researchers is achieved when they are viewed as essential partners in the decision-making room, not just service providers.

"My metric for success is when they won't have that meeting without you. That's my metric for success. If they cannot have that decision making meeting without the researcher there, that means you've d..."

To align with business stakeholders, researchers must learn the language of profit, metrics, and strategy.

"Did you read the last quarterly report, If it's a public company? Did you listen to the shareholder call?... Scour your Google Drive folder... look for all of the documents that are about this quarter..."

The ability to simplify complex concepts is a critical trait for high-level leadership and effective communication.

"Think of a topic that you had to explain lately that was the most complex, and then explain it to me like I'm five... I want to see if somebody can break a complex problem down in a really simple way,..."

The best researchers possess a 'Swiss army knife' of diverse methodologies rather than relying on a single tool.

"I've interviewed hundreds or thousands of researchers, and the way I usually approach that is you want a researcher who's got a Swiss army knife... give... a researcher, a pretty juicy, open-ended res..."

Creating a high-impact insights culture requires breaking down silos between UX research, data science, and customer support.

"I set out to create an integrated insights function where it's like, 'Let's do UX research, let's talk about the market and competitors when we have to. Let's integrate smartly with data science funct..."

Effective decision-making requires aggregating diverse sources of information to counteract individual cognitive biases.

"The wisdom of the crowd works when the people involved with the decision are bringing diverse sources of information and judgment to the table... If you want to check your gut, get a bunch of differen..."

Research should be an integrated partner throughout the product lifecycle, not a reactive service function called in at the end.

"The solution is simple but not easy to me. It's that we need to restructure the way we make products in a way which integrates research much more fully. It looks like consistent relationships in which..."

Research impact is maximized when researchers share the same success metrics and OKRs as the cross-functional product team.

"I never asked for research teams to have their own separate OKRs. I said... shouldn't the PMs, the engineers, the designers and the research, everybody should have the same set of metrics for success..."

Macro research should focus on the competitive landscape and long-term market opportunities to drive strategic planning.

"Macro research is big picture, strategic, business focused, forward-looking innovation, look at the market, look at competitors, long-term research to understand where the product should go next."

Research should be approached with a mindset of falsification—seeking to be proven wrong—rather than seeking validation for existing ideas.

"One of my big mantras was, 'We don't validate, we falsify. We are looking to be wrong.' Many PMs, many designers are not in that place. They do not want to be wrong. They're looking to validate, and t..."

Effective user research focuses on understanding behaviors and problems rather than asking users to design the solution.

"A researcher who's going to ask customers what they want is a bad researcher. You need a different researcher. I've never done that in my career. No one on my team has ever run a study that's like tha..."

NPS is often a flawed and imprecise metric; Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) is a more scientifically rigorous and business-correlated alternative.

"NPS is the best example of the marketing industry marketing itself... the consensus in the survey science community is that NPS makes all the mistakes... Customer satisfaction, a simple CSAT metric, i..."

Teams often suffer from hindsight bias and the narrative fallacy, dismissing research insights as 'obvious' after the fact.

"Everything is Obvious If You Already Know the Answer. And it's about hindsight bias... we end up selectively remembering things and then constructing narratives around them in a way which makes us fee..."

Micro-level evaluative research and usability testing can drive massive business value through small, tactical optimizations.

"The micro level, there's so much business value to be derived there... We changed the text on the button with help from our amazing content design... We basically changed seven characters and made Air..."

While dogfooding is useful for identifying potential issues, external user testing is required to prioritize them accurately because employees are not like the users.

"Doing product walkthroughs to identify lists of potential issues is a great thing to do. Prioritizing that list, figuring out which ones are more or less a problem, and for whom is an area where you s..."