Advertorial – Axel Schomborg, Produkt + Markt

Agile Research – 4 of 9 tips for agile teams

Agile projects can also get bogged down and lead to solutions that are anything but user-centred. To prevent this from happening, Axel Schomborg has developed a series of "Nine Recommendations for Agile Teams". He shares four of his tips here, more appear every week on the P+M website.

 

01 Customer centricity: regularly question your perspective

It's great and helpful when agile teams enter into dialogue with users themselves to immerse themselves in their world and gather feedback. The more the teams understand the users, the more likely they are to develop solutions that delight the customers. If only there weren't these stereotypes, biases, group dynamics and paradigms that always lead to undesirable developments. 

Agile teams like to be cross-functional in order to avoid thinking in silos and to enable mutual inspiration. What is forgotten, however, is that the teams have at least one common background. They all come from the same organization. This means they share a common culture and are subject to the same paradigms, which act like a filter when they perceive the reality of the users. When their own perspective collides with the users' reality, some agile teams find it difficult to abandon their established truths and accept the users' perspective without reservation. 

Therefore, methods should always be available in the toolbox of agile teams with which their own perspective can be questioned and openness to the users strengthened. Bianca Prommer and Heiner Junker will show how this can be done in their presentation at Week of Market Research: 

Sign up!
Monday, 09 May 2022 | 11.00 to 11.45 a.m. | Agile Market Research - How to get more out of your new role | Bianca Prommer and Heiner Junker
(session will be held in German)

 

02 Research quality: you need to know your limits

Agile projects are about developing solutions to problems in such a way that the users - i.e. the target groups - benefit from them. This is done in iterative steps and feedback loops. The further the solution development in a project has progressed, the more important it becomes to involve internal research professionals or agencies. These ensure the necessary quality and depth of detail when they collect and analyze user feedback.

In the early stages of development, more rapid than detailed user feedback is required. The aim is to roughly assess whether a solution is basically going in the right direction. In this phase, agile teams often make methodological compromises to ensure that the project progresses quickly. This also makes sense, because it is not actually user research, but rather a co-creation dialogue with the target group.

Of course, the same quality standards cannot be applied to this customer dialogue as in market research. Nevertheless, we recommend that teams always draw up a checklist on data quality and the limits of meaningfulness - similar to a study profile. Knowing the limits of meaningfulness and addressing them in the team helps to correctly classify the meaning of the data. It also prevents quick-and-dirty findings from getting stuck in the heads of the teams and leading to supposedly reliable truths in the follow-up process.

You can find an example of a checklist here (in German).

 

03 Feedback: Provides more depth

When it comes to user feedback, agile teams are mainly interested in how the solutions are received by the users, what is liked and what is understood, and where the opportunities for improvement lie. The results are processed in dashboards or templates and with the help of KPIs then used for the further process. Typical feedback questions usually start with "what" or "how".

It is striking that questions about the "why" and the emotional impact are examined far too rarely in standardized feedback interviews. Yet practice shows: teams that know why their ideas catch on or fail get a better feeling for their target group. This enables them to develop significantly better solutions.

Dr Jessica Schomberg and Sarah Helmich will demonstrate in their presentations at Week of Market Research how more depth and more emotion can be achieved, especially in time-critical projects.

Sign up!
• Tuesday, 10 May 2022 | 10.00 to 10.45 a.m. | Speed up and dig deeper! How market researchers benefit from AI! | Dr Jessica Schomberg
• Thursday, 12 May 2022 | 10.00 to 10.45 a.m. | Experience live: How quickly you can get to the emotions of your target group in every survey | Sarah Helmich
(the sessions will be held in German)

 

04 Focus: Take time to hang around

Agile projects should focus on the research results that are important for achieving the project goal. Everything that is not needed and distracts from the research purpose should be faded out, thus reducing waste. This begins with the planning of the research design, extends to the design of the guidelines and questionnaires and ends with the presentation of results using top lines. By concentrating on the essentials, market research is so effective in an agile context. With the consistent focus on the project goal, we do not run the risk of getting bogged down.

But what happens when the breakthrough insights are outside our focus? What if there are not just one, but several red threads in the data and our story is just one of many different realities?

If the world were not so complex, there would be no need for market research. And it is precisely because of the complexity of our challenges that we have also adopted the agile principles of software development in management.

That's why the recommendation to the agile teams is: Take the time to loiter aimlessly in the world of your users - outside your product category. Take an interest in users as people and not just as a potential target group. Experience the big and small challenges they face. Observe what makes them happy and what annoys them and try to understand what lies behind their behavior and attitudes. 

User communities like IN|SPIARY or Expert Communities are particularly suitable for this. With them, users can be observed and questioned over a very long period of time, and not just virtually. Often, community participants can also be recruited for face-to-face interviews, focus groups, workshops or in-home/in-office formats. Especially when there is no project going on and the community seems to be lying idle, it makes sense to talk to the users and build empathy. Empathy that will lead to even more customer centricity and even better solutions in the next agile project at the latest.

Advertorial in German on marktforschung.de - here