Agile Research

It is great and beneficial when Agile Teams engage directly with users to immerse themselves in their world and gather feedback. The better the teams understand the users, the higher the likelihood that they will develop solutions that excite customers. If only it weren't for those stereotypes, biases, group dynamics, and paradigms that repeatedly lead to missteps.

Agile teams are often composed cross-functionally to avoid silo thinking and foster mutual inspiration. However, it is often overlooked that the teams share at least one common background: they all come from the same organization. As a result, they share a common culture and are subject to the same paradigms, which act like a filter when perceiving the users' reality. When their perspective clashes with the users' reality, some agile teams find it challenging to abandon their entrenched truths and unconditionally accept the users' perspective.

Therefore, the toolkit of agile teams should always include methods that allow them to question their own perspective and enhance openness towards users. Bianca Prommer and Heiner Junker demonstrated how this can be done in their presentation: Agile Market Research - Make More of Your New Role as part of this year's WdM. If you are interested, you can request the recording of the webinar at marketing@produktundmarkt.de.

Agile projects focus on developing solutions to problems in a way that benefits users—the target audiences. This is achieved through iterative steps and feedback loops. As a project's solution development progresses, it becomes increasingly important to involve internal research professionals or institutes. These experts ensure the necessary quality and depth when collecting and analyzing user feedback.

In the early development phases, quick user feedback is valued over detailed insights. The goal is to make a rough assessment of whether a solution is fundamentally heading in the right direction. During this phase, agile teams often make methodological compromises to ensure rapid project progress. This approach makes sense as it is not strictly user research, but rather a co-creation dialogue with the target audience.

Of course, the same quality standards as in market research are not applicable to this customer dialogue. However, we recommend that teams always create a checklist for data quality and limitations of the findings—similar to a study brief. Understanding these limitations and discussing them within the team helps correctly interpret the data's significance. It also prevents quick-and-dirty insights from becoming entrenched in the team's mindset and being mistakenly considered reliable truths, which could lead to misinterpretations in subsequent processes.

When collecting user feedback, agile teams are mainly interested in how the solutions are received by users, what is liked and understood, and where there are opportunities for improvement. The results are prepared using dashboards or templates with the help of KPIs and then utilized for the further process. Typical feedback questions usually begin with "What" or "How."

Notably, questions about the "Why" and the emotional impact are too rarely examined in standardized feedback interviews. However, practice shows: teams that understand why their ideas succeed or fail gain a better understanding of their target audience. This enables them to develop significantly better solutions.

How more depth and emotion can be achieved, especially in time-critical projects, was demonstrated by Dr. Jessica Schomberg and Sarah Helmich in their presentations at this year’s WdM:
Speed up and dig deeper! How Market Researchers Benefit from AI! | Dr. Jessica Schomberg
Experience live: How to quickly tap into your target audience's emotions in every survey | Sarah Helmich
If interested, you can request the recording of the webinar at marketing@produktundmarkt.de.

Agile projects should engage with the research findings that are crucial for achieving the project goal. Anything that is not needed and distracts from the research purpose should be filtered out to reduce waste. This starts with planning the research design, extends through the development of guidelines and questionnaires, and concludes with the presentation of results using top-lines. By focusing on the essentials, market research in an agile context becomes effective. With a consistent focus on the project goal, we avoid the risk of getting sidetracked.
But what happens when groundbreaking insights lie outside our focus? What if there is not just one, but several threads in the data, and our story is only one of many different realities?
If the world were not so complex, there would be no need for market research. And precisely because of the complexity of our challenges, we have adopted the agile principles of software development in management as well.
Therefore, the recommendation for agile teams is: Take the time to loiter aimlessly in the world of your users – and do so outside your product category. Be interested in users as people, not just as potential target groups. Experience the large and small challenges they face. Observe what makes them happy and what annoys them, and try to understand the reasons behind their behavior and attitudes.
User communities like IN|SPIARY or expert communities are particularly well-suited for this purpose. With them, users can be observed and interviewed over a very long period, and not just virtually. Often, community participants can also be engaged for face-to-face interviews, focus groups, workshops, or in-home/in-office formats. Especially when there is no project running, and the community seems dormant, it makes sense to engage in conversation with users and build empathy. Empathy that will undoubtedly lead to even more customer-centricity and better solutions in the next agile project.

The best market research is of little use if the project goal, and thereby the research objective, is not clearly formulated. It is not that simple to define a common goal. Often, the visions of the stakeholders, users, and the agile team differ. It takes practice, courage, and a systematic approach to develop an engaging goal that everyone can identify with. We therefore recommend using an experienced coach for moderation.

The goal template is a great tool to succinctly capture the ambitions and desires of all parties involved. Remember, during this phase, you are laying the foundation for your project's success. Allocate sufficient time to define your goal as concretely and ambitiously as possible. Don't forget to articulate the main challenges and describe the user groups as thoroughly as possible.

Our tip: Also specify what you do not want to achieve, that is, what should not be part of the project.

Learn how to formulate your project goal here.

Who doesn't know them: Feedback Grid, Empathy Map, User Story, or Customer Value Map. Templates help us structure what we've learned about the users. With templates, we manage to make the complex reality of users more comprehensible and thus derive coherent user-centered solutions.

Using templates is therefore very sensible for agile teams. However, those who structure with templates also run the risk of thinking in the same structures. This risk exists when using Empathy Map and the like. We try to fit the complex reality of users into a structure that we deem sensible from our perspective, but completely overlook that empathy encompasses far more dimensions than we can capture in the map, and that Customer Value with the namesake map almost exclusively represents functional dimensions, but values and motives should also be derived.

Take a close look at the templates you are working with and consider which dimensions lie behind or beneath them that explain the "why" and not just the "what" and "how." Enhance your templates with these dimensions, because every need and evaluation is complex in itself and often unstructured. It is precisely in this complexity that the starting points for surprisingly fascinating solutions lie.

Want to learn more about the use of templates in agile research? Then simply book a free keynote for your team here at impulsvortrag@produktundmarkt.de.

Have you gained many insights and even more ideas? Now it's time to decide which ones take top priority. Dotmocracy is a simple method for prioritizing or making decisions within a team. Team members are given sticky dots to allocate according to their preferences or relevance, helping them select the best options. While this method seems plausible at first glance, it also has some pitfalls you should be aware of and navigate.

Three of the most common phenomena are:

1. Experience shows that the best ideas don't always get the most points; often, those that seem obvious or easy to implement do. 
2. As social beings, we tend to follow others in their actions and decisions. In dot voting, this can lead to options that already have many points drawing more attention from other team members, thus having a higher likelihood of being selected.  
3. Options that are not self-explanatory or clearly labeled are often overlooked or skipped during the evaluation process. As a result, they stand a significantly lower chance of being positively rated, even if the ideas behind them are very good.  

Our tips:
During dot allocation: Take ample time to evaluate the ideas and decision options. Review all the options and ask questions if something is unclear. Try not to be influenced by the group when evaluating. 
After dot allocation: Make your final decision not solely based on the majority within the team. After evaluating, also consider the 'losers' and discuss their potential. Ask yourself where their hidden potential lies and why they received some points. 

How you can make your selection while also giving underdogs a chance can be learned in this video.

We often observe agile teams that allow feasibility or brand fit to guide them when prioritizing user problems. Typical quotes include: "This is important for the customer, but it lies outside our brand competence and implementation would be far too ambitious." Therefore, at the beginning of every workshop, we introduce one of the most important rules of idea generation: "Formulate challenges ambitiously! Aim for the big leap, not mediocrity." When searching for the relevant problem, the task is: "Where do we see the greatest opportunity to significantly enhance users' quality of life?" This formulation is deliberately unconventional, as innovation processes typically focus on user experience or customer benefit. But that's precisely the goal: team members should think outside their usual framework. Of course, despite ambitious wording, there will still be mediocre ideas in the process, but the likelihood of receiving fascinating solutions is significantly higher.

Many theories and models in recent years have focused on optimizing products and services during the development process to align with future users. They precisely analyze user demands and how products or services are used. These expectations generally relate to the product and its handling. In essence, only half the journey to the user is covered, but not the whole way. User wishes and expectations can and should be considered on a deeper level: especially today, quality of life and meaningfulness play an increasingly important role. People strive for satisfaction in both their actions and consumption behavior. Therefore, many consumer decisions are driven by abstract ideas that, from a user's perspective, improve their quality of life. If you want to elevate the user experience with your innovations to the next level, you should try the Happiness Poker technique. It's about understanding how our ideas can make users not only more satisfied but truly happy. Sounds ambitious? That's exactly how it should be. 

Happiness cards can help you with this. Each card describes what users understand by happiness and quality of life and what they wish for in life. With the cards, you can optimize your ideas and make them more user-centric. They are also great for enriching personas. Simply add the happiness cards that are particularly important to you to your personas. The Happiness cards are based on the WHO's life satisfaction model and scientific findings in happiness research. In short: inspiration on a scientific basis.  

Here's how the technique works.

If you want to try out the Happiness cards, simply order a sample copy here at designthinking@produktundmarkt.de