How to Do Strategic UX Research: A Roadmap to Influence in Your Org
Strategic UX research is the practice of informing high-stakes business decisions and product roadmaps by viewing rigorous data through the lens of deep knowledge of a business. This guide explores the 5 key differences between tactical and strategic work and provides a roadmap for researchers looking to increase their organizational influence.
A recent thread on Reddit about the UX research skills needed to attain influence got me thinking, and the result is this post. Rather than talk about influence in general, I thought: why not point the way to the highest form of influence for a UX researcher? The highest level of influence is when research informs strategy of some kind, so the aim of this post is to establish a north star and indicate a path for getting there. This includes:
Defining what strategic UX research is
Explaining how to do it
Articulating the difference between tactical and strategic UX research
Indicating 3 Essential Skills for Strategic Research
Recommending specific UX research courses that build advanced skills for strategic research
This post ultimately provides a roadmap of skills a researcher needs to learn, whether or not they decide to take a course.
What is Strategic UX Research?
"Strategic" was the buzzword of the day just before the arrival of AI. It was by far the most common modifier of "UX researcher" on Linkedin. Just like with any buzzword, it was given to some misunderstanding.
But it's actually really simple. Strategic UX research means your work changes the course of a high-stakes decision, and points the product roadmap or company strategy toward new opportunity.
I've done work that has informed both levels. In my experience, doing research that merits the "strategic" title means:
There's a big decision on the line.
Doing advanced, strategic research means informing product or business decisions where there is something big at stake, meaning it presents a rather large opportunity for the business, and that the decision will be costly and difficult to reverse if it's wrong.
The research uncovers a gap between what exists and what could exist
Strategic reseasrch locates opportunity. There are many ways this can happen. It's limiting to think of opportunity as surfacing "customer needs" or finding "pain points." This keeps researchers locked into users' experience with the current product produced by your company. That's a very small window.
In fact, strategic research can look out the window of your company at the competitive landscape. The most impactful strategic project of my career didn't involve speaking to a single user. It aimed to understand gaps in the competitive landscape according to key business partners, and then confirming these gaps with quantitative methods.
The research is "generative": it suggests a new, different, or unexpected direction.
Research that deserves the title "strategic" doesn't just confirm that the option(s) on the table are good enough. It presents a new direction that either wasn't known already, or wasn't fully understood. It can also disconfirm opinions that were held as orthodoxy throughout the company.
For a really great overview of the spectrum of research, check out this video by Kevin Liang:
What is the Difference Between Strategic UX Research and Tactical UX Research?
It is really easy to identify the difference between tactical and strategic UX research. Here are five different ways they differ:
Output
Tactical: Deliver reports and decks capturing the immediate output of the study.
Strategic: Deliver insights and recommendations pointed at long-term business outcomes.
Scope
Tactical: Narrow focus on individual user preferences and feature enhancements.
Strategic: Wider scope covering the product vision and the competitive landscape.
Language
Tactical: Use standard research jargon like "pain points" and "user friction."
Strategic: Speak the language of business outcomes, such as ROI and LTV.
Initiative
Tactical: Wait to be assigned a project.
Strategic: Actively seek out impactful research opportunities within the business.
Method
Tactical: Follow methods by standard rules and established protocols.
Strategic: Execute methods creatively and efficiently to solve high-stakes problems.
Examples of Strategic UX Research
Surfacing Competitive Weaknesses
Focusing on "user needs" alone is not the entirety of strategic research. There are times when users' needs might be met, but a competitor offers a new, delightful feature, or provides a generally more pleasant experience.
As the person peering out of the company's bubble, the UX researcher is in a great position to notice when a competitor is gaining strength, or is actively taking customers, and to recommend the changes that will get them back.
Exploring and Testing Business Models
UX researchers have the toolset that enables them to explore the implications of future states with users. Since the very beginnings of design research, which predates UX research as a discipline, researchers have used tools like provotyping and speculative design to gather detailed feedback on potential new business lines, or even the creation of whole new product categories.
More tangibly, UX research can also test out different value propositions for a contemplated product before anything is built in order to test its feasibility.
In a past role, I conducted research to test a distribution strategy for an IoT device. In just a few hours, we learned that the proposal on the table would never work. We helped the company devise a new strategy, and in the process saved millions in wasted effort.
Aligning Unmet User Needs and Business Goals
Finally, research gets strategic when it finds unaddressed user needs (or desires)... with a catch. These have to be articulated within the context of what's feasible for the business and what its main objective look like.
It's actually pretty easy to document a bunch of user needs-- just talk to 5-10 participants and you'll have a mountain of them.
More difficult is doing the research in a way that finds opportunities the business can truly act on.
How to Do Strategic UX Research: 5 Steps
Build your credibility doing outstanding research
To earn the right to work on projects that inform strategic decisions, you have to prove your capability when the stakes are lower.
Build trust by producing research that is high quality, reliable, and tells your stakeholders something they don't already know.
In their 2018 report, "The Business Value of Design," McKinsey & Co. argued that top companies rely on "solid customer insights gathered firsthand by observing and—more importantly—understanding the underlying needs of potential users."
Notice the stress put on "understanding," Solid research doesn't just transmit facts, it builds understanding.
If the only method in your toolbox is just "talking to users," you will likely not have much new to add that your sales or customer ops teams don't already know. Invest in learning rigorous research methods and lenses that enable you to dig deeper and produce a narrative that yields real, new understanding.
While you don't always need to show your work to leaders, make it available anyway in an appendix. This shows your commitment to rigor and transparency.
Make your ambition known to your org
A great way to do this is to begin offering strategy-level recommendations as the output to smaller projects.
Inevitably, doing usability tests and small-n qualitative projects, you'll gain insights that could point the way to larger, more strategic opportunities.
Call these out whenever you can. Show that you're starting to think about the needs and goals of the business.
Build the relationships that earn you a seat at the table
Trust is perhaps the most important ingredient in rising to a strategic level. That should be obvious: to allow you to weigh in on big decision, people need to know and trust you.
Be a fly on the wall... everywhere
To do strategic research, you will need to know the business you're working in extremely well. This means getting to know corners of the business you might not have worked with.
Do ridealongs, "creep" on meetings, ask for invites, attend All Hands meetings in different departments. Ask questions. Be nosy.
Step outside your functional area
UX researchers are typically housed on UX teams, or on product teams. Staying within this familiar territory can limit the strategic scope of your work.
Sales, marketing, finance: these are all areas of the business that participate in big decisions. Understanding their work, and being able to address your research findings to them, will be an essential step toward working on a strategic level.
How to Become a Strategic UX Researcher: 3 Essential Skills
1. Methodological Expertise
So what does it mean in practice to actually do strategic UX research? A big decision that strikes out into new territory necessarily puts the researcher in a leadership position, where they are arguing in support of a novel point of view, potentially against some opinionated voices.
To even feel the confidence required to be in this position, the strategic researcher needs to show up believing 100% (or as close to it as possible) that what they are going to say has a firm basis in reality.
In other words, methodological rigor is the source of the researcher's credibility. If you haven't made solid choices to arrive at your conclusions... what are you doing here?
Having your research roasted by stakeholders isn't necessarily a pleasant experience. But it's one you should hope for in your career, because it's the surest sign that you are doing research that matters on a strategic level.
Here are some of the experiential components of doing and defending strategic research that demand methodological expertise:
You need solid, reliable evidence for every claim.
Human beings making big decisions want good evidence. It will never be good enough to say "we talked to some people." You will want to be absolutely sure everything you say is supported by good evidence.
Stakeholders will pressure-test key claims.
Stakeholders who hold the bag of risk will try to poke holes in your insights and recommendations to see if they hold up. You need to be prepared to defend them in collegial, but firm, fashion.
Tech companies are chock full of people with advanced knowledge of data science. You can't present to senior leaders and hope that they just don't know the difference between correlation and causation. Nor can you present your qualitative research and just go mute when someone assails the lack of statistical significance.
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2. Deep Stakeholder Empathy
Early in my career, I remember feeling like I'd go off into the wilderness to do research, bring it back, and it didn't seem to change minds.
Then, as I spent enough time at a place, I started to learn how my stakeholders thought. Each one was different. Some were incredibly deliberate, always pausing to gather evidence for decisions. Others were more intuitive, relying on hunches so that they could move fast.
Understanding stakeholder decision-making
I quickly realized that doing higher-level, strategic research meant tuning into the way leaders think, what pressures they feel, and understanding how they wanted to interact with me.
Tactical research can survive without this because there's simply less at stake. But strategic research falls flat if there's a mismatch with what is really on leaders' minds.
Effective deliverables with compelling visuals
Crafting impactful slide decks or well-organized reports are empathy in action: they show that you understand your leaders don't have a ton of time to wade through walls-of-text and painstaking reconstructions of research methods.
We describe our course on Visual Design for UX Researchers as "strategic" precisely for this reason. Your best insights will fall flat if they're not presented in a way leaders can easily grasp.
3. Effective Communication, aka, Speaking the Same Language
Research functions do not, by default, start off on the same foot as stakeholders, particularly when researchers come from an academic background.
When I interviewed for one of my first UX research roles, the phrase "statistical significance" came up within the first fifteen minutes. A senior engineer on the hiring team was curious about my portfolio item that mentioned interviews with 10 users.
Surprise, surprise! Tech companies are chock full of people with advanced knowledge of data science. You can't present to senior leaders and hope that they just don't know the difference between correlation and causation. Nor can you present your qualitative research and just go mute when someone assails the lack of statistical significance.
When you're working to inform leadership-level decisions, there are multiple languages being spoken in the room at once. These can overlap, but they're still worth spelling out separately:
Quantitative Language
The first thing you notice on arrival in the "strategic" domain is the "numerical peer-pressure." I use this phrase because the culture in company leadership values numerical evidence--at least in public.
This makes sense; leaders are often thinking about the implications of some claim at scale.
Business Language(s)
In general, collaborating with senior leaders requires speaking the language of the MBA-trained executives in the room. Acronyms like CAC and LTV will be floating around the room.
But there's another dimension. If strategic research informs big decisions, those big decisions almost never have ramifications limited to one function. They tend to involve multiple functions at once.
For example, if you're proposing a new product line, this will impact nearly everyone: marketing, sales, finance, accounting, legal/compliance, customer ops... and the list goes on.
At the very least, you'll need to be acquainted with these functions, what they care about, and the language they use. Otherwise, your recommendations will not feel specific or credible enough to gain traction.
Engineering Language
Engineering provides at least two different kinds of constraints on any kind of strategic thinking: capacity, and technical feasibility.
Almost all strategic research will have implications for the engineers who actually build the things. A grand proposal that fails to consider feasibility or capacity will likely not get very far.
Strategic UX Research Courses
In the fast-paced environment of most orgs, managers simply do not have the time to train junior or mid-career researchers on all the skills they'll need to advance.
A course is a great way to learn advanced, strategic research skills, but most courses in the marketplace are for beginners just starting out on their UX research journey.
We built the UXR Institute to make it easier for researchers at that exact point their career to gain the skill they'll need to bridge the seniority gap.
Here are our top three courses that are most relevant for the journey from tactical to strategic UX researcher.
Who's it for: researchers and research leaders who need to make research actionable for leadership
What it covers:
Turn insights into decisions: Separate findings/insights/implications, surface tradeoffs, and produce exec-ready direction (incl. a decision one-pager)
Use judgment strategically: Decide what to include, cut, or reframe based on org context; state assumptions, risk, and confidence clearly.
Build influence in the org: Map incentives, pre-align stakeholders, handle pushback, and leave with a 6-month influence plan tied to strategic artifacts.
Who's it for: UX researchers needing to add quantitative skills
What it covers:
Learn statistical tests commonly used in product development, including t-tests, ANOVA, Pearson's r correlation, and chi square
Translate output into defensible, actionable product ideas
Work on a portfolio project involving a realistic product scenario
Learn in Google Sheets and Excel; no coding knowledge required
How to Choose a Course to Build Strategic UX Research Skills
When choosing UX research courses to become a strategic UX researcher, there are a few criteria to keep in mind. Each of these will help determine if the course stands to provide meaningful advancement toward being a strategic researcher:
Will the course enhance my methodological expertise? If you still feel a need to build method-related confidence, taking a course on soft skills will be less value. Prioritize building strength on methods first; they are foundational.
Does the course have an applied, hands-on component? There are courses out there where an instructor talks at you for two hours. Absorbing information will only get you so far; advancing as a researcher means applying what you learn, struggling a bit, and learning in the process.
Is it taught by a current practitioner who's in the trenches? Gaining influence means understanding how product orgs work, from the inside. Academics simply have no line of sight into this. Some thought leaders and paid facilitators haven't worked in a product org for many years. Our teachers are all current practitioners from a variety of top companies.
