UXR as a Team Sport: Collaborating with Product, Designers & Developers

UX research doesn't have to be a solo sport. In fact, it shouldn't be.

The real magic happens when research becomes a team effort, with insights flowing freely across the entire organization.

When your stakeholders are right there with you, peeking over your shoulder during interviews or sharing their own takeaways, something amazing happens. They're not just observers; they're contributors. And contributors are way more likely to believe in and act on the insights they helped uncover.

When research becomes a collaborative effort, the demand for UX insights also grows. Suddenly, everyone wants a piece of the action. Before you know it, you're not just a researcher —you're a vital part of the decision-making process.

How do you get from working in remote silos to a happy, collaborative utopia?

It starts with understanding how each department fits into the research puzzle. Once you've got that figured out, you can strategically reach out, share learnings, and build those all-important connections.

In this article, we're going to dive into how UX researchers can team up with different departments to create products that users will love. We'll look at product teams, designers, and developers, exploring how each group can benefit from a closer relationship with UX research.

For each department, we'll start by understanding their goals. What keeps them up at night? What gets them excited to come to work in the morning? Once we've got that nailed down, we'll explore how UX researchers and each team can work together and benefit from the collaboration.

Here's a pro tip: If you want to really connect with someone, figure out what would get them promoted, or fired. It sounds a bit sneaky, true. But understanding what really matters to someone is the key to putting yourself in their shoes. It helps you frame your research in a way that speaks directly to their priorities and concerns.

So, ready to turn your UX research into a team sport? 

UX Research and Product

UX-product collaboration is all about creating a shared understanding of what users really need. It builds a culture where decisions are based on real data, not just gut feelings. The result? Products that not only work well but are a joy to use.

To truly work well with someone, you need to first understand what they’re working towards. We'll start with understanding and aligning with the product team’s goals - it's the key to a great partnership.

Understand the product team’s goals

Broadly put, product managers’ priorities come down to 4 things.

• Prioritization: This is the most important part of a PM’s job, i.e. helping the team focus on what really matters for business success. Which product feature/update will provide the most revenue? Which bugs will hamper growth if not fixed as soon as possible, and which ones can be dealt with later? 
• Build smart and efficient: Once you know what needs to be built, it needs to be done as efficiently and effectively as possible. PMs need to create solutions that balance user needs and technical limits, and often find quick(er) wins that solve user pain points without breaking the bank.
• Measure what matters: Product teams also track the product’s performance, to define KPIs and measure success aligned with the business goals and expected outcomes.
• Keep everyone in the loop: This means bringing the dream team together–researchers, designers, developers, sales and marketing folks, to work on achieving the above. It involves coordinating between teams, planning and strategizing keeping their constraints and available resources in mind, and making sure user insights reach everyone. If you don’t have everyone on the same page, progress stalls—so communication is a key part of puzzle for PMs.

Collaborate with the product team

Typical advice on collaboration is generic and frankly, not that useful. We all know we should “communicate insights” and set up alignment meetings—but what should these updates and meetings look like? What questions should you be focusing on answering during them? 

Let’s walk through some real-life questions your PM is dealing with on a daily basis.

1. What should the roadmap be this quarter?

PMs are focused on fulfilling the company’s strategic priorities, and building product roadmaps accordingly. 

Your PMs boss (and bosses’ boss) is going to ask them—what are you planning to build this quarter to help us meet [strategic goal]? Why?

And when the quarter is over, they’re going to measure the success of these initiatives and measure the PMs success accordingly.

Strategic goals can be things like reducing customer churn, helping win more key accounts, or increasing activation for new users.

If the team’s strategic goal is to reduce user drop-off, PMs need to make a bet on which features will achieve this most efficiently. Researchers can play a valuable role in decision-making by bringing data about where users drop off, why they drop off, and gaps in the team’s knowledge that need to be filled with new research. . With this information, product managers can make better bets aligned with the company goal.. 

How this helps Product:  Armed with data to make the best decisions and evidence for why they choose a specific approach, PMs have the greatest chance of improving company outcomes. They can also show their bosses (and the C-suite) that they’ve successfully  hit the targets expected—whether that’s increased revenue, decreased costs or  improved customer longevity. 

2. How do I minimize re-work and wasted developer resources?

Once the roadmap is set, research can help prevent costly missteps and rework. 

There are two parts of product building: build the right thing, and build the thing right.

In other words, even if the team knows what they should be building, they may not know exactly how to build it well. To know how to build the thing right, the team needs to deeply understand customer needs, workflows, pain points, and finally the usability of the key features.

Let’s say you’re building an integration with Google sheets. Great! 

Questions that are going to come up include:

• At what step does the user need to use this integration?
• Is it a one way or two way integration?
• What data does the user expect to see in the export?

To minimize engineering rework after a feature has been released, research needs to help answer these questions.

If the data already exists in your repository, great! If not, it’s ideal to anticipate these questions upfront and set up research before designs are required. 

How this helps Product: By answering key questions related to a build early and test ideas quickly, UX researchers save the product team valuable time and resources. This minimizes the need for extensive rework from design and engineering—allowing the team to move faster and ship other useful features instead..

3. How do I prove that our past decisions were right?

PMs will inevitably be judged by the track record of their releases—how fast were they, how accurate, and how useful to the businesses’ goals.

UX researchers can help product teams answer these questions and ascertain the real impact of their work by comparing key metrics before and after a release. This can involve looking at user experience indicators, revenue figures, or other relevant goals.

Let’s say, research discovers that before the feature was launched, the customer support team dealt with 100 support tickets per day related to this issue. Post-release, it’s down to 80. That's a 20% reduction in support load. The UXRs can then translate this into business value—If each ticket costs $12 to handle, we're saving $240 per day with this improvement.

These insights on profit and cost-cutting can also immensely help with calculating and showcasing the RoI of UX research to the organization.

How this helps Product: This data-driven approach provides concrete evidence of success (or areas for improvement) that can be shared with stakeholders. It also majorly helps inform future decision-making, allowing the team to double down on what works and pivot away from what doesn't.

4. How do I get the whole team on board with building X instead of Y?

When it comes to building consensus around product decisions, UX researchers can be powerful allies. They can help PMs compile and share compelling evidence of customer needs with the team.

This can come from multiple video clips of users experiencing the same issue or expressing the same need. If the stakeholders are more data-driven, researchers can pair these qualitative insights with hard numbers—”20% of the support tickets are about this same issue."

By supporting PMs in gathering this evidence efficiently, researchers make it easier for product teams to build a strong case for their decisions. This approach helps align everyone—from designers to developers to stakeholders, around a common understanding of user needs and product priorities.

How this helps Product: This evidence-based consensus-building saves the product team time and energy that might otherwise be spent on internal debates or justifying decisions. It allows the team to move forward with confidence, knowing their choices are grounded in user needs and backed by data.

Remember, the key to making all this work is being well attuned to your organization/product’s main goals. You need to really be sure–what do they need to get done, and what are they focused on right now?

UX Research and Design

Designers play a crucial role in shaping the user experience, but they don't have to go it alone. UX researchers can be valuable allies, providing insights that inform design decisions and help create more user-centric products.

To collaborate better with designers, let’s understand what they’re all about first.

Understand the design team’s goals

A designer’s key priorities come down to 4 things.

• Design high-quality features that meet user needs: Designers care about designing features that actually solve user needs.
• Product usability: Designers are also focused on enhancing product usability, by improving user task efficiency, visual appeal and effectiveness.
• Support business outcomes: Like product, this can mean aligning with larger business goals, or with team-specific goals like retention, customer value, or acquisition.
• Achieve key metrics: This can be about lowering bounce rates, increasing click-through rates, reducing user churn etc. Typically these metrics align with a business outcome or usability metric.

Collaborate with the design team

UX researchers can help designers answer 2 key questions.

1. What do users expect from a feature?

When a new feature appears on the roadmap, designers might not always have a clear picture of user expectations. This is where research can step in and make a big difference.

If you spot a feature coming up on the horizon, reach out to the designer with a simple question—do you know what the user need is here? If the answer is no (or even if it's a maybe), it's time for some generative research.

Once the research question is clear, UX researchers can get to work by understanding current workflows, identifying tools users are currently using, uncovering pain points in existing processes and exploring user expectations for the new feature.

This research can involve user interviews, contextual inquiry, or even diary studies to get a holistic view of user needs and expectations.

By running this research in advance, UX researchers arm designers with valuable insights before they even put pen to paper (or cursor to screen). When it's time to start designing, they'll have a clear understanding of what users need and expect.

How this helps Product: When designers have these answers upfront, they can save time, move ahead confidently and reduce the need for major revisions later. Research also ensures that designs are grounded in real user needs, and boosts confidence in design decisions.

2. Are there any usability issues/Is this flow intuitive?

Designers want their creations to be intuitive and easy to use. For that, you need to run usability tests. A lot of usability tests. UXRs can help with this, either by running the tests themselves or helping designers set up quick unmoderated tests themselves. The approach might vary depending on the feature's scope and potential impact.

For large, significant, or high-risk features, this could look like:

• Planning comprehensive usability tests in advance, and collaborating with the design team to identify key areas to test
• Setting up moderated sessions to get in-depth feedback
• Providing detailed analysis and recommendations once the data is in

For small or low-risk features, UXR support can include:

• Enabling designers to run their own unmoderated usability tests
• Providing tools and templates for quick, efficient testing
• Offering guidance on interpreting results and identifying issues

In both cases, the goal is to catch and address usability issues early, before they become costly problems down the line.

‍How this helps designers: With the right amount of research inputs at the right time, designers can validate design decisions with real user feedback, catch potential issues and reduce the likelihood of post-launch problems. This collaborative approach can also help with achieving key metrics like fewer support tickets, make design look better to stakeholders, as well as reduce the need for rework because "users didn't understand the design."

UX Research and Software Development

Developers are the wizards who turn designs into functioning products, but they often face tough decisions about features, timelines, and technical limitations. UX researchers can help with these challenges, as well as benefit a lot from collaborating with developers.

First, let’s look into what developers are working towards

Understand the developer team’s goals

For your everyday developer, the priorities come down to this.

• Minimize user facing errors: This means working on errors and problems like software bugs, last-minute UX work to improve usability etc.
• Meet project deadlines: To keep in time with product deadlines involving updates and launches.
• Rapid deployment: Once the research is done and the design finalized, developers have to actually break down the process of building it into minimum viable steps, so they can ship as quickly as possible.

Collaborate with the development team

UX researchers and developers can learn a lot, and benefit from each other’s work immensely. 

The key to making this collaboration work? Open communication and mutual respect. UX researchers should strive to understand technical constraints and speak the language of developers, while developers, in turn, should be open about limitations and willing to explore creative solutions based on user insights.

UXRs can help developers answer these 3 key questions, to do their work more efficiently.

1. Do we really need these designs/features?

Developers often find themselves in a time crunch, facing pressure to deliver features quickly. It’s common to consider cutting corners or compromising on certain aspects of the design to meet deadlines. This is where UX researchers can provide crucial perspective.

UX researchers can step in and offer insights on:

• If the compromise won't significantly impact user experience ("Yes, our research shows that users don't really care about X aspect. You can push this out as is without negatively impacting user satisfaction.")
• If the compromise would undermine the feature's purpose ("No, our data indicates that this compromise won't solve the user problem. It's worth the additional X weeks of investment to get this right.")

To back up their input, researchers can also provide evidence like video clips of users interacting with similar features, quantitative data showing user preferences or pain points, or results from surveys or user interviews.

How it helps developers: Research insights helps to prioritize development efforts, and reduce the risk of building features that users don't want or need. It can also provide justification for additional time when needed, if user data discovers that feature X needs way more detail and work than its present state for instance.

2. How can we reduce UX-related rework?

Rework is a developer's nightmare. It's time-consuming, frustrating, and can throw off project timelines. UX researchers can help a lot with minimizing UX-related rework by conducting usability tests before development begins.

How it helps developers: More visibility on user needs reduces the need for last-minute changes, and helps create more stable code from the start.

It can also reduces the need to go back to an existing build and redo it because of usability issues.

3. How do we build around tech limitations?

Technical limitations are a reality of software development. Sometimes, what seems like a great idea from a UX perspective just isn't feasible given the current tech stack or resources. UX researchers can help bridge the gap here.

This can look like involving developers in research user research sessions, or taking technical limitations into account when conducting a study.

When researchers understand the technical constraints, they can design research questions that explore other options within those constraints, help find creative alternatives, and provide data on which compromises users might accept if ideal solutions aren't possible.

For example, if a developer says that they can’t implement real-time updates due to the current backend structure, a UX researcher can investigate:

• How often do users actually need updates?
• Would scheduled updates at specific intervals meet user needs?
• What other features might compensate for the lack of real-time updates?

‍How it helps developers: Research reduces friction between UX ideals and technical realities, as well as help find feasible solutions that still meet user needs. Also, developers can avoid wasting time exploring impossible features!

Tips to improve Cross-team Collaboration

Let's look into some practical tips for boosting cross-team collaboration between UX researchers, designers, developers, and product teams. Here's how to make it happen.

Open the research door

Invite developers and designers to sit in on user research sessions and debriefs. Give them a front-row seat to the user experience and insights. They'll get to hear user feedback firsthand, which can be eye-opening. Plus, their unique perspectives can lead to some great insights you might have missed.

Create a shared language

Set up shared documentation that links user needs to technical requirements. Think of it as a translation guide between UX-speak and dev-talk. This helps everyone understand how user needs translate into actual features and technical specs.

Do regular cross-functional huddles

Set up recurring meetings where all teams can chat about user-centric development. These pow-wows keep everyone in the loop and ensure user needs stay front and center throughout the development process. Else, just keep the teams in the loop with regular mini-updates. Whether it's via Slack, email, or carrier pigeon, share interesting tidbits or quick fixes as you go along.

Remember, developers often have unique insights into user behavior. They might notice unexpected errors or weird user journeys. Pick their brains regularly - you might stumble upon some research gold.

Design critiques with a research twist

Set up regular design critique sessions, but make sure to weave in those juicy research insights. This keeps the design process grounded in user needs and helps validate design decisions. 

Create a UX research hub

Use tools that make it easy to share research artifacts and design files. Think of it as a one-stop shop for all things user research. Make sure it's easy for everyone to access and contribute to. A research repository can massively help here. We have a guide on how to set one up here, as well as a report on how to avoid the common pitfalls of building a repository.

Keep a shared research roadmap

Maintain a research roadmap and backlog that's visible to all teams. Align this with the product roadmap, but a few weeks ahead so you have time to conduct good research and still provide insights as soon as the team needs them. 

Show, don't just tell

Whenever you're sharing research, include video and audio clips. These snippets bring the research to life for folks who couldn't make it to the sessions. Pro tip: create highlight reels for bigger studies.

Create handy reference tools

Whip up templates for personas, journey maps, and other research artifacts. It can help enable non-research teams to run their own, ‘low-risk’ research like unmoderated tests. These templates can also become go-to resources that teams can use to inform all sorts of decisions down the line. We have our own collection on Figma here.