Continuous Research Report: Trends to Watch in 2023
How product teams are informing decision-making through continuous discovery and research
In partnership with
With support from experts at
A look at the research industry
User insights are the driver for innovation. The best product organizations today are the ones that learn as they build, putting customer needs at the forefront of product development to deliver constant value and react effectively to changes in the market.
To better understand how product teams learn, we surveyed more than 600 designers, product managers, and researchers. What we found is that more and more product teams see the value of research as a powerful tool to inform decision-making at each stage of the product life cycle. Research as a discipline is becoming better established, but there are still challenges to conducting more frequent, better research.
At the end of the report, we identify three trends that will continue to shape the research industry moving forward, and we look at how Atlassian—a customer-driven product organization—adopts a continuous research mindset. We hope this report will inspire new thinking on how we can best empower entire product teams to continuously learn from customers and innovate with them.
About this report
We surveyed over 600 product professionals to find out how they conduct research to inform their decision-making. The majority of respondents who weighed in are designers (42%), followed by product managers (27%) and researchers (26%). Most of our audience works at SMBs and middle-market companies with 51-200 (26%) and 201-1000 employees (28%). Read more about the study methodology.
Key trends and results
Trend #1
Continuous research is becoming a well-established practice
83% of respondents say research should be conducted at every stage of the product development cycle
82% of companies in our audience have at least one dedicated UX researcher
78% of our audience believe their company doesn’t do enough research or could do more studies
78% of our audience believe their company doesn’t do enough research or could do more studies
83% of respondents say research should be conducted at every stage of the product development cycle
82% of companies in our audience have at least one dedicated UX researcher
78% of our audience believe their company doesn’t do enough research or could do more studies
83% of respondents say research should be conducted at every stage of the product development cycle
Organizations understand the value of research
82% of companies in our audience have at least one dedicated UX researcher. As Lucy Denton, Head of Design at Dovetail, highlights, "it's great to see how far the industry has come in terms of understanding the value of research. Companies are investing more in research which means they’re investing more in customer centricity and building for the customer.”
77% of our audience conducts a new research study at least monthly. In particular, 9% of respondents report running a new research study daily, 38% monthly, and 23% quarterly or yearly. Orgs are investing time and resources in research. Yet, there's still work to do to adopt a continuous product discovery mindset—as only 39% of product teams report having weekly touchpoints with their customers.
At what stages of the product development process does your team gather user insights?
Product teams are putting their customers first and are involving them continuously throughout the product development process
Product teams are involving customers from the start of the product development cycle and continuously throughout the process. In particular, 59% of product teams in our audience conduct research at the problem discovery stage, 57% at the problem validation stage, 55% at the solution generation stage, and 53% at the validation and testing stage.
These results align with what respondents say about the most impactful tasks in their job. These are understanding the customer journey (according to 48% of our audience), discovering unknown/unmet user needs (45%), and validating design assumptions (43%).
“Product organizations need to truly understand their customers to be competitive. With continuous research, they can constantly course-correct to work on the right problem and provide the right solution.”
Head of User Research at Pitch
Only 36% of product teams conduct research studies after launch
83% of product professionals in our audience agree that research should happen at all stages of the product development process, yet only 36% of product teams conduct research studies after launch. When product managers are involved in conducting research at organizations, the number of product teams running after-launch research increases to 44%, which indicates that PMs are a key driver of this type of research.
”Many research resources are being put into the design process, problem discovery, and solution testing, but not so much into post-launch reviews,” says Rachel Lynch, Research Manager at Productboard. “I think that’s a huge gap and a missed opportunity because you only know if something will work once you launch it. You should be using those same research tactics to try and figure out if you were successful once something has gone live.”
“We can use different approaches to research to minimize the guesswork before, during, and after we launch a product. Of course, there are constraints, but I would love to use more of the design research toolbox.”
Manager, product manager
“I feel we have so little knowledge about our users, how they interact with our products, and if we're building useful things that I would love to do testing more often.”
Individual contributor, designer
"At every stage, there are possibilities to gain new insights that can affect the solution or problem statement. Being able to see them coming and changing course is key to delivering quality results."
Individual contributor, designer/researcher
“You can always get user inputs and validate ideas through continuous discovery and research.”
Individual contributor, designer
“We can use different approaches to research to minimize the guesswork before, during, and after we launch a product. Of course, there are constraints, but I would love to use more of the design research toolbox.”
Manager, product manager
“I feel we have so little knowledge about our users, how they interact with our products, and if we're building useful things that I would love to do testing more often.”
Individual contributor, designer
78% of product professionals believe their company doesn't do enough research studies or could do more studies
Despite the high demand for research, there are several challenges hindering product teams from running more studies, the main ones being time limitations (according to 64% of respondents), budget limitations (46%), recruiting respondents limitations (31%), and tooling limitations (25%). Unsurprisingly, time limitation is even more constraining when teams don't have a dedicated UX researcher (78% vs. 64%).
“More research isn’t necessarily going to solve the problem of getting the right insights for decision-making," says Rachel Lynch, Research Manager at Productboard. "It's more about quality than quantity and feeling confident that we know what type of research should be used, when, and for what purpose."
64%
time limitations
46%
budget limitations
31%
recruiting respondents limitations
25%
tooling limitations