The UX research reckoning is here | Judd Antin (Airbnb, Meta)

1. Integrate Research Early & Consistently

Restructure product development to integrate researchers from beginning to end, fostering consistent relationships. This ensures researchers are active partners, can frame the right questions, and drive maximum business impact, rather than being a reactive “service function.”

2. Researchers: Be Business-Oriented

Researchers must deeply understand company financials (quarterly reports, shareholder calls), strategic plans, OKRs, and conversion funnels. This allows them to align research questions with business goals and articulate insights that directly drive profit and growth.

3. Falsify, Don’t Just Validate

Product managers and researchers should approach insights with a “falsify” mindset, actively seeking to be proven wrong rather than using research to merely validate existing assumptions. This openness fosters genuine learning and better product decisions.

4. Prioritize Macro & Micro Research

Focus research efforts on high-impact macro (big picture, strategic, forward-looking) and micro (technical usability, A/B test analysis) questions. Reduce reliance on less impactful, middle-range research that often slows down product development.

5. Develop Diverse Research Skills

Researchers should cultivate a “Swiss army knife” of skills, including formative/generative research, evaluative/usability testing, rigorous survey design, applied statistics, and technical skills like SQL or prompt engineering, to address a wider range of business problems effectively.

6. PMs: Engage in Field Research

Product managers should actively participate in research by joining researchers in the field, traveling to observe users, and engaging directly with customer feedback. This builds stronger partnerships and provides firsthand insights.

7. Prioritize Researcher Workload

Product managers and researchers should ruthlessly prioritize research projects, aiming for a maximum of three projects (two big, one small) for a researcher at any given time. This ensures high-quality work and prevents researchers from being spread too thinly.

8. Leverage Research for A/B “Why”

After A/B tests, leverage researchers to understand the “how and why” behind the results. This prevents endless speculation, informs future product development, and complements quantitative data with qualitative understanding.

9. Avoid Siloing Insights Disciplines

Companies should integrate various insights disciplines (e.g., UX research, market research, data science, customer service feedback) into a unified function. This prevents information overload and creates a cohesive, holistic understanding of the user and market.

10. Use CSAT, Not NPS

For measuring customer loyalty and satisfaction, use a simple Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) metric instead of Net Promoter Score (NPS). CSAT questions have better data properties, are more precise, and correlate better with business outcomes, while NPS is fundamentally flawed from a survey science perspective.

11. PMs: Don’t Over-rely on Dogfooding

While dogfooding your own product is useful for identifying potential issues, be extremely cautious about relying solely on your personal opinion or intuition to prioritize these issues. Your experience differs significantly from the average user, so leverage research to understand the true impact and priority of problems.

12. Researchers: Be Excellent Communicators

Researchers must develop strong communication skills to effectively convey insights. Tailor presentations and language to the specific audience (e.g., PMs vs. executives) to ensure the research is heard, understood, and acted upon, maximizing its impact.

13. Hiring: Seek Multi-Method & Clarity

When hiring researchers, assess their ability to propose multi-method approaches to open-ended research questions and their capacity to break down complex topics into simple, intuitive explanations. Strong communication skills are crucial for translating research into actionable insights for diverse audiences.

14. Startups: Hire Researcher Early

Startups should consider hiring a researcher among their first employees, as a single multi-skilled researcher can provide immense value by accelerating learning, informing critical pivots, and providing evidence for tough decisions, helping founders avoid guessing and move faster.

15. Don’t Ask Users What They Want

Avoid directly asking users what they want, as this is not effective research. Instead, focus on understanding their behaviors, needs, and pain points through observation and nuanced questioning, as direct questions often yield unreliable answers.

16. Beware Hindsight Bias

Recognize and guard against hindsight bias (the “we knew this already” phenomenon) when reviewing research insights. Value research for exposing blind spots and genuinely improving intuition, rather than dismissing insights as obvious in retrospect.

17. Focus on Controllable Factors

Researchers should adopt a stoic mindset, focusing their energy and efforts on aspects of their work and career that they can directly control, such as skill development, relationship building, and communication, rather than dwelling on external factors or systemic issues beyond their influence.