A little over a week ago, Harri Thomas asked Twitter "Why aren't more UX researchers founders?"

I saw the tweet because folks like Alec, Lars, and Henrik responded, and I wanted to respond. It lived rent free in my head for a few days until Nate Bolt tagged me in his reply. 

After sleeping on it some more, I have a few ideas, all of which are a bit related:

1. Research is a young discipline.

2. Researchers focus on "doing research" rather than being researchers.

3. Researchers are (often incorrectly) incentivized to be problem explainers, not problem solvers.

These are all generalizations about software companies, so I'm more than happy to hear counterpoints, and I'd love to hear other people's takes. I don’t think these are true in all cases, and most of what I’m describing I wish wasn’t true at all.

Research is a young discipline

Research has always been an important activity, but it wasn't until the last few decades where it was its own role (much less team). Research is something that people did, but the ability to have a single person focused on only doing research is a luxury that many companies still cannot afford. 

What this means for our discipline (based on very rough napkin math) is that I'd bet about more than one third of "ux researchers" are in early career roles, one third are in mid career roles, and less than one third are in senior roles (I mean this in terms of capability, not title). Of that last group, I think we have probably one third of them in leadership roles, and about one tenth of the group in director, VP, or higher roles.

While titles are not important, as Nate mentioned, we are a small and young field that is still figuring out a lot. We regularly fight about what good research looks like and how to measure our impact. In many ways, there are more people who have done research as a part of their career and don't have researcher in their titles than those who do. This doesn't mean research skills don't benefit founders (they do), but many of the people who do research are flying under the radar in some ways. 

Researchers focus on doing research, rather than being researchers

Related to my comment about becoming proficient, I argued in my URLDN 2022 talk that one of the biggest problems in our industry is the way we we’ve mistakenly oriented ourselves to believing that our primary (if not only) value is “doing research,” rather than taking a more holistic view of “being researchers” and recognizing that our special skills are rigorous curiosity and critical thinking and we have so many ways in which we can leverage those skills in our organizations. 

I don't necessarily blame individual researchers for this, I think that we have incentivized the doing of research by researchers rather than building organizations that learn in intentional, responsible, and sustainable ways. The reality is that everyone in our organizations can and does make decisions, and researchers can and should improve the quality of decision-making, because a focus on "learning" is just too low of a bar for what constitutes "good research." 

This belief is rooted in my own practice, not just because I think that democratization is our job, but because the most impactful work I've done was probably not any particular study, but doing interview training for sales teams or training and deploying survey software to 200+ customer success managers. Upleveling the way an entire organization functions often will have a much bigger impact and splash zone than a specific project (not always), and unfortunately too many organizations incentivize researchers being product police rather than strategic partners. 

Researchers are (often incorrectly) incentivized to be problem explainers, not problem solvers

Picking up on that last sentence, I think another major contributor to the lack of researchers as founders is our incentive structure, and the fact that researchers spend so much of their time understanding and describing problems, rather than following through on solving them. 

Again, I don't necessarily think this is individual researchers' faults — we incorrectly incentivize the doing of research, which means that we're out in the world trying to find things that need fixing or confirming that something is ready to ship and putting our stamp of approval on it. But even as we work through the different phases of product development, so few researchers are accountable to actually executing on the ideas and bringing them to life. I imagine that many of them want to, but they either don't have the skills or are busy doing the core part of their job as their organization needs them to, that they don't get to participate meaningfully. 

Leverage

I drew attention to this diagram twice in my User Research London talk because I think it's an important one. 

When I shared it, I asked the audience to imagine this was a representation of product development and I was curious which of the three parts of the diagram they thought researchers were. I do think that many researchers fancy themselves to be the man — moving a large, immovable object. I think that many of our product partners see us as the rock — a large blocker, telling them they didn't talk to enough customers or they used the wrong language on their surveys (this isn't to say you shouldn't do that). But I think that our success is being the lever — helping amplify the existing efforts of others that make things which are impossible alone, possible together. 

I think that some researchers would make great founders, and that the skills they learn from the work and their orientation to the world would be incredibly helpful there. "Making the impossible, possible" is perhaps the definition of what it means to be a founder. 

But I don't think that our discipline, as it stands today, is helping train researchers to become good founders. In fact, I don't think that we're training early career researchers today well at all. More on that in a different post.