Miguel and team, thanks for sharing these team principles. I found them a lot more valuable and actionable than those one can read in most websites about the company values. You managed to land them in a way that they can guide decisions for new and experienced team members alike.
I would like to constructively challenge two of them, that I quote below:
We always work in teams.
For us, working in teams of at least two different researchers with different singularities is the way of going from the subjectivity to intersubjectivity, from opinion to insights […]
— Working in pairs can definitely add objectivity but, based on different project set-ups I have worked on, it reduces productivity and potentially also reduces purpose/engagement of one of the two researchers. When working as a single researcher on a project, you can counter-balance the objectivity issue by including observers in group analysis sessions.
Is the word “always” necessary in the team principle? Or does it depend on certain factors? Think of the added-value of a second researcher in smaller usability testing studies, competitive benchmark or an internal desk research.
Our final intention is to inspire and influence decisions, we deliver aspirations to be put into action.
Our last intention is to create actionable knowledge. Our mission is to inspire the organisation and deliver aspirations that come from the needs of our users. When we start a project, even if we have strong hypotheses, we are open to reject them if the analysis indicates that. The final objective is to purposely gather a pure and unbiased understanding of people’s needs regardless of technological limitations, economic viability or business interests [...]
— Influence (roadmap, decisions or teams’ mindset) is definitely our main way to demonstrate impact. However, as a product researcher, I don’t see the value of gathering people’ needs on areas that are not interesting for the business or too far outside of the team strategy. Impact is tightly connected to a robust prioritization process. In addition to a process, prioritization should be a principle in itself. Nobody should be doing work they consider it will not have impact for the customers, the business or its context (society, environment, etc.). Individual researchers should be empowered to challenge the projects they work on at any point to ensure they are dedicated to high-impact potential projects.
