Thank you for your provocation. I love it ❤

Learning from you will not stop after these many years working together. I agreed to many of the points you raised: keeping up the quality, providing meaning and discovering new strategic directions, less is more, the high costs of training.

However, there are a few wins that you missed in your analysis of the different attempts to scale the UX Research practice that may — in some cases — make us think twice about a black&white answer to the question
“Is democratising research a bad idea?”:

• The increased visibility of the research practice within the organization, which favors a cultural transformation to become more user-centric. For many companies, an increase in research requests may feel like rain in a dry season that a thorough impact-based prioritization can easily manage
• The appreciation of the researcher craft, especially when it comes to designing studies, moderating challenging situations and generating insights
• The trust relationships built across functions and regions, where research becomes the glue for keeping together different functions who did not collaborate in that “intimate fashion” before

Photo by Guillaume de Germain on Unsplash