I recently read a book that is considered to be highly influential in the field of product management and product development, Marty Cagan’s “Inspired: How to create tech products customers love”. It has more than 4,000 global ratings on Amazon with an average of 4.6 out 5 and many of my friends and colleagues are talking about it. I absolutely love almost all aspects of this incredibly helpful book and think it also aligns well with IBM’s Enterprise Design Thinking too. The problem I have with the book is it’s depiction of UX research and UX researchers. Interestingly, Cagan’s more recent interviews tell a different story. Let me explain.
Historical Context
Some 20 to 30 years ago, people acknowledged the importance of design but thought that developers should do the design. The general consensus was that if you could find a designer that would be great but that would be a luxury. And when a designer did create a design, it was often treated as a suggestion by developers. That resulted largely in badly designed products.
Today you’ll be hard-pressed to find anyone who doesn’t think that designers should do the designing, that you should have sufficient numbers of them, and that their designs should be implemented.
Cagan’s Perspective
Cagan acknowledges the importance of UX research but thinks that researchers are one of the “supporting roles” that are not assigned to a particular product but support multiple products. He lumps researchers with data scientists and test automation engineers. He thinks research should be done by others, like the product manager. He believes that if you can find a researcher that would be great, they’re hugely valuable, but according to Cagan they’re not essential.
Do you see the similarity to the way design was characterized decades ago, that it was important but not recognized as being the purview of actual designers. Design is now appropriately characterized as a core role, in fact, it is now considered to be one of the three-in-box along with product management and development.
What I find is intriguing is that Cagan used companies like Google as examples, yet Google has a UX research organization with some 1,400 researchers in it who have been key to the company’s success. Hardly a supporting role. His widely read and influential book unfortunately mischaracterizes UX research. And Cagan could have simply looked at the literature, some of which is captured in the some of the books underneath his on the table in my office, including a book I wrote which was published 22 years ago. UX research and UX researchers are not new.
What I find concerning is the fact that this book is so popular and I know many people consider it to be gospel. I’ve read more books from other authors who are associated with Cagan, like Martina Lauchengco’s “Loved: How to rethink marketing for tech products” and Teresa Torres’s “Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover products that create customer value and business value”. And, these authors do recognize the critical importance of UX research and UX researchers.
Cagan’s Updated Perspective
The first edition of his book was published in 2008 and while he said that the second edition was a significant rewrite, I suspect that the sections about UX research may be left over from the first edition, an edition that almost exclusively focused on startups who typically have very few staff to begin with.
So, I explored his more recent work including a relatively recent article, entitled “Marty Cagan Shares 6 Important User Research Trends”. Here’s another recent article, entitled “Getting in front of the customer with Marty Cagan”. So Cagan does understand UX research? Absolutely! Does he think it’s central to the success of a product? Emphatically, yes! However, he says that, “my belief is that user research is most often extremely valuable, yet usually wasted. It’s wasted in the sense that it is not acted on.” He argues that UX research is so important that product managers, designers, and engineers should be involved together with UX researchers in doing the research so that they experience the insights themselves and don’t just read them in a report. I entirely concur with his guidance on this. While the rest of the team can’t be at every session with users, especially if the team is doing a sufficient amount of research, they should be present and experience first-hand some of the sessions themselves.
Concluding Thoughts
Cagan’s seminal work is having a significant impact on the field. I do hope though that the centrality of UX research and UX researchers along with a more nuanced understanding of the various rigorous methods UX researchers have the unique skills to carry out will find its way into the third edition of his book. I acknowledge that his main audience is product managers but they too should know what they should expect from a properly trained UX researcher beyond free-form interviews and usability testing.