Thanks for the comment and the share, Lizzie!
Your open source doc looks helpful too. I've recommended Just Enough Research so many times! I also really rate "Think Like a UX Researcher" by David Travis. One thing I really like about your doc: it's not a long list - just enough to get going. I've coached a bunch of folks through their first user research sessions. One of the common challenges: they've read so much about all the techniques and pitfalls that they become totally paralysed! The trick has been to boil it all down to the handful of basic principles and get them started. Then they can improve through practice.
I definitely wrote the article keeping in mind teams who aren't getting user feedback early enough. Which includes many teams.
(As an aside, that didn't happen to be the case for the team I developed the approach with – we'd done a few months of generative discovery interviews, provocations, and a pretotype landing before spooling up a team to build anything. For me, it always starts with user research :) )
But I've noticed challenges even when teams are conducting research. Even teams that have continuous discovery running and are getting lots of juicy feedback and signals — it's often hard for them to know which signals really matter, and when to act on them. Hence Pivot Triggers.
In the extreme, nobody's really made it clear what freedom they have to pivot, or what the real expectations are for what they're working on. In that case, Pivot Triggers can start those conversations.
Much more common, I'm sure you've seen too, is that teams just want to wait too long before they start getting feedback. They care about the craft, and don't want to risk showing something unfinished. But I believe we can almost always start experimenting much faster than we think, if we can crystallise what we need to know.
And then there are the teams that have that sense of "weeellll, it's not looking quite as rosy as we hoped, but the boss hasn't told us to stop yet ... and maybe if we just keep plugging away something magical will happen when we launch?" Often they haven't cottoned on to what research can help them learn.
One team I remember well asked their researcher to usability test their proposed flow on some target customers. They wanted to make sure it was usable and that people could get through the flow.
But after a few weeks of recruiting effort, the researcher came back empty-handed: "I literally can't find anyone who matches the target customer ... nobody seems to care about what we're building. Should we worry about that?"
The PM sent him back to recruit just anyone, and they carried on.
In the testing over the next few weeks, they ironed out the usability issues. But also, every participant wondered aloud, "why would I want this?" The researcher collected the participants' real pains and goals, and suggested to the PM that the team might want to pivot.
But the team carried on with the original plan.
After 6 months of heroic efforts, they launched the product to much rejoicing.
3 months later, they closed it all down.
They'd had 1 customer apply. That customer was declined.
