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Be honest. Are you guilty of being a gatekeeper?
For years, UX teams have treated research as a specialized skill that requires extensive training, advanced degrees, and membership in the researcher club. We’re guilty of it too! We've insisted that only "real researchers" can talk to users, conduct studies, or generate insights.
But the problem with this is, this gatekeeping is holding back product development, limiting insights, and ironically, making research less effective. As a result, product and design teams are starting to do their own research, bypassing UX because they want to just get things done.
This shift is happening, and while we could view this as the downfall of traditional UX, we see it more as an evolution. And when done right, with support from UX, this democratization actually leads to better products, more research-informed organizations, and yes, more valuable research roles.
The Problem with Gatekeeping
Product teams need insights constantly, making decisions daily about features, designs, and priorities. Yet dedicated researchers are outnumbered, often supporting 15-20 product team members each. The math just doesn't work. No matter how talented or efficient researchers are, they can't be everywhere at once, answering every question in real-time. This mismatch between insight demand and research capacity forces teams into an impossible choice: wait for formal research and miss critical decision windows or move forward without insights and risk building the wrong thing.
Since product teams often don’t have the time to wait, teams make decisions anyway, without research. A Forrester study found that 73% of product decisions happen without any user input, not because teams don't value research, but because they can't wait weeks for formal research cycles.
In organizations where this is already happening (it’s most of them!) teams have two choices, accept that their research to insight to development workflow is broken, or accept that things need to change and embrace the new era of research democratization.
In Support of Research Democratization
The most research-informed organizations aren't those with the most researchers, they're those where research skills are distributed throughout the team. When Product Managers and Designers talk directly to users, with researchers providing frameworks and quality control they make more research-informed decisions which result in better product performance and lower business risk.
When PMs and designers conduct their own research, context doesn't get lost in translation. They hear the user's words, see their frustrations, and understand nuances that don't survive summarization. But there is a right way to democratize, which not all organizations are doing.
Democratization as a consequence instead of as an intentional strategy, is chaos. Without frameworks and support from experienced researchers, it just won’t work. The goal isn't to turn everyone into researchers, it's to empower more teams to do their own research, while maintaining quality and rigor. In this model, the researcher becomes an advisor instead of a gatekeeper and the researcher's role evolves from conducting all studies to enabling teams to conduct their own.
Not all questions need expert researchers. Intercom uses a three-tier model:
- Tier 1 (70% of questions): Teams handle with proven templates
- Tier 2 (20% of questions): Researcher-supported team execution
- Tier 3 (10% of questions): Researcher-led complex studies
This model increased research output by 300% while improving quality scores by 25%.
In a model like this, the researcher becomes more important than ever because democratization needs quality assurance.
Elevating the Role of Researchers
Democratization requires researchers to shift from "protectors of methodology" to "enablers of insight." It means:
- Not seeking perfection because an imperfect study done today beats a perfect study done never.
- Acknowledging that 80% confidence on 100% of decisions beats 100% confidence on 20% of decisions.
- Measuring success by the "number of research-informed decisions made” instea dof the "number of studies conducted"
- Deciding that more research happening is good, even if researchers aren't doing it all.
By enabling teams to handle routine research, professional researchers focus on:
- Complex, strategic research that requires deep expertise
- Building research capabilities across the organization
- Ensuring research quality and methodology standards
- Connecting insights across teams and products
- Driving research-informed culture change
In truly research-informed organizations, everyone has user conversations. PMs do quick validation calls. Designers run lightweight usability tests. Engineers observe user sessions. Customer success shares user feedback.
And researchers? They design the systems, ensure quality, tackle complex questions, and turn this distributed insight into strategic direction.
Research democratization isn't about devaluing research expertise, it's about scaling research impact. It's recognizing that in today's product development pace, the choice isn't between formal research and democratized research. It's between democratized research and no research at all.
Done right, democratization isn't the end of UX research as a profession. It's the beginning of research as a competitive advantage.
