Aligning UX and Market Research Teams: Practical Tips for Leaders
By QuestionPro
- article
- User Experience (UX) Research
- Insight Transformation
- Product Research Management
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This article is based on a panel discussion hosted by Insight Platforms featuring Janani Venkataraman (Bill), Oli Mival (Picsart) and Vivek Bhaskaran (QuestionPro). Watch the full webinar on demand here:
The Narcissism of Small Differences: Why It’s Time to End the UX / Market Research Divide
For years, organisations have run UX research and market research as separate functions, with separate budgets, separate tools and, in many cases, separate worldviews.
I recently moderated a panel discussion on exactly this topic with three senior practitioners: Janani Venkataraman, Head of Research and Insights at Bill; Oli Mival, VP of Product Strategy, Innovation and Experience at Picsart; and Vivek Bhaskaran, CEO of QuestionPro.
Here’s a quick distillation of some practical ideaas that came out of that conversation.
1. Acknowledge the org chart problem
Before you can fix anything, it helps to understand what created the divide in the first place. In a lot of cases this is to do with reporting lines and org structures.
As Janani put it: “I think the divide between UX and market research is probably more an org chart problem. Historically, market research has always been aligned under marketing, brand or strategy. UX research has been aligned with product and design.”
Vivek agreed: “One comes from marketing and reports up to the CMO. The other reports up to the Chief Product Officer. That’s the way it’s been.”
The methods overlap considerably. The questions being asked are often similar. The separation exists because the two functions report to different leaders, not because the work is fundamentally incompatible. If you reframe it through this lens it might help you know where to start.
2. Start with the problem, not the discipline
The most consistent theme from our panel was to define the business question first, then decide which tools and methods are best suited to answering it. Don’t start by asking whether something is a UX problem or an MR problem.
Janani described how her blended team at Bill approaches this: “What is the problem that needs to be solved? Let’s remove the expert or the stakeholder this is coming from, and understand the problem space entirely.”
This is a bit like taking your own medicine: applying a Jobs to be Done framework to your own team.
3. Think about altitude
A useful mental model for deciding who does what: think about the altitude at which a question needs to be answered. Is it a 30,000 foot question or a three foot question?
Market research tends to operate at greater altitude, covering markets, competitive landscapes, brand perceptions and broad audiences. UX research tends to go narrower and deeper, examining specific behaviours, interactions and the lived experience of individual users.
Both altitudes are necessary. As Oli observed: “Market research gives you the high-level what and who. User research gives you the how and the why. If you can put all that together, you help both the product team know what to build and the marketing team know how to position it.”
4. Move from “actionable” to “activated” insight
I really liked Oli’s distinction between actionable insight and activated insight. Actionable simply means something could be acted on. Activated means something was: a decision changed, a needle moved. If you have an outcome, you can then figure out what role the insight played in it.
Vivek had a blunter version of the same test. When stakeholders ask for more data before making a decision, he sometimes makes up a number on the spot: “I just say it’s 80%. Now tell me what you’re going to do. And then everybody’s like, oh, I don’t know. Well, finish that part first. A lot of requests for more data are really about avoiding a decision.”
This suggests some firmer pushback on stakeholders before commissioning any research. Ask them what decision will be made when they have the answer, and what will change as a result. If those questions can’t be answered clearly, the research brief probably needs more work.
5. Align the narrative, not just the org chart
Restructuring teams is not always necessary, and not always possible. What matters more, according to Oli, is having a shared story: “It’s not about aligning the org chart. It’s about aligning the narrative. You don’t need necessarily one team. It’s about having at least one story.”
This is a practical point for leaders who don’t have the authority or appetite to reorganise. Create shared objectives, shared language and a shared view of what the insights function is there to do. That groundwork will allow you to co-ordinate even when the reporting lines stay the same.
6. Connect teams across boundaries
One of the most practical steps any leader can take is to actively connect researchers with stakeholders they would not normally encounter.
Vivek described doing this at QuestionPro: “I got all my UX researchers and put them in front of customers and in front of the marketing team. Your job is not just product. Your job is to understand how the product actually applies to customers and to the people responsible for bringing it to market. That unlocks a lot of interesting ideas.”
The same logic works in reverse. Market researchers benefit from understanding the product development cycle. Neither group should be left to operate only within its traditional remit.
7. Create an insights council
One structural mechanism that came up repeatedly was the idea of an insights council: a cross-functional forum that brings together researchers from both disciplines, along with product managers, marketers and other stakeholders, to share what each team is learning and to coordinate on upcoming work.
Oli described how this worked at Picsart: “We don’t have research. We have research partners. The question I always ask is: what do you not know that you need to be able to move forward? And then: what are you going to do when you know it?”
An insights council doesn’t require a formal restructure. It requires regular communication, shared visibility of research pipelines, and a commitment to reducing duplication.
8. Embrace the T-shaped researcher
One practical enabler of better alignment is developing researchers who have depth in one discipline but sufficient breadth to work across both. AI tools are making this more accessible.
Janani put it directly: “If there’s one thing that AI has given us, it’s the opportunity to stretch beyond what each of us is individually skilled at. A UX researcher who wants to try doing a survey: that’s entirely possible now. We actively encourage researchers to explore any approach required to answer the business problem.”
This doesn’t mean asking specialists to abandon their expertise. It means reducing the hard boundaries that prevent people from borrowing methods from each other.
9. Learn the language of your stakeholders
Research of any kind only creates value when it informs decisions. That means researchers need to understand how the people they’re working with think, what they’re incentivised to do, and how they use information.
Oli made this point: “The most effective thing you can do is understand the motivation of your colleague. The CEO at Picsart told me early on: learn to speak the language of product managers. When I became a product manager, I realised I really hadn’t been doing that. I was telling them things and assuming they had the bandwidth to understand what that meant for them.”
This applies in both directions. UX researchers need to understand how market research informs brand and commercial strategy. Market researchers need to understand how product development cycles work.
10. Eliminate duplicate effort
One of the most tangible arguments for alignment is cost. When UX and market research teams operate in silos, they often ask overlapping questions to different stakeholders and generate answers that never connect.
Janani described how the blended team at Bill addressed this: “Pre-merger, we would probably have been answering the same question for two different stakeholder groups, and reinventing the wheel in terms of the answers we were trying to source. The new model has been a very effective way to minimise waste and scale the work we’re collectively producing.”
A shared research repository is one practical tool for reducing this duplication. The UX community has embraced the idea more readily than market research, but Vivek’s point applies to both: “It makes sense to have a common repository for the whole company. It’s like having a CRM for one sales team and a different CRM for another. You want all the information flowing into a unified system.”
11. Expect friction, and plan for it
Merging teams or increasing collaboration between functions with different professional cultures is not straightforward. Expect initial resistance, and treat it as a symptom of genuine philosophical differences, not just stubbornness.
Janani described the challenge her team navigated as balancing “purity and pragmatism”: the tension between methodological rigour and the practical demands of working in a commercial organisation. Both UX and market research practitioners face this tension, and acknowledging it openly tends to reduce it.
Change of this kind takes months, not weeks. Janani noted that it was three to four months into the new way of working before the cross-disciplinary approach started to feel natural.
A final thought
None of this requires a wholesale reorganisation. The goal, as Janani put it, is not to merge teams but to merge understanding: “The goal is to merge knowledge and insights. The goal is not to create one org from two teams.”
For most organisations, the practical starting point is straightforward: get both teams in a room, start with a shared business problem, and work backwards from the decision that needs to be made. Everything else follows from that.
