In the past, UX Researchers were the gatekeepers of customer insights—the exclusive bridge to understanding users. Today? In many companies everyone has direct access to customers. PMs conduct interviews, CSMs gather feedback, and designers run their own tests. Does this mean researchers are becoming obsolete? Or is our role simply evolving?
We’ll share how Zendesk approaches research democratization—enabling teams with knowledge and tools while maintaining research quality. We’ll also debunk common myths and discuss when delegating research is a great idea… and when it can lead to disaster.
🔎 If you've ever wondered whether everyone in a company can (or should) be a researcher—and which skills will become crucial for UX researchers in this changing landscape—this talk is for you!
Watch this WaysConf session, then continue with related talks or explore the current programme.
This talk examines how the researcher’s role changes when designers, product managers, and other colleagues also conduct studies. Rather than defending exclusive ownership of methods, the speakers describe a shift toward enablement, larger cross-product questions, synthesis across evidence, research quality, and organizational knowledge. They introduce a maturity path from producing individual insights toward connecting patterns and informing strategy. Democratization is therefore not the end of professional research; it raises the bar for the distinctive value researchers provide while requiring practical support for non-researchers who engage customers.
The debate over whether democratization should happen has been overtaken by practice; researchers now need to shape its quality and consequences.
Watch from 3:30Supporting colleagues with planning, methods, and interpretation helps organizations learn without pretending every study has the same risk or depth.
Watch from 7:30Researchers can contribute distinctive scope by studying areas that cross features or teams and require sustained, specialist investigation.
Watch from 11:38Scattered findings do not reduce uncertainty across the organization; synthesis and accessible repositories turn individual studies into cumulative knowledge.
Watch from 15:59A more mature researcher links patterns across work, conducts meta-analysis, and helps leaders understand implications for product direction.
Watch from 20:30These concise notes were edited from automatic captions and checked against the talk structure. They are not a verbatim transcript.
Organizations no longer wait for the research profession to decide whether other roles may speak with customers. Designers, product managers, and colleagues across the business already do it. The useful question is how to support appropriate work, prevent avoidable harm, and distinguish a quick learning activity from research that requires specialist depth, independence, or methodological control.
Watch from 3:19Helping other roles plan conversations, choose methods, and interpret evidence has become part of the researcher's job. This does not mean every person becomes interchangeable with a specialist. Enablement expands the organization's capacity for everyday learning, while professional researchers retain responsibility for harder questions, quality standards, and the consequences of weak evidence.
Watch from 7:11When many teams can gather feedback, researchers need to offer more than another set of interview notes. Cross-product questions, ambiguous domains, and patterns that develop over time require sustained attention and analytical range. A distinctive research voice emerges from framing those questions, connecting perspectives, and helping the organization see beyond the boundary of one feature.
Watch from 11:18Evidence stored in an isolated document cannot reliably lower risk for the next team. Research also has to build knowledge: findings must be discoverable, comparable, and connected with what the company already knows. The value of a study increases when later decisions can use it, challenge it, or combine it with new evidence rather than restarting from zero.
Watch from 15:41The proposed next stage moves beyond producing insights for a single request. Researchers synthesize across projects, identify recurring patterns, and translate the combined evidence into implications for product and company strategy. This demands broader context and continuous skill development, but it also gives the profession a clearer role in organizations where basic customer contact is widely shared.
Watch from 20:10
