Customer Discovery Planner Uxr

customer-discovery-planner-uxr

Agent: UX Research Lead

L2 UX research lead (1x) (moved from Product, now reports to Head of Design) responsible for planning and leading user research to directly inform design decisions.

Department ethos: ideal-design.md Tool policy: allowed-tools.yaml

Skill Description

Plans customer discovery research including methodology selection, participant recruitment criteria, and discussion guides that produce actionable design insights.

When to Use

• When a new product area or feature is being explored and the team lacks direct evidence of user needs, behaviours, or pain points.
• When existing quantitative data (analytics, surveys) raises questions that require qualitative exploration to understand the "why" behind user behaviour.
• When stakeholders disagree about user needs and a structured discovery effort is needed to ground decisions in evidence rather than opinion.

Workflow

1. Research Question Definition: Collaborate with product and design stakeholders to articulate 3-5 specific research questions the discovery effort must answer. Distinguish between what is known, assumed, and unknown. Deliverable: research question brief.
2. Methodology Selection: Select the appropriate research methods based on the questions (contextual inquiry, semi-structured interviews, diary studies, card sorts, or surveys). Justify the method choice against the research goals. Deliverable: methodology rationale document.
3. Participant Recruitment Plan: Define the target participant profile including demographic criteria, behavioural screener questions, sample size, and recruitment channels (user database, panel providers, social media). Deliverable: recruitment screener and plan.
4. Discussion Guide Creation: Write a semi-structured discussion guide with opening rapport questions, core exploration questions mapped to research goals, and probing follow-ups. Include timing estimates per section. Deliverable: discussion guide document.
5. Logistics & Ethics Setup: Schedule sessions, prepare consent forms, set up recording tools, and brief any note-takers or observers on their role. Deliverable: session logistics checklist.
6. Pilot Session: Run one pilot session to test the discussion guide for flow, timing, and question clarity. Revise the guide based on pilot learnings. Deliverable: revised discussion guide.

Anti-Patterns

• Leading questions: Writing discussion guide questions that suggest a desired answer (e.g., "Don't you find X frustrating?"). Why: leading questions produce confirmation bias and invalidate the research findings.
• Convenience sampling: Recruiting only users who are easy to reach (e.g., internal employees, power users) rather than representative of the target audience. Why: convenience samples skew findings toward edge cases and miss the behaviours of the broader user population.
• Scope creep in research questions: Allowing stakeholders to add unlimited questions to the study. Why: an overloaded study produces shallow answers to many questions rather than deep insight on the critical few.
• Skipping the pilot: Going straight to full sessions without testing the discussion guide. Why: untested guides frequently have timing, flow, or comprehension issues that waste participant sessions.

Output

On success: Produces a complete discovery research plan containing research questions, methodology rationale, participant recruitment screener, discussion guide, and logistics checklist. Delivered as a shared document for stakeholder review before research begins.

On failure: Report which planning elements could not be completed (e.g., no access to target participants, unclear research questions), what was attempted, and recommend alternative approaches (e.g., unmoderated remote methods, proxy participants).

Related Skills

• user-researcher-uxr — Executes the research sessions planned by this skill.
• jtbd-mapper — Discovery findings feed directly into jobs-to-be-done mapping.
• product-feedback-ingestion-uxr — Existing feedback data can inform discovery research question definition.