The Ultimate Guide to Research Strategy (2026 Edition)

You are not your user. You are not your customer. You are not your target audience.

Researchers across disciplines often repeat variations of this phrase, like a prayer, as they try to convince internal stakeholders that real human behavior is not the same as stakeholder assumptions.

Of course, sometimes even the most rigorous among us can fall victim to false consensus. That’s the fancy scientific term for the little voice that says, “It’s ok. People will probably respond the way I expect.”

One of the best ways to minimize the power of that little voice—for stakeholders, researchers, and anyone in between—is to set up a fundamental research strategy.

"Acknowledge your vulnerability and establish checks. Don’t validate; instead investigate." ~Raluca Budiu, Director of Research at Nielsen Norman Group

Creating, deploying, and revisiting a strategy is a hallmark of a “mature” research practice. It enables teams to prioritize, organize, and accomplish meaningful work—which matter more than ever in 2026's research landscape.

Why strategy matters now more than ever

If you're feeling the pressure right now, you're not alone. Our State of User Research 2025 found that 49% of researchers feel uncertain about the future of the field. Yet here's what the data also shows: researchers aren't standing still. They're adapting, experimenting with new tools and methods (90% have tried new approaches in their workflow), and finding creative ways to demonstrate value.

Whether you're recruiting participants for product research, market studies, or AI model training—the challenges of proving value, managing stakeholder expectations, and building efficient workflows are universal.

A research strategy helps you stay on course during this transition. Most importantly, strategy is not "just" for large, enterprise organizations. Teams-of-one need strategy, too.

Finally, strategy is important for research-adjacent roles across product, design, data science, and business intelligence. As research becomes more democratized and AI accelerates certain workflows, having a clear strategy distinguishes rigorous, impactful research from ad-hoc data collection.

This guide unpacks everything needed to create a research strategy:

• The definition(s) of a research strategy
• The difference between research strategy and strategic research
• The four steps to create a research strategy

Defining a research strategy

At its most foundational, a research strategy describes what research looks like in practice, how a team’s activities will contribute to larger organizational goals, and defines the boundaries of what kinds of projects a team will and will not address (having a research strategy can give researchers the confidence and rationale to say “no” to a request). 

Without a research strategy, project work can feel disconnected, lacking a north start or an iterative impact.

“Doing the work of strategy well requires making visible and discussable that which was felt but was previously invisible.” ~Dave Hora

The reality of research teams in 2026

Understanding where your team sits in the organizational landscape helps you craft a strategy that's realistic and effective. Here's what the current state looks like:

Most research teams are still relatively young. About half of research teams are fewer than five years old, which means many teams are still building their foundation. If your team is in this stage, you're in good company—and a clear strategy becomes even more critical.

Research is typically embedded, not independent. Only 6% of researchers sit on dedicated User Research teams. Instead, research is distributed across functions, with nearly one-third reporting into Product. This embedded structure means your strategy needs to account for cross-functional relationships and competing priorities.

Democratization is real—and requires strategy. Seventy-one percent of organizations now have people who do research (PwDR) who aren't dedicated Researchers. While this expands research's reach, it also means dedicated Researchers often spend up to 25% of their time supporting others—what we call the "democratization tax." Your strategy should address how you'll balance this support with your own strategic work.

Devin Harold, Director of UX Research at Capital One, believes that a strategy should remain open to feedback and flexible to the business as it, too, changes and grows. Check out our conversation with him below for more.

Comparing a research strategy to strategic research

A research strategy might include strategic research, but it doesn’t have to. Strategic research (also known as design strategy research) focuses on longer vision (or horizon) questions. 

“The value of [strategic] research is that it provides awareness of assumptions and the variety of previously-unknown approaches people have to a defined purpose. It illuminates the broader picture of how people accomplish a goal or satisfy a need…” ~Indi Young

Judd Antin, former head of Design for Airbnb, offers examples of strategic research questions:

• What insights does the board of directors need to decide on the M&A strategy?
• How should the company prioritize business goals next half?
• Which user problems or product and design trends should executives focus on over the next 3–5 years?
• What consumer trends really matter for the business, and how should we translate them to action?

Strategic research designs often employ qualitative research methods such as contextual inquiry, diary studies, and interviews. This is not always the case, however. Some leaders maintain that more tactical and evaluative research—such as prototype and usability testing—can have strategic impact.

Four questions to ask when building a research strategy

But how does one go about building a research strategy? We offer four steps, which are conceptualized here as questions that require thoughtful, reflective responses:

1. Who is your research for?
2. What will you research?
3. When will you conduct research?
4. How will your research support the business?

Together, the answers to these questions create the foundations of an actionable research strategy. Let’s take a look at each of these questions, and the considerations when formulating your answers.

💡Pro Tip: User Interviews is the fastest way to recruit participants for any kind of research. Talk to sales or sign up for an account today.

1. Who is your research for? 🙋

To build a successful research strategy, you need to understand who your research stakeholders are. Research stakeholders could be anyone from the CEO, who has in-depth knowledge of the business strategy overall, to the people building and implementing what you learn. These are the people research will impact. Stakeholders can vary from research project to project, depending on the focus and scope.

We talked to Holly Hester-Reilly, who helps companies of all shapes and sizes embrace research, about how teams can work with stakeholders.

Keep in mind that in a typical org the people higher up will have a lot more access and information on the company's strategy, the resources that are available, what is the company's competitive advantage. And there may be cases where you hear something in research that seems like a great opportunity but just doesn't actually fit with those elements.

Three types of stakeholders to consider

There are three different kinds of stakeholders you’ll need to consider when building your research strategy: Leaders, implementers, and executives.

Leaders: These are people at your organization who lead teams and/or projects that will be affected by research. They’re also likely to be your audience for any research recommendations you may give. Think the VP of Design who wants to know the viability of a new UX flow, the Head of Marketing who wants to investigate an acquisition strategy, or a Senior Engineer who wants to test a new prototype.

Implementers: These are the people who will actually be building the stuff you learn about through research. Think the Junior Engineer who is responsible for building improvements on a feature, or the Product Designer who will create the new designs you investigate through research.

Often, Implementers are also involved in executing the research, meaning they may sit in on sessions or even set up projects themselves. 71% of organizations now having people who do research (PwDR) who aren't dedicated researchers—whether that's managers running surveys, colleagues gathering feedback, or team members conducting their own validation work.

Executives: These are the executives at your organization. They likely have a lot of information on where your company is going, why, and how much money the company is willing to spend to get there. They’re likely not active participants in the nitty-gritty of research, but they probably have the power to stop research if they feel it is unprofitable or a waste of time.

All of these stakeholders are important to the success of your research, and thereby, your research strategy. Each stakeholder will have different things they want and expect to get out of research, so it’s important to understand their perceptions to build a research strategy that’s impactful for everyone. You can learn more about what each stakeholder wants and needs from research by conducting stakeholder interviews.

Understanding stakeholder buy-in in 2026

Here's the reality: stakeholder buy-in varies significantly and directly impacts your ability to execute research. According to our State of Research Strategy report:

• 74% of researchers say their peers see the value in research
• Only 58% say leadership does

This gap matters for your strategy. When leadership buy-in is lower, you may need to focus more on quick wins and visible impact metrics. When it's strong, you have more room to pursue longer-term strategic work.

Resources

Here are a few resources to help you answer this question:

• Get to know your stakeholders better with interviews (this will go a long way when it comes time to decide what you and your team might research)
• Demonstrate the value of UX research org-wide
• ‍Familiarize yourself with UX trends in anticipation of questions

2. What will you research? 🔍

What do you and your stakeholders hope to learn from research? How you answer this question will change what kind of research you need to do. Michael Margolis, UX Research Partner at Google Ventures, identified the most common reasons startups need to conduct research. They are:

1. Improve a process or workflow
2. Understand customer shopping habits
3. Evaluate concepts
4. Test usability
5. Refine a value proposition
   

Each of these reasons for research requires using different research methods and asks different research questions. For example, research about whether or not a product is usable probably involves doing a usability test, and the request for this type of research likely comes from your product department. Research to better understand customer shopping habits could involve doing a shopalong or a field study. The request for this research could come from your marketing or product department.

What researchers are prioritizing in 2026

The challenges of balancing rigor with speed are universal across research disciplines. The most recent data from our State of User Research 2025 shows that researchers are conducting a median of 2 mixed-method, 3 qualitative, and 1 quantitative study over six months. While AI promises faster research, output hasn't dramatically increased—instead, researchers are adapting their approaches to be more strategic with their time.

According to our data, the top factors influencing method selection are:

1. The research question itself (87% cite this)
2. Timeline and speed required (74%)

Here's something that might surprise you: 52% of researchers say that expectations around demonstrating ROI don't actually influence the types of research they prioritize or conduct. This suggests it's possible to maintain research integrity while still demonstrating value.

Prioritization is power

Creating a rationale for which research to greenlight and what to backburner demonstrates expertise, authority, and engenders a sense of credibility with your stakeholders. They wouldn’t say “yes” to every project and neither should you.

Other factors you might consider as you start working through not only what to research, but what order those projects might take place: 

Speed vs. rigor: Stakeholders often need answers quickly, yet quality research requires adequate sample sizes and methodological rigor. Your strategy should define when quick pulse checks are appropriate versus when to advocate for proper study design.

Scale and quality: Whether you need hundreds of survey responses or thousands of labeled examples, maintaining consistent quality at scale requires deliberate systems. Your strategy should define quality control mechanisms.

Participant recruitment: Finding the right participants—whether B2B decision-makers, specific user segments, or diverse demographic groups—requires specialized recruitment strategies. Your strategy should address how you'll either maintain or gain access to quality participant pools for your specific needs.

Ethical and governance considerations: From informed consent to data privacy to potential impacts of your research, all research carries ethical weight. Your strategy should outline governance structures and review processes appropriate to your work.

Resources

To help you answer this question, check out these:

• A guide to better research questions
• ‍A primer on the most popular UX research methods

For more help on research prioritization, try these:

• A questions workshop with your stakeholders
• ‍Creating a “Research Opportunities Assessment Matrix” or ROAM

3. When will you conduct your research? ⏰

Making time for all this research is a strategy in itself. The timing of your research depends on your organizational context and business cycles—whether that's product development sprints, campaign launches, fiscal quarters, or model development timelines.

Your research needs to work with existing schedules, not fight against them.

But let's acknowledge the elephant in the room: time is tight. Our data shows that 74% of researchers cite time as a primary factor when selecting research methods. If you're feeling pressure to move faster, you're experiencing what most researchers face. This doesn't mean you should compromise on research quality—it means your strategy needs to account for these constraints:

Be strategic about when to say "not right now": You can do research for almost anything, but doing it at the most optimal time to bring value to your organization is a skill. Learning to prioritize is essential.

Leverage AI thoughtfully: Eighty percent of researchers now use AI in their workflow—a 24-point increase from 2024. While sentiment is mixed (41% view it negatively vs 32% positively), AI can help with time-intensive tasks like transcription, initial analysis, synthesis, and open-end coding. Just maintain appropriate oversight for accuracy.

Protect your bandwidth: If you're flying solo or on a small team, be realistic about capacity when setting expectations with stakeholders.

How to align research with your product development cycle

Here's how research can line up with specific stages of a product development cycle, from pre-prototype to post-launch.

Discovery (pre-prototype) research usually happens before you have a prototype or product at all. In this stage, you’re learning more about the market for the thing you’re building, its potential users, and keeping an open mind about how you can best build the product your users actually need.

In this stage there are a few methods that work best when you want to learn more about your users and the products or features they need:

• ‍Generative interviews: These can be especially effective early on in your product development cycle. They involve sitting down one on one with participants, usually five is enough, and asking them questions, testing your problem and solution hypothesis.
• ‍Diary studies: These are great for capturing long-term data. They’re also a cheaper and easier alternative to a traditional field study or ethnography. Diary studies involve participants keeping logs of actions and thoughts, helping you understand habits, changes over time, motivations, and long-term customer journeys.
• ‍Ethnography: This is all about observing people in the context of their actual lives. It’s great for understanding how people interact with your product outside of a lab environment. It can help you consider use cases, problems, and solutions you might not have otherwise. Ethnography is a type of field study in which the researchers totally immerse themselves in the participant’s environment. The drawback to ethnography is that it is typically costly and time consuming. In some cases, you can cut costs by using digital ethnography tools for remote ethnographic research.
• ‍Focus groups: These can be helpful for getting a broad view of the audience you seek to serve, offer you an insight to a group of people in a short amount of time, and can be cost-effective.

When you’re in the validation and testing stage, you typically have a prototype to test with and a good sense of your users needs and pains. The goal in this phase is to understand if these designs help users solve their problems, how they interact with them, and where they get hung up.

There are a few key methods you can use in the validation and testing phase, each with different benefits and applications:

• ‍Qualitative Usability Testing: This is the process of testing how “usable” your product is. Qualitative usability testing involves having participants test the usability of your prototype, while thinking aloud. Like generative interviews, you really only need 5 users to get a good idea of what users are thinking.
• ‍Tree Testing: This involves testing the architecture of your website. This is useful when reorganizing your site, or when building a new one. Tree testing helps you see how users navigate through your site.
• ‍First Click Testing: This is exactly what it sounds like, it measures where users first click on your site. Why does this matter? When users fail to click the right thing the first time, their chance of getting the whole task right goes down to about 50/50. This can be useful when testing a new task, or trying to determine why users are failing an existing one.
• ‍Task Analysis: This involves analyzing how users do certain tasks. This can be helpful when testing a new product or feature to get a better idea of the users JTBD.
• ‍A/B Testing: This involves testing one option against another. It’s often useful to do A/B testing when trying to choose nitty gritty details, like colors or styles.
• ‍Accessibility testing: As with so many systems and institutions, a lot of unconscious bias is built into many designs, and accessibility testing is a great defense against these pervasive issues in our society.

The research doesn’t stop once you’ve launched your product though, it’s important to keep research going even after the launch of your project. At the ongoing listening stage, qualitative data ties in closely with quantitative data, which is likely closely tied to your business metrics. You’ll want to make sure whatever solution you put out into the world is actually accomplishing the goal you hoped it would.

Here are some methods researchers working in this product development phase often employ:

• ‍Surveys: User intercepts, sourced participants, short surveys—like NPS—longer surveys targeted at a particular aspect of the user experience; there are a variety of survey types and tools to help you meet your ongoing listening goals.
• ‍Analytics: These can be a treasure trove of great quantitative data if you know how to analyze it and connect insight to action. Keeping a close track on key user flows and business metrics will help you see changes over time. Analytics may help you define your metrics for your research initiatives.
• Bug tracking and reporting: Bugs come up and need to be fixed, users have questions about how to use your products. Hopefully, your product or engineering team already has a process in place for dealing with bugs. The value here is to link those improvements—where possible—with projects that spotlit the need for them in the first place. This is a repeatable, visible, and practical way to track your impact.

Remember: Post-launch does not mean post-research. Many of the most innovative teams employ a continuous research framework, where customer interaction is a regular (think weekly) practice. There are a host of benefits to weaving this method into a research strategy. Head here to learn more information on what continuous discovery is and how to get started.

4. How will your research support the business? 📈

Your research strategy will work best when it’s aligned with your business strategy. This means having an open and honest conversation about where your business is going and how research can help your team get there (alignment on metrics, growth trajectories, reinforcing the line from UX insights to business decisions). Your stakeholder interviews hopefully helped you learn about the business strategy and where research can fit into that.

Like any other part of your business, research should be valuable in a clear and measurable way. The best way to establish research metrics is to make sure the data you’re collecting is clear, align with the rest of your company on metrics, and store your findings meticulously.

The reality of impact tracking in 2026

But let's be honest about the challenges in doing this: our State of Research Strategy report found that only 21% of researchers are satisfied with their impact tracking methods. This challenge extends across research disciplines—whether you're tracking how research influenced decisions, strategy, or outcomes.

Here's what most researchers are doing:

Qualitative tracking is dominant:

• 83% track impact qualitatively
• Top methods: Observing how findings are used (85%), follow-up conversations with stakeholders (80%), internal recognition (73%)

Quantitative tracking is less common:

• 46% track numerically
• Top metrics: Customer metrics like NPS (57%), decision impact on roadmap (56%), research demand like study volume (52%)

Manual processes dominate:

• 59% rely on spreadsheets or documents
• Only 27% use dashboards or BI tools
• Just 20% leverage tool integrations

The role of Research Operations

If you have dedicated Research Operations support, count yourself fortunate—only 35% of organizations do. Teams with ReOps track impact more effectively:

• 51% track quantitatively (vs. 42% without ReOps)
• 65% measure demand metrics (vs. 44% without)
• 65% track decision impact (vs. 49% without)

If you don't have ReOps yet, your strategy should include plans to build operational infrastructure as you mature. According to our State of Research Operations report, ReOps work is becoming more strategic thanks to AI automation freeing up time from tactical tasks—but the role requires sustained organizational support.

The maturity curve: Teams with 6+ years of sustained investment do more rigorous, impactful research and have better measurement systems. If your team is younger, be patient with yourself while working strategically toward better infrastructure.

Collect clear data

Ok, now that we have that context out of the way, let's look at how to collect clear data from research. This means getting on the same page about metrics, research goals, and questions you’ll ask in moderated research sessions.

Employing templates is a way to balance rigor with scale. Templating intake or request forms, stakeholder feedback, and certainly research instruments is a great way to save time, align stakeholders, and ensure participants are set up to share data in an easy way. Here are templates for interview guides, UX research plans, and note taking. And here are tactics for making the most of your user research recordings.

Ursula Shekufendeh describes how she leveraged templates to align her stakeholders across sales, customer support, and research (see video below). Folks were not only more informed on why research was happening, but were able to take action on data more quickly having been involved in the process early.

Align on metrics

After you’ve collected your data in a way that’s clear for everyone, you’ll need to tie that data to actual metrics. Your stakeholder interviews should have helped you establish what metrics are important to stakeholders and to the business as a whole. Whether it’s MRR, conversion rates, or NPS scores, it’s important to align your research to the metrics that are most important to your stakeholders.

You can even take it one step further and calculate a project's financial impact using our UX ROI & Impact Calculator. This will help you show the value of UX research and continue to grow your practice.

When you start your research projects, take the time to gather data about where your baseline metrics are pre-research. This helps you focus on what you really want to get out of this effort, and gives you metrics to compare post-research.

Store your findings

You’re probably not creating a research strategy to do one research study and then forget about research altogether. A great research practice that supports your business builds on itself as time goes on, resulting in a library of insights to draw on for future efforts. Create well-documented projects with clear and easy to track data, that are focused on moving the needle for specific metrics. Then, store your findings just as meticulously (and revisit these systems to ensure they’re still working for your org).

Pro tip: Researchers with ReOps support consult internal documentation at much higher rates (56% vs. 25% without). Even without dedicated ReOps, building a searchable research repository should be part of your strategy.

Resources

Here are resources to help you answer this question:

• Explore the full breadth of research tools
• Our Launch Kits offer templates for popular UX methods
• Check out these templates for usability tests and journey maps
• ‍Try this recipe for repeatable, insights-forward research
  

Final thoughts for 2026 and beyond

So there you have it—the four steps to creating a research strategy that will make stakeholders happy, keep your research manageable and accountable for real business metrics, and help build support for research across your organization.

If you're reading this in a moment of uncertainty, remember that a research strategy is your navigation tool through this transition. It helps you:

• Make strategic choices about where to invest limited time and resources
• Articulate your value in terms stakeholders understand
• Build the infrastructure and relationships that lead to long-term impact
• Protect space for rigorous research even when pressure intensifies

‍Now go do some fantastic research!