Patterns of practice and a set of tools for researchers and their teams to grow—
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1. Learn Skills & Practices
RSF divides the skills of user research into Craft Skills ("doing the work successfully") and Human Skills ("making the work successful"). The model for research growth is a value chain that shows how themes ladder up toward organizational needs.
• Page: Craft & Human Skills.
The first step to using the framework with your team is to review the skills, define a shared understanding, and customize the list of skills relevant to your team context.
• Tool: Skills & Themes Inventory.
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2. Build Projects & Playbooks
Craft skills are stored as patterns of practice you can use to plan, scope, and sequence out project types collaboratively:
• Tool: Project Builder w/ Miroverse Template.
As your team sees more projects unfold, you can build a "playbook" or a small set of the 10-20 patterns you need for a given project-type. This allows you to operationalize what's really important—productive and impactful projects.
• Video: Planning an Experience Map Project.
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3. Map Progress & Goals
Findings from the workshops are encoded into a series of maps. See an "archetype" of progression through the various stages of an individual-contributor research career.
• Page: Insights on Research Career Progression.
The real power comes from building a bottom-up picture of yourself or your team. Use the map as a tool for self-reflection, a discussion, or planning out possible and realistic goals for developing as a researcher.
• Tool: Skills Progression Map.
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4. New Frontiers & Exploration
Starting from the ground up with a realistic picture of the practices we engage in as researchers, and how they fit together, is a new and exciting place to be—there's so much we can do to open this up and build new tools and knowledge for our community.
A small group of researchers and research leaders are experimenting with where we can go next: team training, hiring profiles, strategic capability planning, democratization playbooks, and more. Please reach out if you're interested to explore further!
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