Thread by @PavelASamsonov

No amount of research will make stakeholders as confident as following all of their biases.

Sell stakeholders on the idea of *doing research* in the first place, or they will demand impossible bulletproof evidence for anything that doesn't align with their existing assumptions.

In one article, @jmspool discusses how you must always ask executives for what they expect to happen *before* user testing. Otherwise they will pretend like they knew the outcome ahead of time, and it will not sway their thinking.

This is an analogous concept.

If you produce results without creating the expectation that the stakeholder's assumptions may have been wrong, they will find a way to reconcile the results with their existing mental model. Often that just means being dismissed: "you asked the wrong people/questions".

As @MrAlanCooper says - user experience is a power struggle. In low-maturity product orgs, stakeholders gather political power through being Experts who are Always Right. Realigning attitudes away from assumptions is a political game, not a delivery one.

These orgs create a vicious cycle between assumption-driven design and brittle development. The cost of being wrong is massive (politically and financially). Rather than reducing the cost of being wrong, stakeholders find it safer to obfuscate how "right" is determined.

Introducing the idea of experimentation - controlled, rapid failing - is anathema to this environment. So you have to sell the whole thing at once: small, quick, cheap tests aimed at learning rather than "winning". The only real failure is if we didn't learn anything new.

This is very scary because it requires stakeholders to commit to a real "definition of good" that's not just "the team delivered the requirements." They have to get buy-in for goals and hypotheses (you might recognize these as OKRs) and that takes work!

But more importantly, they give up control. They are no longer the Knower and Decider (instead, research determines the way forward). They no longer set the team's outputs (the team determines their own experiments). But they are still on the hook for results.

This is what you're struggling against: convincing stakeholders to relinquish absolute power. If they do not, then regardless of the title on your business cards you are stuck as a feature designer or usability tester, not a UX designer or user researcher.