There is a million articles on the topic of “Management does not see the value of user testing! Help me wage a hearts and minds guerrilla campaign to change their minds!”. But I think we might all learn a bit more from each other’s more personal war stories than a buzzfeed style lists!
My situation is probably better than typical - I have unlimited licence to do guerrilla testing on company time, but no extra budget to recruit customers with anything other than a smile and a wink for the most basic testing. Normally I’d just hustle up some friends, but I simply don’t know people in the right demographic. I’m considering simply invading the kinds of places they are likely to inhabit on the weekends (I’m just not sure mothers with young children want that :P)!
For broader customer research, we have a chronic problem where non of the executives seem to trust either my interview driven results, surveys or external agencies. They spend a lot of time with our customers themselves, so it’s not like they are out of touch - but it’s hard to align them all on a common ideas, so even simple methods like summing it up into personas or a list of JTBD don’t seem to get far.
I love this company, we build great stuff - but as we’ve grown as a start-up, I’d like for us to transition some of our learning from our failures to learning from tests!