Mixed methods is the most important research skillset of the 2020s
“Mixed methods research, combining qualitative and quantitative methods in one project, is becoming the defining skill for user researchers this decade. The reason is product-led growth: when the end user is the buyer, research stops being about polishing an experience and becomes central to company strategy, answering “what are our users’ biggest unmet needs?”. Tech companies run on quantitative data but can’t understand why users behave as they do without qualitative work, so they increasingly need researchers fluent in both. That researcher, the one who can run an interview and a statistically valid survey and translate between them, is what this piece calls the full-stack researcher.”
Rewriting the role of research
Product-led growth (PLG) is a strategy that uses your product as the main way to grow your company. Unlike sales- or marketing-led organisations where deals are done over dinner and 18 holes of golf, product-led companies recognise that the end user is the new buyer. That end user's main question isn't "how will this product help the company's bottom line?", it's "how will this help me in my day-to-day?".
These strategic choices might look far removed from UX research, but they reframe the job completely. User research stops being about creating a smooth experience or quantifying the cost savings a product delivers. User researchers now have a central role in shaping company strategy, by answering one question: what are our users' biggest unmet needs, pains and motivations?
As research gets tied to strategy, demand for researchers has climbed. Around the start of the decade, searches for "UX researcher" had risen nearly 500% in five years, and there were already more customer insights wanted than there were UX researchers to uncover them. That surge is what turned user research into the most sought-after research specialism of the decade.
Why is mixed methods becoming so popular?
Quantitative data is the internal currency of tech companies. Their credo is W. Edwards Deming's famous line, "In God we trust; all others must bring data." And make no mistake, product teams don't think an interview quote passes for "data".
The resurgence comes from those two worlds colliding, the quantitative technologist and the qualitative researcher, and tech companies deciding they need both. Qualitative work is what explains why people behave as they do and turns up the insights nobody thought to look for; the quantitative side is what tells you how big those findings are and what to prioritise next. Drop either one and you're guessing at half the picture.
What's new is how much the smooth handoff between the two now matters. The two disciplines used to meet only under ad-hoc circumstances. Now that qualitative research has a seat at the decision-making table, both specialisms have to work together well, which means one of them has to learn the other's language. That burden is falling to researchers.
The knock-on effects show up across the job. Research is turning into a continuous function that isn't boxed into pre-set project timelines. Spotting the core pains that drive user behaviour has to happen proactively, not as a reaction to whatever the big-data dashboard coughs up. As the people who deal with the end user most, product and UX leads own the job of understanding why users buy.
Above all, researchers are turning into the people who can pick up any kind of data and use it to win internal sceptics over to the end user's side. The more cross-functional a company gets, the more it needs someone who can do that. They become the go-to for everyone, marketing, sales, product and design, and each of those teams trusts a different kind of evidence.
What is mixed methods research?
Mixed methods is a type of user research that blends qualitative and quantitative methods within a single research project. (For the full definition, the three designs and worked examples, see the complete guide to mixed methods research.)
Companies like Spotify, Airbnb and Lyft have used mixed methods to combine rich user insights with actionable statistics, and large technology companies have been hiring for these skills for years. A quick tour of the three types.
Exploratory mixed methods (qual → quant)
If you're working on a project with a lot of unknowns, exploratory mixed methods is a good way to form a hypothesis. It usually starts with open-ended qualitative work like a user interview or free-text survey, then moves into a quantitative survey to measure the significance and validity of what you gathered.
Explanatory mixed methods (quant → qual)
Explanatory research suits the moment you're trying to interpret quantitative findings. Analysing user or market behaviour with big data turns up a measurable insight, and you carry it into a qualitative deep dive to learn the context behind the numbers. A common example is digging into user churn to diagnose the factors affecting a high-value cohort.
Dynamic mixed methods (qual + quant)
Dynamic mixed methods collects qualitative and quantitative data at the same time within a single research method, where exploratory and explanatory need multiple steps. Dynamic projects hand more control to users so several data types can be collected at once, which makes them a good fit for discovery-focused research and product-led companies.
You've possibly heard this called "qual at scale". The most common type is unmoderated usability testing at scale, but newer platforms like OpinionX reimagine existing research methods for the digital age, taking away some of the most time-consuming manual tasks of mixed methods, like thematic codingand qualitative analysis.
The future of research
Mixed methods research used to be an academic affair, convoluted and inaccessible. Not any more. As the leaders of the product-led growth movement keep pointing out, we're in the era of the end user, and mixed methods research is your toolkit for understanding them.
If you want to build the skillset, the practical starting points are the guide to mixed methods research for the designs, and how to run mixed methods research without being a quant expert for the hands-on version.
Frequently asked questions
Why is mixed methods the most important research skillset this decade? Because product-led growth ties research to company strategy, and tech companies run on quantitative data but need qualitative work to understand why users behave as they do. The researcher who can do both, and translate between them, becomes central to decisions rather than a support function.
What is a full-stack researcher? A researcher fluent in both qualitative and quantitative methods, who can run an interview, run a statistically valid survey, and move between the two within one project. The term reflects how product teams increasingly expect research to cover the whole loop rather than one half of it.
What are the three types of mixed methods research? Exploratory (qualitative first, then quantitative to measure it), explanatory (quantitative first, then qualitative to explain it), and dynamic (both collected at once within one method). The full guide covers each in depth.
Why do product-led companies need mixed methods? Because in product-led growth the end user is the buyer, so understanding user needs, pains and motivations directly shapes strategy. That requires both the scale of quantitative data and the "why" of qualitative research, which is exactly what mixed methods combines.
The researcher who thrives this decade is the one who stops treating qual and quant as a choice. Learn to run both, and to translate between the teams that each trust only one, and you turn into the person the whole company routes its hardest questions through.
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OpinionX helps product and UX teams understand what matters most to their users, turning qualitative insights into quantitative data in a single survey. It's free to start: $0, unlimited surveys, unlimited researcher seats, capped at 25 participants per survey, then $900 a year to lift the cap (full pricing). Create a ranking survey.
About the author: Daniel Kyne is the Co-Founder and CEO of OpinionX, a next-generation survey tool that helps product and UX teams understand what matters most to their users in just one click. He curates a newsletter on the future of user research called The Full-Stack Researcher and can be found shouting out into the internet void on Twitter and LinkedIn. (Originally published February 1st 2021)