[from Chris: I'm delighted to feature this new essay from Quant UX Con co-founder Kitty Xu*, discussing how "T shaped" skills fit into today's UX research world!]*
Last year, I wrote about why Quant UXRs need to get comfortable with qualitative work and step outside their methodological comfort zones, and argued for the idea of becoming a T-shaped researcher, combining breadth and depth. The job market has since made that argument for me. Read any research job posting today, and you'll see it: mixed-methods researcher, deep qual and quant skills required.
The baseline requirement for a user researcher’s toolkit has expanded. But now there is a new problem.
When everyone seemingly can write a survey, run a usability study, parse a log data file, and conduct user interviews, what makes you different? In a sea of applicants where a baseline horizontal T seems to be just table stakes, what makes your T stand out?
If you are a mid-career UX researcher, this is the question I’ve been thinking about for a while, and the one I’d like you to think about now.
The T Has Always Been About More Than Methods
The idea of the T-shaped professional is not new: depth in one area, breadth across many. But in the current workplace, with AI raising the floor on what anyone can do, and mixed-methods seemingly becoming the new baseline, it feels more topical than ever.
To me, the horizontal stroke of the T gives you range: the ability to tackle different problems, spot connections across domains, collaborate across specialties, and adapt as your role shifts. But at the end of the day, the vertical stroke of the T is why people will remember you, and how you build a moat around your career.
However, depth isn't purely methodological. I'd argue there are at least four dimensions where your T can go deep. The most compelling researchers I know have a clear, honest story in at least one of them.
1. The Craft of Research Influence
Some researchers are great at generating insights. Far fewer are great at helping teams act on them.
Research influence can be a real form of depth because impact does not happen automatically. Impact is the outcome: a team changes direction, prioritizes differently, or kills an idea. Influence is the craft of making research useful enough to shape those decisions.
I have written elsewhere about a hierarchy of research excellence: good researchers answer questions well; great researchers choose the right methods; amazing researchers make sure they are asking the right question; exceptional researchers do all of that and craft compelling narratives that inspire action. This dimension is about that final leap: the ability to turn insight into action.
There is no single way to build influence as a researcher. At its core, influence comes from turning knowledge and intuition about users and business into decisions. For one researcher, that may look like storytelling: distilling a complex body of findings into the three things a leadership team needs to act. For another, it may look like executive communication: delivering a difficult finding in a high-stakes room with enough clarity and conviction to change the direction of the product. For a third, it may be problem framing: taking a complex, ambiguous issue and reframing it into a question the team can actually rally around. Over time, these forms of craft compound into trust. Cross-functional partners begin to seek out the researcher not just for answers, but for judgment before important decisions are made.
If your research consistently shapes product direction rather than just informing it, and people bring you into the room before the decision is made, not after, that is a T worth naming.
2. Methodological Depth and Operational Savvy
Knowing a method and owning it are two different things.
Can you design a study using the simplest methods to answer a complicated question? Can you build a measurement framework from scratch, define success metrics, choose the right signals, and spot acquiescence bias in a survey draft before it ever goes to the field? Are you a trained ethnographer who can surface insights that no structured data can capture: the unsaid, the subtext, and people's raw emotional reactions?
Mixed-methods fluency seems like the new baseline. But deep expertise in something highly specific, whether that is conjoint analysis, diary studies, international research, log-based behavioral analysis, or psychometric scale development, that is your superpower and your differentiator.
And then there is the knowledge that never shows up in any textbook or LLMs: which qual research agencies are worth the cost, which survey panels deliver quality, which vendor you can trust, and what international research in a given market realistically costs. That is also part of your T.
Ask yourself honestly: What is the specific expertise where someone would actively seek my help?
3. Domain Depth
Domain depth is the expertise you build by staying in a specific context or problem space long enough to see patterns others miss, ask questions others don't think to ask, and make connections others can't make quickly.
That context might be an industry. A researcher who understands consumer tech knows that user behavior is often shaped by attention, habit, what other users do in the network, and how the platform is designed to keep users coming back. A researcher with healthcare or fintech experience knows how to work within regulatory constraints and emotionally high-stakes personal decisions. A researcher in enterprise understands that the user, buyer, and decision maker are often different people, and that good research has to identify the right target audience, and navigate those competing user needs.
It might be a product vertical. Growth research requires high fluency in data and experimentation, but also the ability to look beyond existing users to identify untapped opportunities and future audiences. Search and discovery research requires deep thinking about relevance and user mental models, and knowing how to surface nuanced, contextual signals in a way that informs how ranking and recommendation models are built. B2B and developer tools research means understanding domain experts with specialized workflows and constraints, navigating both the account-level and user-level data, and recruiting the right participants who can meaningfully speak to highly specific problems.
Or it might come from outside tech. A background in academia might bring rigor in study design. Journalism might bring sharper interviewing instincts. Public health might bring deeper sensitivity to vulnerable populations, privacy, and harm. If you know how to apply that experience to product work, it becomes a part of your T.
What these paths have in common is judgment: knowing which questions matter, which risks teams miss, and when the evidence is good enough to act. That kind of pattern recognition is earned through years in context, not from a course or an AI assistant. If you have it, name it in your T and own it.
4. Company Stage and Organizational Context
This dimension rarely shows up on skill matrices. But the environment you have worked in shapes the skills you build and how you work. It is a bigger part of your T than most people realize.
The spectrum runs from the early-stage researcher building the function while delivering the work, to the researcher scaling an established function in a large organization. Neither is better, but neither is interchangeable.
I know this one personally. I have been an early Quant UXR at multiple points in my career, helping define and build the discipline when it was still taking shape, at a time when there wasn't even an industry definition yet. The skills you build in that environment go beyond research methods. You learn to move fast, prioritize direction over precision, educate stakeholders on what good research looks like and why it matters, build infrastructure from scratch, and take ownership of decisions that will outlast you. You also build range by necessity: when there are no specialists to hand off to, you develop muscles across methods and domains you might never have touched otherwise.
In a scaled org, researchers often have more resources, more room to go deep, and more peers to sharpen their thinking. But scale brings a different challenge: making your work visible and trusted across teams that may not know you. That takes its own craft: positioning research so it does not get lost, building scalable infrastructure others can use, and knowing which organizational battles are worth fighting.
If you've lived any of these, it is worth naming explicitly. Most people don't. And it is a real part of your T.
So, What Is Your T?
Not everyone builds a T through a grand, master-planned career strategy.
I didn't plan mine. Some researchers I admire were deeply intentional about going deep in one direction, while others followed their curiosity or an unexpected opportunity, moving between companies, problems, and methodologies. Both paths produce a T. What they share is years of hard work, in specific contexts, with real constraints and consequences.
There is no shortcut, no course, no certificate, no AI assistant that can build it for you. And your T is already there. You just need to look back, connect the dots, and recognize the pattern in your own path.
So here is the thought exercise. If someone described you to a hiring manager in one sentence, not your title, not your methods list, what would they say?
"She is a storyteller. Her readouts change minds."
"They are the person you call when you need to measure something that is hard to define, let alone measure."
"He's done consumer growth research at three places and knows instinctively which metrics are easy to game but will hurt retention in the long run."
"They've built research teams at two startups. They know how to build leadership trust quickly and hire the right people early on."
Don't do this exercise alone. The things that make you exceptional can sometimes feel so natural to you that you might have stopped noticing them. Talk to people whose opinion you value and trust, who have worked with you over a period of time. Ask them what they appreciate about you, where they think your judgment is the strongest, and what you do differently from others they have worked with.
Or, simply pay attention to the kinds of problems they bring to you. I know this from personal experience. A manager once put me on the most ambiguous projects, the ones that were poorly defined, in spaces fewer researchers had explored. I didn't always feel ready at those times. But they saw something in me before I saw it in myself. That belief pushed me to take on challenges I would have otherwise avoided. And looking back, those projects shaped some of the most important parts of my T.
Then, Earn the Reputation
Finding your T is one part of the story. The other equally important part is earning a reputation around it.
It is tempting to treat this as a personal branding exercise: your ideas broadcast through your writing, public speaking, and online presence. There is nothing wrong with making your work visible, but you only control the inputs. An authentic personal brand only matters when what you project is backed by the experience people have of you in the room.
Reputation is different. It is the imprint you leave in the small, unglamorous moments, consistently and over time, until they become a pattern: how you delivered an unpopular finding to a team that's not ready to hear it, how you pushed back on a PM's request with thoughtful follow-ups, and how you interacted with your colleagues, whether leaving them feeling empowered or diminished. You cannot curate a reputation. You just have to earn it.
Ask yourself the harder, more uncomfortable question: what do people actually feel and remember about working with me?
This is not just about finding the right job. When the job market feels unpredictable, when the lines between specialties blur, when you are not sure if what you have built still matters, it is easy to lose your footing. Knowing your T will not fix any of that. But it gives you something solid to stand on: a clearer story about where your judgment is strongest, what differences your work has made, and why your depth cannot be reduced to a title or methods list. Know your work. Know where you thrive. Know what you value. Know what sets you apart. Then keep earning the reputation that makes others see it too.
Acknowledgments: Thank you to Altay, Cassandra, Jenny, Gabe, Chris, Scott, and Jane for your thoughtful feedback and encouragement. You made my thinking clearer and this piece stronger. Thank you to Jeff for the illustration that brought the idea to life.
