How we’re making strategic decisions based on the needs of businesses

Richard Smith

As the Lead User Researcher working on the Digital Business Growth Service, I am part of a team committed to continuously improving our service by understanding and meeting the needs of our users.

We know that navigating the support available for business owners can be overwhelming. This is why we launched the Digital Business Growth Service on business.gov.uk in June 2025 to help businesses find what they need, when they need it.

As the service has grown, our biggest challenge has been ensuring that the insights we gather are used strategically.  Research is spread across many government teams with different priorities, and business needs are wide‑ranging. Bringing these insights together in a way that supports decision making is not straightforward.

Ensuring this research remains valuable requires transparent knowledge sharing and a commitment to continually refining our understanding of business users. This helps us shape the Business Growth Service and prioritise future work based on insight and on gaps in our understanding.

To build this shared view, we brought together insight from across government and took a more strategic approach to understanding business needs.

Bringing insights together

Government teams across DBT and beyond have carried out extensive user research with businesses. The insight gained from this research was valuable and we want to avoid duplicated efforts. However, with the work done by different teams for different reasons, the insight was not yet connected in a clear cross-cutting way.

To build a consolidated view of business needs, we:

• reviewed more than 20 key user research documents looking for trends and themes that cut across teams
• used DBT Assist, our internal AI tool, to help systematically extract insights from these documents
• manually validated each insight to ensure quality and context

Whilst this was a thorough process, it gave us a faster and more consistent way to analyse a large volume of research.

By efficiently compiling this information, we developed a clearer understanding of the users’ needs and challenges. The insights we gained directly shaped our first public facing AI feature, which helps business owners find potential funding opportunities.

Finding the gaps in our understanding

Building a consolidated view allowed us to finally see where the gaps were in our understanding of users. To make our service better, we needed to address and fill these gaps.

We mapped existing findings to key user journeys, highlighting where assumptions remained or where evidence was lacking. For each gap, we documented targeted research methods, such as semi-structured interviews or more co-design activity, to deepen our understanding of business owners needs.

For example, we know some people who run businesses need support to adopt technology that enables growth. However, we still need to understand the most effective way to provide that support. This insight alone is shaping where our teams focus next.

By improving our understanding of the limitations of our evidence base, we created a stronger foundation for strategic research and ultimately more confident decision making.

Building transparency into future work

As we continue to improve how we plan and share our research, we are building transparency and accessibility into our work from the beginning. One of the challenges we faced was ensuring that research activity and insights were visible across teams.

To address this we introduced a user research knowledge kanban board, drawing inspiration from a Government Digital Service (GDS) approach.

The board brings our research backlog together, allowing teams to visualise the status of ongoing and completed research. It identifies areas where evidence is still lacking, and coordinates future research more effectively.

The board also functions as a living repository, capturing high-level findings along with the methodologies and documentation that underpin those insights, such as research playback slide decks.

While we are still refining how we use the board, it is already helping teams make decisions based on shared evidence rather than working in isolation. It also helps us focus our efforts on where they will have the most impact for business users.

A modular approach that continuously generates strategic insight

We are also trialing a new modular user research approach. The aim is to deliver more timely insights to teams as they need them whilst understanding emerging trends and user needs.

This works by breaking down larger research objectives into smaller, focused modules. Each module targets a specific aspect of the user experience or a distinct business challenge. This allows us to rapidly deploy research activities that address immediate priorities while still fitting into a broader strategic framework.

It enables us to adapt quickly to new trends and user needs. For example, if a module uncovers a shift in how business owners seek support, we can run a follow-on module to explore that area in greater depth. Insights from each module are promptly shared with teams, ensuring that decision-making is informed by the latest evidence rather than waiting for longer, end-to-end research cycles.

This process also supports collaboration. Different teams can contribute to or lead modules that align with their expertise, helping to build a more comprehensive understanding of our users over time. As Junior User Researcher, Kelly Voysey noted,

“The modular approach enabled me to work closely with senior researchers, sharing our participant interviews, effectively doubling our capacity, and closely collaborating on analysis and synthesis. This approach also helped to create a ‘common knowledge’ across 2 teams’ work, thereby reducing the dependency on a single researcher’s knowledge and availability."

Looking ahead

Bringing insights together, identifying gaps, improving transparency and using modular research are all part of one effort to turn dispersed research into strategic insight.

As we continue to learn more about businesses, this approach is helping colleagues in both delivery and policy teams to make informed, strategic decisions based on user insight. We are still learning and refining our methods, but the combination of our consolidated evidence base and more transparent ways of working is already supporting faster, more confident decision making.

If you are a user researcher, how have you managed the challenge of dispersed research insights? Please share your experience in the comments to help us adapt and learn.