UX research allows you to test and validate your hypotheses by understanding how people are using your product. It’s cheaper and more efficient to talk to your users before starting to write code.

But to really get into your users’ heads, you can’t simply schedule user sessions and interviews every time you’re about to launch a new product or feature. Today, products must rapidly adapt to the needs of their users or die quickly.

As Arjun Sethi, founder of MessageMe and a partner at Social Capital, writes:

Your customers are consuming an experience. How do you test, ask questions and synthesize that information? How do you think about your product over the course of a few weeks to a few years and evolve it? It’s tempting to think about just the initial numbers but it’s better to focus on the entire experience. Quantitative metrics will always give you lagging indicators but won’t tell you how to think about your product holistically.

The ability to rapidly synthesize qualitative data from your users and build your product accordingly gives you the superpower of being able to move faster than the competition.

But when you’re working with a small team and limited resources, it can be difficult to make time for UX research — you’re too busy putting out fires, dealing with customer concerns, squashing bugs, and building out your product.

To get the user insights you need to improve, you need to set up a system where your team is constantly receiving a steady stream of quality user feedback. You don’t need a big UX research team or a massive budget to achieve this. By automating your UX workflow, you can spend less time on the logistics of UX research — finding users to talk to, scheduling interviews — and more time getting into the heads of your users.

Here’s a step-by-step guide for automating your UX research flow to make sure you’re receiving a steady stream of user feedback throughout your entire product cycle.