In a participative setting ethnography’s main value is building shared understanding and inspiration in the project team.

This wasn’t this clear to us back then. We first called it ‘Qualitative research’, which had two drawbacks:

1. project members with market research background found it unsubstantial
2. in a corporate setting ‘research’ often means ‘backed by data’, and when some of our insights went against data-based results it hurt the project’s credibility

We started to communicate the field research part differently after hearing our project teams members highlighting how valuable it was to face the customer reality together before they started to come up with solutions.