It’s been two years since I started the Integrating Research Medium publication to share articles about research repositories and increasing the product impact of customer insights. Since February 2021, the articles have evolved from longer pieces into a cumulative table of contents across a series of posts — and the…

Integrating research > Crafting arteries into planning > H. Onboarding all product people to repositories and their culture of research use > Article H2 Existing research at the starting line. Product people often want fresh data on what they see as new questions, before they’ve considered how available insights could reframe and clarify their ideas. Insight seekers can build the muscle of starting with what’s already known, filtering early ideas and uncertainties through the learning captured in research repositories — be they exact answers that provide ‘direct hits,’ up-leveled insights to think bigger about customer needs, or analogous insights that can inspire parallel actions.

Integrating research > Crafting arteries into planning > H. Onboarding all product people to repositories and their culture of research use > Article H1 Where are insights being used? How can we grow adoption of existing research if we don’t track its application? Product teams may be consuming insights, but the ‘through line’ to resulting action is easily lost. Researchers can push new standards for how and where their research repositories should be referenced. Product people can then apply these standards to cite the insights they’re working against, communicating evidence-based rationale and unlocking other downstream value.

Integrating research > Crafting arteries into planning > G. Driving early adoption of repositories in product design processes > Article G4 Bridging from point solutions to systemic needs. When teams address insights about product-wide design problems with feature-specific solutions, they can create needless variation that becomes expensive-to-fix ‘UX debt.’ To drive consistency and usability, research repository programs can collate and push insights with direct implications for overarching design systems. Over time, stakeholders in design systems can become core advocates for existing insights, grounding their standards and experimentation in evidence-based problems to solve.

Realized that we’re 1/3 of the way through my list of planned Medium articles, which I’m thinking to eventually edit into book form. Table of contents with links to completed articles below. More to come! …

Integrating research > Crafting arteries into planning > G. Driving early adoption of repositories in product design processes > Article G3 What happens to all of those ideas out ahead of product road maps? As priorities narrow and shift, solutions for crucial insights may be set aside — leaving a trail of product explorations that are all too easily forgotten. Research repositories can ingest related solution ideas and design proposals. As explorations are discussed and documented, repository users can connect them back into the insights that inspired them. Once captured, research operations can work to keep these insight-driven possibilities alive in iterative product planning.

Integrating research > Crafting arteries into planning > G. Driving early adoption of repositories in product design processes > Article G2 Insights needing designs to get traction. Without visualization to inspire product planning actions, even the most compelling evidence-based problem can languish in a research repository. Research operations can secure design resourcing to solidify ‘in the air’ solutions and ideate concepts for non-obvious problems, clearing the fog around possible next steps. By using existing research to align design staffing with needed efforts, we can build momentum toward using repositories to set larger product agendas.

Integrating research > Crafting arteries into planning > G. Driving early adoption of repositories in product design processes > Article G1 Off to the races. Designers taking on new projects are hungry for insights — but existing research in repositories can feel a world away from new lines of exploration. To activate repositories, research operations can connect into the spaces where design teams document and track their own work items. By mapping existing insights into new design projects, we can help shape designers’ thinking toward better outcomes, reframing projects toward a greater range of evidence-based customer needs.

Integrating research > Forging systemic knowledge >D. Improving upon existing research knowledge management practices > Article D1 How should I think of this piece of research? How does it relate to other inputs that we could build our product plans around? Insight consumers can become confused when different insight generators, each vying for attention and impact, talk about their work in isolation. Researchers of different stripes can clarify what they offer — and start to build a more connective community — by defining common ways of describing each type of research. Communities can come together to stand on a foundation of shared language.