Existing customer insights aren’t showing up when decisions get made

Root causes of research waste in tech (3 of 3): Integration

Leaders and owning teams don’t have enough of the ‘right’ touchpoints with researchers and their collected knowledge.

Sure, there are great interactions during researchers’ projects. Stakeholders’ participation in the actual research process — along with investigators’ “notes from field” communications — can be essential. And of course, the concluding steps of each study are crucial to immerse decision makers in what’s been learned.

These conventional touchpoints can be effective elements of most any study process, and research teams can continually improve them through standards and support.

It doesn’t have to end there.

It turns out that those conventional connections during a study can be just the beginning.

For insights that don’t manage to drive planning action within a study’s timeframe, initial touchpoints can function as a sort of kick off. There are many other times in your organization’s product development and delivery practices when it can make sense to push existing research knowledge.

Efforts to re-communicate and activate insights from past studies can become routine and ongoing. Your research community can work to grow the mindshare of their work through meaningful new touchpoints.

Integration doesn’t stop at awareness. Researchers building mindshare for their work can’t rely only on their colleagues’ memories. As the fast-paced feeds and conversations of product development flow onward, known customer problems can stay outside the periphery of planning discussions. They can lack presence in decision making.

Insight presence can be challenging to attain. Researchers can’t be everywhere, and they’re not consistently invited into the room when teams are thinking about plans.

To make sure the right insights are present in the right audiences at the right times, you need to have an understanding of how your organization is structured.

You also need to know some pivotal points in your product development and delivery processes. Potential targets within the big phases and also down in the smaller tradeoffs.

As you turn research knowledge into an internal product, you can design new approaches that enhance the ‘fit’ of insights to these internal use cases.

To increase the integration of insights in your product development processes, you can try the following ways forward:

• Help your research community develop new interactions to push insights, increasing mindshare and presence.

• Lead the definition and adoption of standards for citing research rationale as the ‘why’ of product plans.

• Develop practices for insight generators and their supporters to inject research into the decision points where it could matter most.

Much more to come on these topics in forthcoming ‘Stop Wasting Research’ book for Rosenfeld Media

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