Outcomes of research waste in product development

Untapped customer research becomes hidden value that’s waiting to fuel new advancements

Wasted research in product planning can be revived, highlighting lost opportunities and potential advancements for core organizational goals.

Effective product development creates compelling value that balances the needs of customers, the business (or other organization type), and other forces. It’s about balancing desirability, viability, and feasibility — among many other competing factors.

When product organizations waste research — leaving crucial insights on the cutting room floor — they fundamentally lose out on new sources of that value.

Some outcomes of research waste that would get the attention of any leader:

• New offerings — created with significant investment — that fail to find a viable market fit.
• Products that have found a customer base but are abandoned in favor of a competitor who better understands customer needs.
• Actionable opportunities to spur needed growth that never even made it to the drawing board.
• Extensive engineering effort spent on features that teams touted as successful — based on small lifts in internal metrics — but were actually ‘product debt’ that customers perceive as unwanted complexity.
• Friction that remains in your product’s current interaction design, leading to lower engagement and increased time spent in frustration with your brand.
• Overlooked organizational changes that could address root causes for recurring issues in the customer experience.
• High-velocity experimental tweaks that attempt to discover customer needs through expensive implementation but fail to hit the needed scale of improvement.
• Unintended harm to individuals and communities that’s left recurring in the wild, one social post away from becoming a major fire drill.

From micro advancements to macro directions, lost impacts from unused insights happen at every scale. In total, these persistent oversights add up to substantial losses that could become wins.

Wins that could fuel plans for better serving people, help leaders accomplish their aims, and advance organizations toward their missions.

In these terms, wasted research represents the opposite of what anyone working on a product or service wants to see. These aren’t just failures to use some internally-generated information — they’re end-result problems that negatively impact an organization’s entire reason for being.

What negative outcomes have you seen when research was wasted?

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

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