Principles for reducing research waste in product development

Using durability, adaptability, connectivity, and visibility to create research wealth.

So much customer research never makes the cut in product planning.

There’s a wide variety of experiments that you might run to target this research waste. Everything from a new type of workshop to consolidate insights, to a new metadata standard, to a new type of recurring reporting — and anywhere in between.

Any effective solution for activating research wealth will represent one or more of these common principles:

1. Durability
2. Adaptability
3. Connectivity
4. Visibility

A bit more on each:

1. Durability is about your research knowledge having saying power. Customer insights are wasted when people believe that any and all research learning becomes obsolete quickly.

Following this principle, your researchers can take a longer view on the shelf life of insights, creating enduring mechanisms to manage what’s still relevant. You can shape your collected research knowledge with a long-term, legacy mindset.

2. Adaptability is about the ways that research can be tailored to fit the particulars of your organization’s structure and ways of working. A one-size-fits-all approach won’t be as effective at reducing research waste. There are many ways to break apart and pull together research learning in order to match your planning environment.

Following this principle, you can tailor your waste-reduction efforts to your organization’s unique culture and the types of impacts that your community wants to see.

3. Connectivity is about building useful networks within and between your community’s research outputs. Isolated insights become waste. Qualitative and quantitative, generative and evaluative, one-time and continuous sources — different stripes of research inquiry are at their best when they’re united. Connected research knowledge can then be traced forward into your colleagues’ work to envision, define, design, and implement what’s next.

Following this principle, you can forge meaningful links among your collective research knowledge, learners, and product development practices.

4. Visibility is about ensuring that your community’s research remains an ongoing part of internal conversations. Research is wasted when it’s not seen. Exposure can be narrowly focused dialogs, wider broadcasts, or anything in between. It can be a series of one time touch points, but often benefits from becoming a repeated stream of planned messaging.

Following this principle, you can push mindshare and presence of essential insights, the research community that generated them, and the launched wins they enabled.

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

Sign up for email updates — monthly, at most
Connect on LinkedIn