Taking stock of existing research sources

Whether distributed or centralized, it’s worth mapping who’s generating customer research in your org

To start reducing research waste, you need to locate your organization’s insight sources. You want to find people who synthesize customer insights based on structured investigations. Once you know the ‘who’ of your research sources, you can move on to the ‘where’ of their stored research work.

Identify full-time customer researchers

There are a lot of different types of research staff in tech. Your organization may have several different roles that focus entirely on generating and activating insights about customers. These roles often have ‘research’ or ‘science’ in their job titles, and often have professional training requirements: market research, user experience (UX) research, customer experience (CX) research, research science, data science (focused on product planning, rather than feature engineering), and more.

After you’ve located researchers with obvious job titles, you need to keep going. Your organization may have other roles that spend the majority of their time conducting investigations into customer needs and behaviors. These colleagues may not identify as ‘full-time customer researchers,’ even if they fit the definition. These additional jobs can include strategist, customer success, business intelligence, data analyst, program management, and more.

Identify ‘People Who do Research’

Customer research in tech isn’t just for full-time researchers. Over time, a broader range of roles are being asked to add different forms of research work to their responsibilities. New tools and services are making it easier to conduct common types of studies. The distribution of customer research effort is often referred to as ‘democratization,’ and people taking on these efforts are sometimes called ‘people who do research’ or PWDRs.

You’ll need to dive into what types of research have been democratized in your organization (market research, UX research, social data analysis, behavioral analytics, etc.). Some pathways to identifying your PWDRs include the following:

• Look for owners of customer lists and communication channels and ask who has been accessing.
• Identify available research tools and ask for lists of who has access.
• Search for research artifacts created by colleagues who are not full-time researchers.
• Ask your legal, privacy, and information security teams about who they have advised regarding customer conversations and consent.

Some common roles in tech organizations that may be conducting democratized research include designer, marketer, product manager, growth, engineer, and more.

Identify outside resources

In your hunt for research sources, you may find that some decision makers have relied on insights from outside your organization (e.g. vendors, industry reports). You may find it worth capturing these sources as potential pools of existing research wealth to reactivate.

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

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