7 Steps Toward Pathfinding Impact

Pathfinding projects can present researchers with an overwhelming range of possibilities — and just as much potential impact. Here’s how to stay on track.

By Crystine Gray

Pathfinding research is the work that enables us to peek around corners and shine light on new pathways. This requires a strategic approach and often includes a blend of foundational, exploratory, and foresights research.

Strategic research identifies longer-term aims or interests and means of achieving them. Foundational research illuminates the perceptions, needs, motivations, and/or pain points of the people you’re building for, yielding evergreen insights. To perform pathfinding research is to leverage both of these core components, triangulate data sources both within and outside your company, and find a lighthouse in the distance to steer your shipmates toward.

There are tons of creative and effective ways to approach pathfinding — and just as many ways to get stuck along the way. As someone who has shifted from leading this type of work to supporting those who do, I wanted to pull from the experiences of both researchers and managers to share our collective wisdom on how to do this unique type of work in the most impactful way.

1. Listen, triangulate, and envision

Take a look at existing foundational work, read up a bit on macro and market trends, and spend time with thought leaders and decision makers in your organization. Meet one on one or in small groups when possible, and find other ways to understand the perspectives of your company’s most senior leaders (e.g., attend all-hands meetings and Q&As). Ask targeted yet open-ended questions like:

• “What’s a decision you’re trying to make about product or strategy that you feel blocked on, and why?”
• “What are some of the problems you hope to be solving a year from now?”
• “What’s the biggest open question in your mind related to our strategy on X?”

Just as you’d do with a qualitative research project, synthesize and reflect on what you’ve learned in these conversations, pulling out key themes and connecting dots across areas and organizational lines. Outline your vision for the projects or initiatives. Be as clear and tangible as possible in articulating the impact and the outcomes you expect, and why they matter.

2. Share, connect, and find your fellowship

Armed with your handful of potential projects, the next step is to pull in key people and partners for further feedback and support. This fellowship group will be made up of collaborators — often other researchers, but also including anyone else who can bring an important perspective to the effort — and stakeholders.

Articulating your informed, high-level vision of the work and outcomes is the next step in bringing the right people along from the start. Remain open to feedback and adjustment during these early phases to increase the chances that others will find your work as valuable as you do.

Before you get into the fine details or execution, you, your manager, your stakeholders, and your key collaborators should be able to confidently answer these questions:

1. Why are we doing this? It seems like a lot of effort and time.
2. What does success look like for this project or initiative?
3. When can new insights or deliverables be expected, and what should we be prepared to do with them?

3. Define your milestones

Long-term strategic projects can feel like marathons, so it’s critical to establish checkpoints along the way — moments when you and your fellowship take a breather, look at where you are and what you’ve learned, and regain alignment, momentum, and excitement for the next steps.

In some ways, you’re transforming your long-term project into a set of smaller ones so you can be more flexible and impactful along the way. Map out a timeline and phases, and be sure to consider things like initial literature reviews, listening tours, and stakeholder kickoffs as milestones in and of themselves.

You’ll want to build out a communications plan at this point, too. How will you keep your fellowship informed? How will you effectively communicate upward and outward about your progress? How will you ensure the right touch points with the right people along the way?

4. Cultivate visibility

Getting your pathfinding work seen comes down to making connections and communicating effectively with a diverse audience. It starts with the actions you take at the very beginning of the projects or initiatives you drive, and carries through long after the core work is complete. Cultivating visibility might happen in large meetings or big public presentations, but it can just as easily happen via one-on-one conversations, frequent async sharing, chats, workplace comments, posts, and so on.

Change on a larger scale takes time, so you’ll find you may need to repeat yourself often, in different ways, and across multiple channels. Two good ways to tell whether you’ve cultivated visibility well are the extent to which your work is known, recognized, reshared, or mentioned, and the extent to which a diverse set of people across multiple areas can speak to the value and impact of your work within their own domain.

5. Figure out how the pieces fit

Because they tend to involve multiple methods, phases, and data sources, strategic projects can result in an overwhelming amount of information. There will likely be a million different ways you could parse, interpret, and report on what you’ve gathered. That’s why “piloting” your insights with a set of people from different disciplines (ideally one on one) can be hugely helpful in boiling down your takeaways to their essence. To focus the conversation, you might ask things like:

• What stands out to you?
• What connections do you see, if any, to our strategy?
• Do you feel like you could do something with this information? Why or why not?
• What else do you wonder when you read this?

By including PMs and others outside of research in this process, you’ll start to see clearer lines between your insights or initiatives and their implications for product, strategy, and/or the team.

6. Tell a story worth repeating

Next, it’s time to put together the full deliverable (or series of deliverables). Experiment with different versions of decks that speak to different audiences. Try videos, mini museums, trivia, workshops, and other creative ways to get others engaged in the insights. Look for ways to translate your takeaways into themes relevant to each audience.

A great story inspires others to re-tell it. Empowering others to easily repeat your key message represents a massive opportunity to increase your impact (while protecting your own time). Here are a few quick tips:

• Outline your story. If you had 5 minutes to tell the CEO about your study and its implications, what would you say?
• Develop visuals as a storytelling device. Pathfinding research needs to land more broadly than product-embedded research, so your artifacts need to be extra compelling — and flexible enough to be used in other contexts. Data visualization, metaphorical imagery, and photos from field research are all worth considering.
• Create your full presentation. Flesh out the story. The title of the presentation and your summary/TLDR should reflect the main points you outlined, and each slide within should lead with the key point you’re trying to make.

Experiment with what works for you and your audiences, and don’t be afraid to adjust your approach according to who you’re sharing with.

7. Track your impact

When most of us think about impact, we think about a tangible product change we can point to and say “this happened because of my work.” With a longer-term, strategic, or theoretical project, success indicators can look different. This article provides a great overview of the different forms impact can take, and some additional examples include:

• It teaches us something big we never knew before.
• It results in a cultural shift or change in how we work or prioritize.
• It transcends functional lines, influencing how other disciplines approach problems.
• It challenges major assumptions about a topic or product space.
• Takeaways, key quotes, stories, or stats are echoed in key product meetings and by senior product group leadership.
• Peers come to you for advice on the topic, consider you an expert, or use your methods (e.g. impact from within).

Go forth and inspire

The relative freedom and vast potential of pathfinding work can also make it feel ambiguous and overwhelming. The next time — or the first time — you set out to pathfind, try some of these tips to see if they help you navigate the ambiguity and supercharge your work. Here’s to more impact!

Author: Crystine Gray, Head of IG Growth Research at Facebook
Contributor: Carolyn Wei, UX Researcher at Facebook
Illustrator: Drew Bardana