What’s Your Point? How to Drive Product Strategy With a Clear ‘So What’

Boost your strategic impact by building your research deliverable around a single provocative argument, not an assortment of findings.

Lise Marken

Published in

Meta Research

7 min readMar 8, 2022

By Denise Deutschlander and Lise Marken

As UX researchers, our job is to formulate strong research questions, apply rigorous and objective methodologies to answering them, and finally, to bring our findings back to our team as strategic partners in a product development process.

Everyone seems to know that telling a powerful story is crucial to doing that last part of our jobs well. But what does it mean to tell an effective story?

If we think about the great stories we’ve heard and loved, they can have a range of powerful characteristics from narrative arcs to relatable characters.

But in a product context, we’re telling stories for a very specific reason. We tell stories to make an impact on products — and to bring our powerful insights about users and their needs to the problem space we’re working in.

So what?

The single most important aspect of storytelling to drive strategic impact is to have a clear, provocative point. A “so what.”

See what we did there? We just told you our “so what” — the key argument we’re going to make in this article. And whatever happens now, whether you agree or disagree with our argument, we’re driving forward a strategic conversation — which is what we want our research deliverables to do on our product teams.

“You’re wrong,” someone could easily say. “Researchers are the voice of the user. The most important thing is for stories to evoke empathy with a relatable character.”

We disagree (with this person we invented to make a point), but our argument has still been effective. We’ve kicked off a useful debate and set the terms of that debate. Our strategic story has achieved its goal.

The allure of the research buffet

Researchers often have trouble developing a clear argument for our teammates because we’re so close to our research. And our research is so good! We learned so much! Our methodology was so rigorous and our execution so flawless. We poured our hearts and souls into identifying our findings and we want to share them all!

We want to offer our teammates a rich buffet so that they, too, can pick through and savor the delicacies we’ve uncovered.

The problem with this approach is that our teammates are busy. And buffets, while exciting, are inefficient. They’re aimless. It’s almost impossible for research buffets to drive a discussion toward a conclusion. After all, it’s hard to agree on what the best meal is when some people are eating crab cakes while others are scarfing down french fries.

A fine dining experience

When we structure our deliverables with a clear argument at the center, we’re trading the buffet for a fine-dining experience: the prix fixe menu. We’re telling our teammates which of our treats are the tastiest so they can focus on them.

Delivering a single dish we’ve hand-selected means that everyone at the table shares the same starting point. Some may love the meal, others may not, but we can now have a meaningful debate because we’re all talking about the same thing on our plates.

Driving the conversation with a clear argument also helps protect against that age-old thorn in a researcher’s side: watching our findings get hijacked to support the solution our team (or one team member) wanted in the first place. The buffet approach is vulnerable to this kind of appropriation because we as researchers haven’t taken a position. We’ve given our teammates the leeway to gravitate to the dishes they already know they like. Choosing what’s on the menu exerts pressure on our teammates to consider new ideas and even, potentially, to change their minds.

But how can I say just one thing? My research found so much!

The basic structure of a deliverable based on a “so what” is simple: start with your argument, provide support for that argument, and then connect your argument to a larger conclusion.

By structuring your deliverable this way, you’re putting the argument front and center for those who are farther from your research and don’t have time to go digging to find your point (likely strategic decision-makers). You’re also including the details and related findings for the people you work closely with who want that level of fidelity. And who knows? Once you’ve pulled those decision-makers in with your compelling argument, maybe more of them will stick around for dessert.

But how can you pour your rich, multifaceted findings into such a narrow-sounding form? Think of your findings as falling into three categories: those that support your argument, those that challenge your argument, and those that are superfluous to your argument.

It’s clear what to do with the findings that support your argument: put them in. Build your argument around them.

If you have findings that challenge your argument, you should include those, too. Remember, the goal of the exercise isn’t to be right, it’s to provoke an effective conversation that drives decision-making. You want everyone to come to the table with all the information they need to make a good decision.

The good news is that even findings that are superfluous to your argument can have a place in your deliverable. Perhaps they’re not terribly controversial, perhaps you’re not sure what to make of them, but you want your team to hear them anyway. An appendix is a great place for findings that you and your team may want to come back to, but that aren’t germane to the main argument.

One argument per deliverable

You may find that your research project has yielded more than one provocative argument you want to make. Congrats! Make more than one deliverable. We tend to make the assumption — a strange one, when you stop to think about it — that there’s a 1:1 ratio between our research projects and our deliverables. But why? What matters is how your research will be consumed and understood. Break your findings up into as many deliverables as you have clear arguments to make. You may be surprised how much more attention your team and others will pay this way — and how much more they’ll act on what they’ve learned.

OK, so … how?

We all know we need to go from raw data to synthesized findings. Trading the buffet for the fine-dining experience is really just a matter of doing one more level of analysis to uncover the key takeaway from all those findings.

Sometimes this next layer of analysis is easy, and the “so what?” emerges naturally from your data. Sometimes it’s more of a struggle. In working with other researchers to help them find and articulate their “so whats,” we’ve found four techniques that can help you get to the point.

1. Ask “What are people wrong about?”

Research often overturns expectations or assumptions held on the team. When that happens, make it the center of your presentation. This is a surefire way to start a (heated) conversation.

2. Decide which of your top themes is the most important

When the output of your research is a list of “top themes,” an easy way to turn that into a “so what” is to argue that one of your themes is the most important. If you have trouble coming up with compelling reasons for your team to focus on that theme over the others, you might want to reconsider whether it’s the best “so what” for your deliverable — or whether multiple deliverables are warranted.

3. Use a comparison

When you have a complicated story to tell, it can be hard to find a single argument to lead with. In these instances, comparing a broken experience to an effective one can help. For example, comparing two types of learning — immediate vs. long-term — enabled me to argue that we should look for ways to make longer-term learning look more like learning for immediate needs.

4. Use an analogy to sharpen your point

Telling your audience that a user workflow is a disjointed mess might feel like your main finding, but it isn’t all that useful — and isn’t much of an argument. Try using an analogy instead: “The user is trying to build a boat, but the tool is serving her like she’s trying to catch a wave. We need to offer more boat-targeted tools.” The analogy itself can become the basis of the argument.

Finding and focusing on a “so what?” for every deliverable can take some getting used to. But it might be the easiest way to boost the strategic impact of your research and drive your team toward the conversations it needs to have. Don’t be surprised if “skipping the buffet” also inspires colleagues to take a similar approach, helping to create an environment of broader engagement, more productive debate, and maybe a little less indigestion.