Research That Scales: Using past research to answer today’s questions

In a series of articles, we — Cordelia, Jordan, and Erik from the Thumbtack Research Team — share three strategies that we used to scale up the impact of our tiny research team without increasing our headcount. This article, Part 2, is focused on how we scaled past research to answer current questions. You should also read Part 1: Scaling ourselves and Part 3: Scaling the contribution of others.

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In 2018 our tiny research team put in place multiple strategies to scale our operations. As we scaled ourselves, we were able to do more research. We collected more data and produced more knowledge to support our colleagues. But we weren’t prepared for quite how fast our output grew and we didn’t have a structured way to organize our findings.

Over time it became harder and harder for our tiny team to keep track of all the research we’d produced. And that led to a load of inefficiencies like duplicated research and slow information finding. It also put huge strains on our tiny team as we became the gatekeepers for our knowledge. Each day, we’d receive a number of Slack messages asking where we kept different reports, data, and so on.

So we asked ourselves, “How do we make past insights discoverable and relevant today?” Or, “How do we squeeze more juice out of the lemons we already harvested?”

We first considered creating one central database where we could store individual research observations. Curious about the concept of atomic research (popularized by Tomer Sharon’s work on the Polaris database and the Research team at Uber’s impressive Kaleidoscope solution) we explored creating a similar system in which we would meticulously store these research “nuggets.” If we labeled everything with themes and project descriptions, we’d have the perfect, searchable research database.

As we went down this path we hit some serious roadblocks. Who was going to populate the database? How would we develop a consistent yet flexible tagging taxonomy? How would we determine what qualifies as an insight and what doesn’t? Would our research partners be able to find the relevant nuggets? What about participant privacy?

We loved the idea of atomic research but decided it wasn’t the right approach for our tiny team. We knew we had to organize our assets but we couldn’t handle that level of granularity nor did we think it would serve our stakeholders well.

So we took a step back and reassessed the problem. And when we did, we realized we had two distinct issues. On the one hand, we needed to make our insights discoverable for us, the researchers. On the other hand we needed to make our insights discoverable for our teams. We had two problems, which meant we could explore two solutions.

Our first solution was a repository for our raw qualitative data, which most of the time takes the form of a recording of an interview. A prior researcher at Thumbtack had discovered Reduct, a product that automatically recorded, transcribed, and stored every research session. It was a great fit for our first solution. Having all our raw data in one place gave us a quick way to answer some of the strategic questions that our stakeholders ask over and over again. For example, when someone asked, “What do our customers think about reviews?”, we could fire up our repository and find an answer in minutes.

Our second solution was a research archive. We implemented Coda (a table and text database tool similar to Airtable) to catalog and organize all our research reports and literature reviews. Whenever a research project concludes, the final report is submitted to the archive and a member of our team reviews the submission before we publish it in the archive. Our colleagues now have a birds-eye view of all our research and can consult our past reports to support their design decisions.

It took a long time and a lot of work to put our two new systems in place. But by slowing down, thinking about our needs, and building a system tailored to Thumbtack, we are now able to move much faster.

What’s next?

In the next installment of this series we’ll cover: Part 3: Scaling the contributions of others. You should also check out Part 1: Scaling ourselves.

Do you want to help us continue to scale the impact of the Thumbtack research team? We’re currently hiring a Quantitative researcher and Experience Research Interns for the Summer of 2020.

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This article was co-authored by Cordelia Hyland, Erik Olesund, and Jordan Berry — researchers at Thumbtack. Special thanks to Cory Weaver for the illustrations.