Jake Burghardt - Stop Wasting Research

Speaker A: No one's career should hinge on an individual team picking up an insight, right? No one should burn themselves out over pushing a particular perspective. I mean, if there's something that you see that you feel is wrong or there's customer harm, I think in this market the advice is tone deaf. But I always talk about voting with your feet.

Speaker B: Hello and welcome to another episode of Brave ux. I'm Brendan Jarvis, Managing founder of the Space in Between, the behavior based UX research partner for enterprise leaders who want an independent perspective to align hearts and minds. You can find out more about me and what we do at thespaceinbetween.co nz. Here on Brave UX though, it's my job to help you to keep on top of the latest thinking and important issues affecting our field of design. I do that by unpacking, um, the stories, learnings and expert advice of a diverse range of world class leaders. My guest today is Jake Burghardt. Jake is a veteran of the research, product and design worlds. Someone who has spent the better part of two decades helping organizations close the gap between what they know and what they act on. Over the course of his career, Jake has held senior roles in research and product at companies like Amazon, where he served as both principal researcher and and principal product manager. While at Amazon Retail and later Alexa, he led large scale meta analysis initiatives, built insight systems from the ground up and helped teams put existing knowledge to use, influencing planning cycles, product roadmaps and organizational strategy. Jake's work sits at the intersection of research ops, design ops and product ops. He's an advocate for what he calls activating insight and a sharp critic of the idea that building a repository or buying a tool is enough. He's also the voice behind integrating research.com where his widely read essays challenge conventional thinking and offer practical strategies for making customer insight matter. In mid-2025, Jake's first book, Stop Wasting Research will be published by Rosenfeld Media. In it, he outlines a new framework for tackling insight waste, not through more reports, but through better timing, smarter deliver and stronger ownership of what research is really for. And now he's here with me for this conversation on Brave ux. Jake, a very warm welcome to the show.

Speaker A: Wow, thank you for that wonderful introduction. I'm very happy to be here, Brendan.

Speaker B: I'm happy you're here with me, Jake. And you made that really easy with all the work you've been doing over the past couple of decades. And speaking of that work, I want to go back almost to the very beginning now and that is that in 2006 I saw on your LinkedIn profile that you're a named inventor on a patent for gene expression or a data interface related to gene expression. Now that's something that's probably not on everybody's resume. What's the story behind that work?

Speaker A: I got started in dot com after going through school in psychology, hitting human factors class, thinking hey that's really interesting. Taking another major in human centered design and I followed a partner out to Boston and did some consulting out there and I met some great folks. And when I moved back to Seattle where I live now, I ended up having conversations with folks that had kind of expanded out from those dot com consulting days and were working at the company that makes the sequencers that were used to sequence the human genome. And they were moving on towards commercialization of a lot of those technologies and looking for new applications of them. And I ended up working with um, someone who you've interviewed in the past, John Fukuda and Maria Taylor. We started up a, um, small consultancy and we developed software. It was a generalist model where we were working with them on requirements, research, design, um, roadmapping for a variety of different kinds of genetic software. And it's work that I still think about to this day as I try and turn more product development and delivery teams into laboratories with notebooks. Uh, scientific work was ahead there and that patent is just one of the designs that uh, Limina and I participated in, in thinking through how to assess the quality. I think in that case it was of microarrays and it was exciting time for visualization. A lot of novel patterns and uh, just a lot of fun work.

Speaker B: Really enjoyed it since those early days. I've noticed, and I think I mentioned this in your introduction, that you seem to be someone who has at least progressively over time position themselves at the intersection of a number of complementary but slightly different disciplines. You know, you've worked as a very senior UX researcher, uh, and the same in product management and also in operations operationalizing these disciplines as well as doing some systems thinking, I believe. At certain points in your career as well, do you see yourself as having a core discipline anymore? Or have you always been comfortable operating in these gray zones, these intersections, these crossovers between disciplines?

Speaker A: Thank you for asking. I mentioned a couple times in that new book that you mentioned, stop wasting research. You know, I have a generalist perspective on a lot of things. I think it comes from those experiences in the dot com days of being in a shrinking company where I was able to try out A lot of different things. And then, you know, going off and doing independent consulting with, uh, friends and on my own and really stepping into a variety of different roles based on what clients needed. And when I decided to make the switch to go in house in bigger tech companies, I kind of got tired of throwing the deliverables over the wall. I wanted to follow through on things more. You know, it came down to you kind of have to make a choice there because they have job descriptions and guess what? They're not big generalists, you know. So I went back to the first roles that I had, which were in research. I love to focus on problem finding before, you know, solutions and owning problem spaces and helping teams think through how they can structure their problem spaces better rather than just charging ahead with various ideas. And so UX research has been a core part of my work. But, um, over time, you know, again, the generalism crept in because I was really interested in getting more done with research insights. And that involves reaching out into a lot of different roles and um, parts of an organization. Even though my title ended up at Amazon as Principal Product Manager, I was very focused on research. I was helping folks think through product development practices and processes, more operational things. And um, you know, now that I'm in an advising capacity, I find myself in the generalist seat again.

Speaker B: And you've been on that forefront of the operations movement, if you like. You know, the research ops, design ops and product ops movement. That's certainly something in the last decade that's become more and more of a focus. Has it surprised you throughout your career that the groundwork for making things more efficient and effective, but especially between disciplines, hadn't already been laid? That it was something that we hadn't really come to until the last decade or so.

Speaker A: I'd been in organizations, large organizations, where there had been more thought given to it. You know, it was a problem of scale. If you have X number of researchers, suddenly you can start to think about these operational factors. And there's definitely some big companies that have been doing this for a long time, reached out and tried to learn as much as I could from them as I started to dig into similar things. I did a bunch of research in creative agencies at point and saw how ad agencies and different kinds of companies focus on operations. So I kind of had it on the mind from back then as well. And then it is interesting, the timing, you know, it was uh, a, uh, scaling point in the economy and all of these different roles in technology and the desire to have more infrastructure, to have People stop kind of recreating the wheel in their own little pieces of an organization and find out ways to streamline things and make things, multiply forces and all of those great things. I don't know if it's surprising, but sometimes giving a name is the same as inventing it. You know, there was a lot of this work going along, and I'm really excited by it. I would, I would say that. And you know, the different threads that you mentioned, you know, whether it's research, design or product, I mentioned them all and stop wasting research. Um, I worked on, you know, volunteered on the board of the research ops community for a couple of years with an amazing group of folks. And, you know, it's exciting to see it all develop. And I think we're hitting a point where some of the ideas are crystallized and making their way into more organizations. Not crystallized, but codified, I guess. Enough to kind of have legs, which is fun.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I don't imagine there's many people out there that do what you've just done. I just saw lou's post on LinkedIn having a, um, picture holding your actual physical book in his hands. Right. Like you. Stop wasting research is, is a, is a real thing now, and it's something you've been working on for, for a wee while. I wanted to ask you about the, the title because it's quite a powerful, provocative title. Tell me about that. What is the story behind the title

Speaker A: in the proposal creation process, kind of debating. I'd been writing, as you pointed out, a set of articles on this stuff for a couple of years, uh, kind of structuring it into an idea of a table of contents, thinking I was going to pull it together into some sort of volume. And I ended up having conversations with Lou Rosenfeld and reshaping the ideas of the structure of the book. It started it with research repositories at large. You know, this was the topic that was driving the writing process. I wanted to contribute to some things, ideas that I had in that space that I didn't feel like people were talking about as much. And, you know, over the past years, it's been an explosion in that space in terms of, you know, vendor content and all sorts of ideas. But still we're at this place where a lot of people are saying, you know, the most common questions are what tool do you use? And then sometime later, you know, why is this failing? Uh, the goals part of it, you know, what are we trying to do with these tools? I've always Come at it with a focus of, uh, getting more value from research. Researchers are already doing amazing things in their study processes. They're delivering all sorts of value in product and development and delivery in terms of, you know, new opportunities, refining ideas, go to market. All these different aspects that have folks hiring researchers today and you know, understanding that that's more of a challenging market than in previous years. But what I'm really focused on, picking up the remainder. I've had a lot of roles where I've been able to say, look through volumes of research and see how much was left behind. And not just the ancillary stuff, you know, major insights that are directly in line with what leaders are talking about now that they have no idea exist. So picking up that existing research and getting more out of it, and I framed it as waste in an article, you know, fighting research waste. It had more legs. You know, people were activated by that. It has sort of an activating emotion. And um, when we were talking about how to frame that as a title, you know, the most active framing that we came up with was stop wasting research, um, as something that takes a topic that could be sort of dry and archival and turns it into something that says, hey, there's really something lost here. And it's not just lost in terms of researcher efficiencies or cross silo wins, there's losses for the product. You know, this is about maximizing product value from organizations, customer insights.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean the title is certainly evocative and it really is getting to the heart of that travesty. Perhaps that's a bit too, too evocative itself, but that, um, wasted opportunity that exists, um, that like you suggested, many leaders, executive or otherwise, uh, probably not aware of the depth of insight that is available to, to them. And I know that you've previously suggested that researchers should, and I'll quote you now, research how planning works in their organization. And I know at Amazon you were very much involved in aligning insight delivery with key decision points. You even went so far as to tactically display research work physically in offices, uh, in very deliberate places, in very deliberate ways. What do you believe that is so essential for researchers to grasp about understanding how their organizations plan?

Speaker A: Thank you for that question. You know, if we think of studies as sort of this unit of work and we have this ideal where researchers, you imagine the perfect research project, and it could be in a variety of disciplines where you align with a group of stakeholders and develop questions and methods and, you know, take them along for the ride and the process and the analysis, and you have those great readouts and you're changing minds, you're working your way into backlogs and goals and these various things. But the problem is, is that the remainder that wasn't in sync, you know, it didn't land because it wasn't in line with what folks were working hard to implement at that moment. They just didn't have the space for it. But if you bring it back at another time, they might. It didn't find the right team or leader. Organizations planning is so fragmented that one research report can influence a huge number of teams. But our model is still based around this deep partnership model, which, you know, get as much juice out of it as you can. But there's a lot more that we can do, especially if you compile insights and route them to the right places. So studying planning is about thinking through it can influence the study process itself. You know, I didn't. I have FAQ at the start of Stop Wasting research. That is essentially, this is not a book about conducting research. You know, this is about everything that happens after. There's a lot of books out there about conducting research. But when you study the outcome that you want to see, when you think about the places you want research to show. When I'm advising folks, you know, some folks, it's a quarterly review cycle. Some folks, it's, um, five particular teams, backlog grooming processes that own the most important things. Other folks, it's an executive quarterly review with, you know, on the way to resource planning. If you understand where the decisions you want to influence, all those insights that aren't making the cut where they could make the cut. And then you work backwards from there and you develop essentially, you know, information architecture and practices and, um, you know, experiment towards getting the research to those places. That's how you can take content that is, uh, sitting in digital junk drawers and various systems and kind of start to iteratively make your way to the places you want to be.

Speaker B: And if you're sitting here listening to us talk about this, and that is sounding like something that you want to be doing, do you have a clear picture in your head as to who specifically? Whether it's by title or some other way of thinking about who within the research organization might be best positioned to make something like that happen, you know, are we talking about any and all researchers? Are we talking about research managers? Are we talking further up the chain? Like, who exactly do you feel is the best positioned in large enterprises to make the most of this type of insight? They could get from stop wasting research.

Speaker A: So in the kind of background of the book, we talk about researchers of any stripe. I uh, use a broad definition of research. When you think about all the folks that are trying to influence decision makers in organization, UX research is up against, you know, market research, data science, research science. You know, we're kind of all jockeying independently in a lot of cases to influence the same stakeholders. And a lot of what I talk about is banding that together so it could come from any of those places. And it's really the person that gets the biggest bug about this problem. Or you know, I talk to a lot of folks that have a repository goal and then they're really wondering what that means. You know, it's not just the tool, it's an initiative. And we could talk about that. I also target the book towards the decision makers themselves, you know, design and product folks who want to see their organization make more decisions based on research. And as we spoke about earlier, this kind of growth of operations, folks, is a natural home for it as well. I think part of the challenge of writing the book and saying research your organization and its planning processes and work backwards from it is that there's not going to be one pattern for this or one natural home. I have a part in uh, the third chapter about trying to find that home and growing an initiative from a crawl to a walk to a run to a marathon. And there's not going to be one way to do it. We can focus on common root causes of the problem. We can look to adapt to the outcomes that we want to see so we can map the research assets that particular organization has come together and say, okay, what are we trying to influence? And think about the wins we've had that we want to see more of and the losses that we've had and um, you know, work from there. And then it takes many hands in the end to reduce research waste. I mean the initiatives has to start from somewhere. It's often from the people who feel the pain more intensely, which can be research. But you know, this could be a product operations function as well. Um, and over time you're going to need a lot of different skill sets. And so an initiative can sort of beg, borrow and steal and do project based uh, work to say, you know, leader, I need a commitment from this person for a certain amount of time. Whereas you know, a uh, research team in and of itself may have a lot of those skills in it may need to reach out and find other skills as well. And in the end it comes down to someone making the choice to use research in their plans. And so the scope of people involved in this, you know, this is a change management initiative that can start as a passion project of a person, uh, that gets some early experiments off the ground. But, you know, the goal is through iterative wins and kind of thinking of how to address some root causes of research waste, you can get to a point where a lot of folks are involved, not because it's some mandate, but because they see it as something valuable, it's worth their time. It, um, helps them get more done with their insights on the insight generating side and on the insight consuming side. It helps them justify where they're going and inform where they're going and drive where they're going in a way that leads, um, to results and provides rationale. And eventually people start to recognize as a common pattern that, um, isn't just research being used in a vague sense, is much more concrete than that in a way that can have positive feedback loops.

Speaker B: Jake, you spoke a couple of times there about the root causes of the problem, if you like, of research being wasted. And one of the ones that I feel that we've touched on so far has been the timing, the fact that people are busy and they're focused on other things and therefore they can't focus on everything that might come out of a study or a series of studies. You've also suggested that researchers can tend to think of their stakeholders as superhuman, as in that they have the capacity to focus on all of those things all of the time. Um, what are some other common causes or what is the, the most significant cause, perhaps if we haven't spoken about it, of research going to waste and what can we do about it?

Speaker A: This became the framing model for the book and it organizes a lot of the chapters and sort of thinking about ways forward. It presents a big menu to address the root causes. And given people's circumstances are so different, no one's going to try all the ideas in there, but you might find some things that would be useful. And the model that I came up with was preparation, motivation and integration. So integration has a lot to do with the getting in sync. It's that research isn't available and present, you know, even if there's mindshare for it at the touch points that matter for certain kinds of decisions. Or it could be involved in a lot more of them. So a researcher may have, uh, run the perfect study, delivered the results, had some wins, and there's a bunch more insights that could be Influencing decisions, but they're not showing up, uh, at the times when those decisions are made. We can, in that model where, you know, we have this trend where decision making is just more and more distributed to more, more and more and more teams over time. How can a researcher, you know, if you're kind of focused on delivering to a certain set of stakeholders, we got to set things up so it can be routed and present at the times. And that's what integration's about. There's things in there about pushing more visibility of insights, about citing insights and like having a clear ask of how we want research to be used. And there's things about the particular touch points in design, in you know, decision making processes, like, you know, product backlog processes, um, marketing, you know, the various types and then in leadership process as well. So in, you know, more corporate operations environments, uh, kind of pushing up the chain. So in integration is that last one to go back to the first part, preparation. We're creating all these individual outputs. We have all these assembly lines creating insights. We're not connecting the dots between them. They're not preparing the research that hasn't landed to have that impact over the long haul. We can put it into a repository and make it searchable. That's a step forward. You know, I talk about report libraries in the book. What's the unit that's going to be easily addressable in planning? What's the thing that's citable? So I talk about insight summaries for top insights where we pull together a variety of different types of research and create the best case we can, uh, in an authored way that can be picked up and pushed out to teams at those integrated times. And you know, something to keep people aware of, to add evidence to over time and to share the wins when they happen among the research contributors. So preparation has to do with kind of starting to break down silos, whatever that means in your organization. And there's a bunch of ideas about that. There's some ideas, concrete ideas about research repositories. Obviously if a reader already has one in place and they're happy with it, there's a lot of ideas for kind of bringing it to life. But for the folks that don't, there's some ideas. And what does it mean to prepare things now for later use? We talk a lot about speeding up research processes so that we can recruit faster, we can run a study faster. You know, all these marketing claims about new data, uh, and they're delivering in some cases, you know, and what can be Faster than continuous rediscovery, you know, knowing what's there and having it ready. So at that moment, for the things that are most important for a research community, they're ready to be injected into conversations and shared. So that's the preparation piece, the motivation piece, uh, in terms of a root cause. The second root cause is that, you know, research is too often seen as an optional input and it could be driving more conversations in private. It's the thing that a lot of researchers talk to me about. They count their wins, but they feel the losses. And there's a piece that's missing there. And some of it is we show up with everything. And that's a problem with repositories where it makes it very acute. The problem of prioritization and suddenly showing up with 20 findings from a study that aren't ranked very well, which happens in fast research, often is one thing. But when you show up with a few hundred, um, across pulled from a repository, suddenly you end up in a totally different ballpark where, um, prioritization becomes a much bigger issue. And so there's a chapter on ways of thinking through that from customer perspectives and business perspectives, a different perspective on frequency maybe. Then some folks are used to digging, um, into, you know, spotlighting different things and matching leadership interests is another form of prioritization. There's ownership, um, and I'll wrap up with, just mention the last couple chapters here and then I'll summarize the model ownership. Uh, you know, on the research side and on the product development side, there's a bunch of ideas in there and how they meet in the middle. Everything from, you know, extending study time frames so that you're not just delivering and done to collaboratively articulating insights together. And there's opportunities to change how we measure success where it can be everything from aligning research to goals, pushing for new goals, taking metrics and, you know, making them part of the research conversation where we say, hey, this metric's lagging. Let's tie a bunch of insights to it. There's a bunch of ideas in there. But preparation, motivation, integration are the three root causes that I arrived at. And they became the structure of the book.

Speaker B: It sounds like a really clear structure. I want to zone in now on one of the things that you said while you were describing that, which was the challenge around prioritization. So turning up with basically too much for people to focus on and therefore things getting lost. Right? The, uh, it's just too much noise. How did you become comfortable with leaving

Speaker A: things out I was really bad at it for a while. I've certainly been the researcher that shows up with what people call an embarrassment of riches, you know, which at the time I felt like, oh, wow, great. And then I realized that it was maybe not the right thing, leaving things out. I, uh, think when you take the long view and you think about systems for activating research over time, what does it mean to leave things out? Well, repositories, depending on what stripe you have, they can hold everything. You don't have to leave anything out. They can come up later. You know, it could build more evidence, it could connect to a different team. So what you're leaving things out of is a particular conversation. And what you're doing there is you're focusing a conversation. I think the thing that I've talked, uh, to a lot of folks about is researchers that feel uncomfortable about it is they do this all the time. They just don't think of it this way. You know, you focus on certain questions and certain topics. As a researcher, you're prioritizing, you're saying what's important. You have sort of skin in the game there of, uh, working with stakeholders or in some cases for more exploratory work teams that own their own space and are working to fill out knowledge for their leaders. There's a huge amount of prioritization that's involved in that. We just don't necessarily think of it that way. And then the executive summary, that ends up on a big report, Ah, common pattern. So there are things that people are already doing that are in this space. And to your point about leaving things out, I think it's leaving it out for now and then knowing that if it's really important, we can bring it back and we can find the right conversation for it. And when you stop treating research as a momentary spark, that happens, an aha moment, and you start treating it as a durable business asset that can accrue over time and is much more durable than people commonly give credit to. The pain of leaving things out can lessen. But as an author in the moment, I've certainly felt it.

Speaker B: It certainly sounds to me like you are, uh, encouraging us to think more strategically. I think you even mentioned the long term about making the most out of all the energy and effort that goes into any and all studies that we're involved in. This is almost like an overarching way of thinking about maximizing the impact of research over time.

Speaker A: I think that's right. And, um, some researchers are always looking broadly, even when they're down in a niche silo others hyper focus on current needs and you know, it's not an either or. People may do the same thing in different time, you know, depending on the constraints they're under. But when you create systems that make it so that you're more confident that the insights that you find, regardless of whether they fit the current people you happen to be talking to will eventually find the right home if they're important enough, then suddenly it does change the way researchers think about their work. Um, I've had people tell me that they document more and not for documentation sake. They pick out more of the things they think are really important. That if they didn't have those kind of operations and channels in place, there was no option to make that work visible and to find the right owner that they wouldn't have even bothered to write it up in the first place.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Thinking about the decision making process that goes into what not to present or what not to include. Now you touched on earlier that that's already happening based on what your research question is. For example, you've already excluded other things that you could have asked. Some of that may be conscious and deliberate and some of it may be just happening as part of the course of conducting the work. But when you've been thinking about purposefully what to include, and I don't know if this is tied back to something I heard you say to Lou on your conversation with him on the Rosenfeld review. Um, you suggested that it seems like a framing for this. So tell me if this is incorrect or not. You suggested that and I'll quote you now, uh, one way of framing it is what would our, uh, competitors pay to know what we're forgetting? And to me, even if it wasn't intended that way, that sounded like a really powerful lens for looking at what you could include and making decisions based on that. Was that the way you intended that or is there, are there other ways that you've made those hard decisions?

Speaker A: I think that's one thing that I come back to, you know, especially when I'm looking at a body of stuff that's been on the cutting room floor, as I sometimes call it, you know, and we could pick it back up and make another edit and you know, have a whole other conversation based on what's been left behind. Many conversations in some cases, I think that that's definitely one perspective. I think you start thinking about the importance of opportunities and issues and finding ways there's common usability methods around this for a long time. Market research has done this. Data science weights different things. Every research discipline that might contribute to your efforts is going to have a perspective on it. And I think the thing that I talk about in the book is you're really just trying to come up with some tiers. You're not trying to rank everything. I think it becomes a problem with researchers sometimes where you feel like you need the exactitude. Like this is a, uh, layer that's applied on top of your already excellent study. It, it's not a reflection on your study. And if you go and ask a bunch of teams about how they prioritize their work, everybody wants to have a great rubric and may show you something, but you know, it's often not that complicated. And I've talked to a lot of teams that didn't have much of a rubric at all. You know, it was just judgments based on comparing individual items. So if researchers just developing something basic and not try and rank every last insight into a stacked rank, but just put some tiers together, let's say you got a list of insight summaries that compile a bunch of research about particular insights. What are the ones that are less important for driving metrics, lifts or reducing customer pain? Which are the ones that are the most promising in that regard? You're placing a beta. You've got some skin in the game. If you have an initiative that's sort of an umbrella over researchers work, it can take the blame if it doesn't go well. But you know, it puts, uh, you in more of a position of a stakeholder, not just an information source, which is something that is important to me for research and it's something I talk about a lot in the book. And a stakeholder isn't always 100% right. They're contributing to a conversation and their priorities are not what the owning team that implements solutions are going to adopt wholesale. They have to balance all sorts of things. You're just one more voice. And so it's a topic that, you know, I'm excited about the chapter that I put together there and to hear uh, what people think about it. I got some positive reviews about it and the technical review and I think, you know, people are probably doing all sorts of interesting things that we don't have eyes on behind the scenes because can be a bit of a secret sauce.

Speaker B: What was it that people were particularly positive about?

Speaker A: I have some models of how to break down customer impact and business impact and I got some positive feedback about them. I was worried, uh, that they were too Complex and, you know, I didn't get that response.

Speaker B: So when you were describing that, where my head was going, when you were just talking about the different, I, uh, suppose stakeholders in different departments and their different goals that they might be pursuing, it seemed like the same insight could have different levels of value depending on which department might be looking for something like that to help them make decisions, and also at which point in time it might be more salient to them. Is that one way of thinking about prioritization?

Speaker A: It's pretty easy to go pretty far in the weeds. And so I do say in the book, you know, the most important sort of metadata for an insight summary is owning teams, you know, people who might make progress on something because that allows you to route insights. And. But I don't have the prioritization kind of pivoting based on which owner. Essentially, if you look at a team's backlog, they have stuff that's come to the top, variety of different kinds of teams. They got a whole bunch of stuff in the middle, and they have some things that they're probably going to cut. So I think we can apply a ton of nuance to it. But if we could just take a filter to a set of insights and say in our backlog for the customer, that is this list of insights, this is one of the things that we think is really important, and here's why. They can look at the rubric, decide if they agree with it or not, but more often than not, it has a lot to do with just the fact that you brought that insight to them in the first place because you thought it was important.

Speaker B: That sounds really simple, but I get the feeling that the devil's in the detail. Just how much is required to either create or manipulate an existing tool to. I know this is a hard question to answer because there's no real way, uh, of answering how much energy is required to do that. But I get the sense that people have to be up for quite a bit of work in order to get things to work in a way that works for their organization.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's a big conversation. I mean, I advocate for using tools first. Evaluate the tools that are already in use, particularly the tools that are already use in planning. Like why create something new? Why have somebody learn something, uh, when they can use something that's more native to them? There's a lot of things out there that have repositories on their list of attributes that are, you know, really fancy analysis tools. Those are super powerful. I'd be excited to use a Lot of them. But when it comes to figuring out how to stop wasting research, I'm not talking about, you know, analyzing new studies. I'm talking about taking existing insights and getting more juice out of them. And so, you know, I think which tool is, uh, one of the most common questions I get, and that's my default position, is just, okay, what tools are you already have in house? You know, what, how can we make the most of those and then making it work from there? It really is deeply dependent on context, and not everybody's going to run to prioritizing individual insights down to the nth level. And again, this book is full of ideas to take or leave based on what's most useful to you. Uh, I'll give you another approach to doing something similar. Another approach would be just to say, researchers promote the insights that didn't get traction, track all your impact and your impact trackers, ideally a shared impact tracker. So as a community, we can all build on each other's successes. And there's ideas about that. There's a lot of great articles out about that in the industry. Um, but I think it's probably the topic of another book, to be honest. But then for the things that haven't gotten traction that you want to promote, promote them out. And we have this set of insights from across research studies. And then another way to think about prioritization is not some abstract rubric that we apply and, um, figure out what to surface. Another way is just to say, this quarter's priorities are X. These are the things that align mostly with those priorities. And, you know, these are the obvious things to bring up. And it's not an either or. You could do both. But as I say, there's a lot of ideas in there that there's categories of intent. You know, the chapter is called Clarify, um, what matters most. There's a lot of ways to get there and some different branches of ideas.

Speaker B: So I get the sense it's, it's almost that typical consultant answer, uh, of it depends. And there's very good reason why it depends because, like, you've talked about context several times. Every organizational context and every research team's context is different if we think about what. I understand having not read the book. Right. Having just heard you talk about the book, though, I understand when you're describing, uh, the model behind the repository that you could consider implementing. Uh, so it's less about tools and more about ways of thinking about that. You speak in the book about a library of reports, like a dual repository model. Right. A library of reports and then a more uh, actionable insight summary hub. And I was mainly curious about the, what seemed like an intention to at least split or perhaps it's just present differently those two things. Uh, what is it about those two things working together that you feel is more powerful than an alternative?

Speaker A: I churned on this topic for quite a while where, you know, in the past I had pushed researchers to create insight summaries for everything, for example. But I think a tenant for all of this work is that you should get much more value out of it than you put into it. And I just didn't see people getting the value out of that. They already had reports. Um, you can incorporate all sorts of outputs from all sorts of disciplines. It becomes a common denominator. You're not trying to create a tool that owns all sorts of research processes end to end, particularly if you're trying to really break down silos. Outputs at the report level are something that can be consolidated without too much difficulty. You know, it's an extra step. Ideally there's some standard definition of a uh, header and attributes, but this is not heavy lifting. And the payback that you get is visibility for your work and the opportunity for more follow through out of it as a contributor. So you're kind of adding into this repository that people may go search researchers will definitely search other folks, you'll have some lead users, you'll have even that little bit of adoption that you'll get as a step change for follow through on research from there. I think that's where the struggle is. Having everything in one place doesn't guarantee a whole lot. You can create more mind share for new findings. You know, new being a filter that really works well. You know, people are excited to learn what's just in, but when you think about trying to get things done with insights, you know, that's where the insight summary idea came in. This is the thing we want to see linked in a plan. You know, I've seen these things take off to where before long there's CEO doc level documents with these insight summaries cited in it. I think it's sort of the unit that's, it's, it's not about getting an analyzing. You know, there's lots of different ways of atomizing that are about finding themes and atomizing is once you have some themes, how do you document it in a way that's ready to be picked up, you're preparing it for use and that could be in two different tools that could be in the same Tool. I talk about it a little bit. I think in all of it, the topic that I didn't get to, that I think I have some more writing to do about is point of view in research tools, where the structure and what we include in a research tool and that we open up access to has different degrees of point of view. Where if you are pulling together all sorts of evidence streams and you're calling that your repository and you're throwing your reports in there as well, you're kind of mixing things that are very low point of view with things that are very heavily interpreted by skilled, you know, professionals already. And so what I'm trying to do is elevate the bar towards things that are higher point of view, connecting back into evidence. And then what has the most point of view is when you've done the interpretive labor of, uh, saying this is a primer, as Andrew Ward talks about, for a particular insight. This gives you what you need to know about it and you can kind of connect this forward into planning. I think there's a million other ways to do this. But again, my frame is about reducing research waste and I'm always interested in learning how other folks go after those problems. Um, but I think when you look out at the variety that's out there, they have unclear goals and they tend to focus more on empowering researchers. Where now researchers are in the research process, I should say where now researchers can include a wider variety of roles. But once you've found the goods, how do you get more done with it? It's like AI tools. I'll just one more thing. It's like I talked to folks, uh, tool vendors are interested in connecting and I talked to some folks who are creating tools. Oh, it's going to analyze all this stuff. And I say, well, every time do I run it, Do I get something different? It's like that's a low point of view tool, especially when it's taking heavily interpreted work and munging it into a summary. And the next time you run the summary, you get something different. I think this is so counterproductive to the value that researchers provide. And so much of what we're trying to do is create structures and language and common focuses for planning. We're trying to build that problem space and whatever repository helps you get there, I'm all for it.

Speaker B: I'm playing catch up here mentally. So tell me, lower point of view artifact, if you like, am I correct in interpreting that as, say, the report and the higher point of view is the insight summary that Might be derived by looking across multiple reports.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's fair. And then where I really want to point the emphasis is on the lowest point of view, which is a pile of customer support calls being called research, you know, and an analysis tool unleashed on that with some social media thrown in there and you know, research report evidence and maybe a few finished research outputs. So it uh, becomes sort of this soup of different data sources. So interesting analysis tool. I'd love to play with it, you know, as a researcher in a space, but when it comes time to driving action, I think that's where we're in the low point of view territory, where every time you come to it, you're not finding that common language, you're not finding the problem space. You can't align multiple teams around something until you create something out of that.

Speaker B: And I sense from the way you've described that in particular, say that AI tools influence and creating different summaries every time you run it against that data set, that there's something inherently unnerving about that, presenting a different point of view every time it's run that devalues the potential of that data in the eyes of stakeholders.

Speaker A: I think they may love it. You know, um, I think we're all amazed, you know, I certainly am, by the outputs that, you know, many tools can generate. It's a, it's an amazing time and things are getting better and things will refine and be more useful. But to your point, I think what we're trying to do is build common structure and language and things of, to reference to drive particular customer needs forward in planning, you know, and in the user centered design days, uh, of yore, when I got started, there are these sort of big methods that were aligned a lot with waterfall and big models and things. And the thing I've struggled with, like a lot of folks, is how to better build out problem space knowledge for this highly distributed world. And I think that some of the approaches in the book are a, uh, solid stake in the ground for that. And they do rely on some consistency. And so AI can get there, AI can create that consistency, I believe. You know, it's not like I'm slagging it in any way, but it's a means to an end. You know, I put some tenants in there for AI and research systems and it's such a fast moving target. I wanted to put some higher level principles for it where it shows up. That being said, I think a little bit like, you know, some science fiction authors will write every last detail about how a system works sort of on the technical sci fi side. And then others will just say they said this and something, the outcome happened. Right. They don't tell you that it was an AI. They don't tell you. You know, I think a lot of the things in this book and that I'm pitching could be very much enabled, especially over time as the systems get better, but not at the cost of building that common problem space, which I think some tools are kind of interfering with right now, personally. But.

Speaker B: Well, let's come back to a little bit back into the conversation. A little bit earlier in the conversation where you were describing the insight summaries finding their way into executive level reports or decision making. And you spoke about how when you first got started in the industry, we're sort of talking about the dot com sort of era and there was this also around that time there was this mentality of build it and they will come. And I get the sense that that may also apply to some of the, um, thinking around these repositories. And what I'm getting to is I'm curious to understand what you feel is necessary outside of say, the perfect system to shepherd or ensure that work. And those insight summaries are uh, actually making their way into the right hands at the right time. Like what is the effort or energy that's required outside of the system itself to make that kind of happen? What kind of leadership or actions are important?

Speaker A: That's a great question. And as I said, I started out sort of writing up ideas about repositories and ended up talking about all sorts of things that were enabled by the information that comes out of repositories, but really about changing practices and culture change around thinking about and small changes for using research. So when you look across the various ideas and sort of the body of the book, the sort of menu of things to choose from to go after, those root causes of preparation, motivation and integration, there's some things that speak directly towards the tool. A lot of it is more about, you know, pushing visibility, extending the reach of insights around, uh, an organization. So many things added value to a particular team at a particular time. But there are 10 other teams that could use them right now. So, you know, a lot of it is about routing and increasing, you know, that general awareness of insights, um, that makes sense for particular teams. There's things in there about where to connect and how to connect. I think thinking hard about those touch points that we talked about earlier, the outcomes and planning and working backwards from there, you know, there's so many of these practices. In a lot of research processes we sort of present results and we may ask for responses, come back later and track. But a lot of times, you know, people are too busy, they move on to the next thing. But there's just a lot more follow through that can be done by the individuals conducting studies than other people picking things up in aggregate that make these tools come to life. The tool holds the information and enables certain use cases. But I think that one of the traps that people fall into, to your point about build it and they will come, is thinking that folks are going to arrive at this tool and discover just what they need and walk away and do things with it. When really a lot of consolidating knowledge and preparing it for use is getting ready for it to be shared. It's when that moment of continuous rediscovery comes up. It's having that content ready to go. Um, and it's about push. You know, people don't like that word. Some folks don't. You know, and I even say inject. You know, I don't want to tap dance around it. I want to get research in more places and get it into conversations where it isn't. And depending on the company culture, it can show up in a lot of different ways. But, um, you know, those tools are enablers of uh, more targeted conversations over a longer period of time.

Speaker B: Yeah, and this is more, I'm getting a sense it's more than evangelical angle that has been talked about for a long time in our circles. It's less about that. It seems to be more about. You already know that there's great value in what's in there and we need to get it in the hands of the right people at the right time. Now you communicated some reluctance around some of the terminology there about pushing and injecting. You know, there's something I think that um, I'm personally comfortable with, but I can understand why others wouldn't be. Um, but you also have spoken about previously that researchers need to understand when uh, to move on. I mean there's just sometimes things uh, are going to fall on deaf ears for whatever reason. I mean, is it overtly obvious when you need to move on or do you have some sort of bar or benchmark that you would reach internally when you are in practice that you would go, okay, it's the third time now that they've not listened to me. I need to find a team that's more interested in what I might have to contribute. Like how can people think about when uh, to start pushing their value on others and when they might need to find someone else to serve.

Speaker A: Uh, it's a really good question and it's covered in a few ways in the book. I mean I think that there's finding the right teams. Sometimes researchers are embedded in low value teams where they can add a lot of value compared to other places in an organization where they can add value. And when you start consolidating research knowledge, it can become more apparent. But also on the flip side, by creating a situation where research can find the right audiences and that folks can be connected, that person who's in a smaller node can be connected to more of the people that they could be impacting. Position in the organization matters, but it's not necessarily ah, a dead end. So that I, I think that's one piece of what you're talking about, but the other piece is just the broken record. You know, um, I talk about researchers having a horrible time getting folks to act on a particular study and then I show up sometime later with the export from a repository with the researchers, same work, collated with a few other folks. But it's not the fact it's collated with a few other folks. It was just the right time. So we've talked about timing, but some folks are just not going to be open to hearing certain insights. You know, it doesn't fit their worldview. No one's career should hinge on an individual team picking up an insight. Right? No one should burn themselves out over pushing a particular perspective. I mean if there's something that you see that you feel is wrong or there's customer harm, you know, I'm, I think in this market the advice is tone deaf, but I always talk about, you know, voting with your feet, but when you're pushing and you get feedback that we've heard it before, I think the first thing that folks do is there's the tendency to think of insight has to be brand new and these insight summaries are ingredients of a planning process. They don't have to be brand new and they can accrue additional evidence over time for the other studies as things come in to freshen them up. So the first pushback is not necessarily the walk away moment. And sometimes it uh, depends on the severity of the problem or the opportunity, the importance of it. You know, some things you definitely want to push on more if you're comfortable and come back more times with other things, you know, you see that it's not moving and maybe it's about Finding a different team that would be interested. That's certainly been something that's been a recurring theme. And um, are waiting for the leaders to change over or you know, to our earlier conversation. The goal setting cycle for the year comes up at that organization and suddenly they're all ears about new ideas. I wish there was an easy answer to it, but I think I would stress testing the limits a little bit.

Speaker B: Do you think that there's a new role here somewhere in amidst all of the work that you've been doing? Or is this something that you feel can be this type of an approach to uh, you know, stopping wasting research can be achieved within the existing role types that we have in our organizations?

Speaker A: You know, I struggled with the writing of the book. You know, so many books they talk about a new role and we've talked about design ops, product ops, reops and you know, the great bodies of knowledge that are coming up around that and books from Rosenfeld Media, my publisher on some of these topics. And I struggled with the who. And I think that there's someone that gets this in their craw. And I've talked to a bunch of folks who are this person. They're often a research leader. Um, in some cases they're in product, some cases they're in design. They're the sort of the initiator. And then from there the diversity of skills across that spectrum are large. There's a lot that's just basic program management. You know, it's. To keep those insights alive requires some operational work that can be done, you know, once it's codified a little bit early experiments that turn into wins. We could say, hey, let's do that every month. Someone has to do that. I think the harder part where I think more to your point is the, the thinking in what are those experiments and what should we do? Um, it does take a certain kind of mindset and um, I don't know that it's bound to a particular role. It's, it's someone who has um, you know, a passion about getting more done with research and is willing to dig into organizational change, which isn't everybody's cup of tea. You know, a lot of researchers are amazing researchers, but this would just not be what they would want to do. And they, and that is absolutely fine. And you know, there are product people who are, get really frustrated by their ideas that are based in research not moving forward. While something that's, you know, more of a hot trend that's not based in research moves forward. That kind of person can get excited about it. Design is a natural ally. You know, I've definitely sat in large design groups and benefited from design ops. People who didn't have that title, they were producers or, you know, program managers. So I struggled with that topic. I wouldn't rule it out. Somebody asked me if there is this new thing called a research integrator. I don't think one person can do it all. I think that you need an initiative. An initiative has a leader, and that leader has to be passionate about it and have a perspective on what would be useful. And there's a lot of ideas in the book that can fuel a person like that.

Speaker B: You spoke about design being a potential ally and you've also spoken about a number of times today this idea of taking the long view. There's definite hints of this being a strategic, uh, enabler of research and value for companies. And you've previously said in not so many words, uh, that this isn't a short game, it's a very long game as far as, I imagine, implementing this type of program within the organization. What has helped you in your career stay in the game when things are, uh, working slowly or the wins aren't immediately evident?

Speaker A: Yeah, I think part of it is finding quick wins that justify the value of doing this kind of work. You know, resuscitating some old work, doing a big meta analysis of, uh, a topic that's really of a current importance, that people get excited about past research, experimenting with new kinds of reporting long before you figured out a repository on, you know, to connect the dots between folks or, you know, just encouraging folks to work together more. I've gotten a thrill out of kind of supporting research communities, uh, especially across disciplines. But over the long haul, that's where the product management side, you know, when I did flip the title, it was in part because I was roadmapping out ideas and, you know, connecting with a whole bunch of teams, influence without authority, all those sorts of things. Um, and what kept me going, what keeps an initiative like this going is each incremental win. You know, it's. I talk about sort of going from a crawl to a marathon. And I think we're talking about sort of not that first stage, but kind of when you're moving on and it's being able to broadcast through whatever channel, a story, uh, to champion the use of research that resulted in something great, which then snowballs, which then gives credit to the researchers who contributed to it. And also the discipline gets elevated by it. And the brand of your initiative, you know, keeps getting more and more prominent in conversations about what should be next. It's learning to take those small wins and really celebrate them, I think, and turn them into opportunities for the whole thing to have a, um, positive feedback loop.

Speaker B: I could hear the passion in your voice as you were describing that. It really came through loud and clear. And you've been doing or laying the groundwork for Stop Wasting research for some time, and you've been writing about this for some time on integrating research, and now it's a month or two out from Stop Wasting research coming out. So this is like, right at the very exciting point for you, when you reflect over the time that you've been sharing your thoughts on integrating research, um, as well as what, um, you've received so far on the book. What has most surprised you, what's been the most pleasantly surprising part of doing this endeavor?

Speaker A: I've spent a lot of time kind of reaching out and doing advising to check in with folks to see if the ideas resonate in their environment so very in particular contexts and putting the ideas out in the world and hearing in a general sense that, oh, that makes a lot of sense, you know, that it's filling a need that I see as an underserved area. And I'm just taking in the weak signals that we're, uh, heading towards something that could be useful. And what's been surprising is, I'll be honest, as an author, I'm always waiting for the pushback. And, you know, you throw up an article or a LinkedIn post or. And it's pretty easy for things to get trolled, um, for folks to come in and say something like, you know, repositories are dead. They don't do a damn thing, do new research. You know, I see all these posts, but I see pushback on some of the ideas outside of what I've contributed. But inside of what I've contributed, um, I feel like I've just built some amazing connections and learned from a lot of folks along the way. And I'm happy to have incorporated some of their inputs into the book itself. So what's surprising is the thing that's exciting to me is also a topic of experimentation for a lot of folks. And, um, you know, it's an interesting time to kind of pull it all together.

Speaker B: And that's a great time for us to bring the conversation down to a close. Jake, this has been a really enlightening conversation. Thank you for so generously sharing your stories and insights with me today.

Speaker A: Thank you so much for having me on it's. Been a real pleasure and I've gotten a lot of value out of Brave ux and I'm just amazed by the archive of thoughtful interviews you put together. So thank you for it.

Speaker B: Oh, Jake, you're most welcome. I'm very humbled by those words and I'm very excited for you at Stop Wasting research is coming out soon and people will be able to get their hands on that. I believe Lou Rosenfeld was saying it's around about June that it should launch and if people want to keep up, uh, to date with you and when, um, the book's available, uh, what's the best way for them to do that?

Speaker A: You can go to stopwastingresearch.com right now and that'll take you to the Rosenfeld page where pre orders are available. It does ship in June. I have a website called integratingresearch.com that you alluded to that I've updated to be more of a personal site that links out to the articles and you can connect with me there. I'm active on LinkedIn. Um, that's the best way to reach out and I look forward to hearing from anybody who's interested in this stuff.

Speaker B: Great. Thank you, Jake. And to everyone who's tuned in, it's been great having you here with us as well. Everything that Jake and I have covered will be in the show notes, so don't forget to refer to them if you want to hop back to something that we discussed, uh, specifically today in this conversation. If you've enjoyed the show and you want to find more great conversations like this with world class leaders in UX research, product management and design. Don't forget to leave a review. Those are always very welcome and very helpful. Subscribe and also perhaps if there's someone that you might know that would get value from these conversations at depth, then please pass the podcast along to them. If you want to reach out to me, you can find me on LinkedIn. There's a link to my profile at the bottom of the show notes. Or you can head on over to my website, which is TheSpaceInBetween Co NZ. That's TheSpaceInBetween Co NZ. And until next time, keep being brave.