EP 156 - Stop Wasting Research with Jake Burghardt

Matt Green: M hello, product people. Welcome to the Product for Product podcast hosted by Matt Green, data advocate and product manager, and Musha Mikanovsky, product leader and author. Our goal is to serve the product community by helping you find products that can help make your work in product management easier. Thanks for joining us on another episode of the Product for Product podcast.

Moshe Mikanovsky: Welcome back, everyone. On today's episode, Misha and I are excited to speak with author and product leader Jake Burkhart about his book stock Stop wasting Research. Maximize the product impact of your organization's customer insights. Let's dive in. Welcome to the show, Jake.

Jake Burkhart: Hey, thanks so much for having me.

Moshe Mikanovsky: Uh, it's a pleasure.

Speaker D: Hey, Mishay, really nice having you here today with us. And I believe you're joining us all the way from Seattle.

Jake Burkhart: Yeah, it's early in Seattle this morning.

Speaker D: Yes. That's nice. Starting the weekend early.

Jake Burkhart: Yes.

Speaker D: I don't know if that's nice or not.

Moshe Mikanovsky: Is it not rain? Is it, uh, is it going to be a sunny day there in Seattle?

Jake Burkhart: Uh, you know the answer to that.

Moshe Mikanovsky: Yeah, I know.

Jake Burkhart: Presentation.

Speaker D: Uh, really nice having you here with us. Tell us a bit about your background in product. How did you get to product and, um, where are you these days? Ah, before we dive into the topic of the episode today.

Jake Burkhart: Yeah, of course. Um, thanks for the opportunity. You know, I got started in doom in research and, um, you know, working in usability research and quickly became a generalist in sort of a shrinking dot com company. A consultancy was able to try out all sorts of roles. Roles. Um, and that generalist model followed me for a number of years as I kind of pursued independent consulting, working on tools for complex knowledge work like scientific engineering and the like. And I would do everything from, you know, gathering requirements all the way through to design and testing things. Um, and when it came time to go in house, I got tired of throwing things over the wall in a consulting environment. I went back to working in research because I'm obsessed with the problem. Um, you know, what should we be building? What's going to add value for the customer in the business or those early stages of product planning and quickly ended up kind of turning back into more of a product mindset, where I ended up being a principal product manager at Amazon for internal research systems, trying to get more value out of the research assets gathered in the organization and integrate them more carefully into planning and drive new plans. Um, and I've carried that forward into consulting work again. And I've written this book, the mentioned Stop wasting Research. Um, and I'm talking to various teams, you know, uh, both researchers and product people about how to make research more integral into their product. Not just always continuously discover new content, but how do we set up tools, uh, mechanisms, operations to better continuously rediscover what we already know and apply it to our next product plan?

Moshe Mikanovsky: Oh, uh, that's great.

Speaker D: Yeah. So, so today you're also, you have your own consultancy in that area, right?

Jake Burkhart: Yeah. Integrating Research.

Speaker D: Integrated. Oh, that's the name, right?

Jake Burkhart: Yes. Okay.

Speaker D: Integrating Research. Uh, amazing. So let's, um, you know, start talking about research and what does that mean? And then, uh, how do you structure the book and what's in the book for all those products, people out there that are listening to us. Uh, so let's start first with research. I think we, we all think we know what this means. Yeah, right.

Moshe Mikanovsky: Depends on who you ask. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker D: From your own vast, uh, experience and writing the book about it, what it actually means.

Jake Burkhart: Yeah. Well, I think, you know, there's no one definition, but in writing a book called Stop Wasting Research, you know, you have to get crisp about what we think we're wasting. Right. What can we get more value out of? And I use sort of a big tent defin definition because, you know, when I got started in the field, there were much fewer sources trying to inform product planning. These days we could talk about everything from UX research to market research to data science to conventional business intelligence to customer support to sales feeds. You know, the list just keeps going. And you know, it's not just data. There's all sorts of data that's underutilized. Um, you know, research has a study plan that sets clear goals, uh, you know, things that you're going after. It doesn't have to be, it's not academic or anything too fancy that inform methods and analysis process and how it's going to be communicated and all those things. You know, it's the, the kind of thing that anybody who's doing research full time generates as a normal part of their work. But increasingly, I think, to the point of your question is a growing number of different roles are also conducting research. You know, some of it is just customer connection or some form of kind of quick analysis. Uh, but a lot of people are doing rigorous studies that are worthy of being distributed. Further, that the organization could be getting a lot more value out of it. So I conduct sort of a, uh, big, or I use the big tent definition for the book of what research could entail, but at the same time setting a bar to say it's not Just, um, you know, grabbing a couple of random quotes that there's some rigor to it as well. And there's more definitions in the book.

Speaker D: Right, okay.

Moshe Mikanovsky: Yeah, Yeah, I like that. Yeah. So a data scientist could redo research, a UX designer could do it, a product manager could do it, teams could do it. And I think the point is, like, everybody could do it differently. And so if you don't have a defined way of doing it, the big tent way of doing it, then people are going to get lost. And that's what the goal of your book. And don't waste your time doing it. Yeah, yeah.

Jake Burkhart: And there's all sorts of books on methods, you know, all of those different types of research. There's a lot of great content and people, you know, influencers and substacks and books talking about better ways to conduct different stripes of research. And what I saw is like, the opportunity is to say, for product planning, for thinking about what's next. How can we make research into more of, uh, a useful internal product? And if we work backwards from that, you know, what would it take? What are some ideas for operations? And, you know, how can we get more value from research as a business asset?

Moshe Mikanovsky: Totally make it more operational that way. Everybody's kind of following the same pattern. Yeah.

Speaker D: In, in, uh, this reminds me a discussion we had recently with, um, Radhika Dutt, and she was, uh, talking about frameworks that it's not so much about the, you know, if it stays a framework and you have to think about the framework all the time, it's not really ingrained in your work, but once it is a mindset that is ingrained in your work and you don't think about it anymore, that's where it clicks, uh, in. So, you know, like you mentioned a lot of the positions that we're doing research, um, is part of that. We just do it because we know we have to do it and know that we need to get answers. We are obsessed about getting answers for different things. We know that we need to get insights, we need to get, you know, proof and evidence and all that. Right. Thank you for clearing that out for us. That the starting point is really we already doing the research. We have different methods to do the research. And like you said, other books can teach you about that. But then, you know, uh, what's the next step? Where is that all of those points of information and what should we do with them? So I guess this is where the premise of the book.

Jake Burkhart: Yeah. Researchers of different stripes are already having amazing impacts on product planning. Right. As product people, you've used different stripes of research, different sources within the organizations that you've worked in, and they've influenced your decision making, helped you think about what would be valuable for what's next. Right. So not to discount the value that people are already delivering, which is massive. It's to say, I've had the opportunity to go back through big volumes of existing research and see how much gold is left behind. The kind of thing that a competitor would just die to know that the organization just isn't paying attention to because they're so focused on the front of the ticker tape. You know, the next thing, you know, in our sort of agile mindset of new, new, new, new, new, um, that if we take a look back, we can get a lot more value out of it. All those great things from, you know, new lines of thinking, uh, for a, um, new vector in product development at the strategic level, all the way down to small optimizations, to, you know, an interface or a marketing message. Oftentimes you go into an organization, it doesn't have to be giant or all that old, and there's a lot of things just waiting around, ready to be picked up. And it's easier, much so much easier said than done. And then the book is just full of ideas for where that, how that might happen.

Speaker D: So let's dive into that and maybe from um, the structure of the book and how do you get into all of those different ways to make sense of that and be useful for people reading it and trying to implement it?

Jake Burkhart: Yeah. So it's a novel concept. Right. People think of research as sort of a momentary thing that they use in a particular decision oftentimes and they find it difficult to track down existing things so they don't incorporate them as much into their workflow. Maybe there's a dashboard or some things that are real time, that are set up, but when it comes time to like already interpreted insights that are ready to go, strangely enough in a lot of organizations, they're hard to track down. So the first chapter, it's really about kind of setting the problem space, talking about who the book is for, which is for anybody who cares more about getting value out of insights. You know, researchers are a primary audience, obviously. I've been talking a lot with those folks. I've been switching more to the other side of the equation because it's just as important for the people who use insights in their work. And they often have an outsized role in deciding what researchers do. Right. So if we Say that this is important. As product people, we can kind of shape the conversation in our organizations. So chapter one is sort of setting the stage. The second chapter is about taking stock of what's in your organization. Doesn't have to be anything fancy and it can even just start by like tracking down job titles and setting up communication channels across disciplines that are connected at all. Everything through to taking big inventories of what's already there and all that. A whole bunch of ideas around taking stock and making some early connections. And then you know, the third chapter is saying this. What are the root causes? And this isn't a, uh, short term problem. This isn't a one and done problem, right? This is sort of an initiative, sort of mindset where we're going to be running a marathon and building out things over time. And you know, that could start as a passion project, but eventually, you know, you're going to need project related resources where you're drawing from folks in this market. It's harder to say you're going to get a dedicated head for this. But maybe you have research ops, product ops, design ops, people in your organization or some other program management function that can help with this. Um, so m kind of thinking of it organizationally and um, thinking about some goals that you can kind of build out over time. And then the majority of the book is a very random access, kind of very structured set of menu items, you know, things that you could try in your, given your organizational context and your resources to move things forward in this direction. And it's organized by the three root causes of research waste. The first one is that research isn't prepared for use in future decisions. You know, we could be aggregating it more. We could be thinking about what's a useful format so that it can show up in plans and provide that rationale that a product person would really value. And um, we could create a virtuous circle where we want to do more of this, right? It's, it's a, it's a internal product that's adding value. It's not just a database somewhere. The, the second root cause is motivation. You know, we often see research as an optional input. So what are the things that can be done to kind of shift that over time, both from researchers perspective to increase their motivation to follow through on their work, not just deliver it, but also from the product side to say, how can we find new value by connecting into this? And what are some of the kind of mechanisms we could do around that? And then the last bit is integration the last root cause. And it's the idea that you could, you could have made the perfect internal searchable space and all, you know, some sort of, um, imaginary, uh, Library of Alexandria. Right. You could, uh, everybody could acknowledge that it would be great to use it more, you know, have. But is it actually showing up? Right. And how can it show up? Whether that's new forms of reporting and visibility just to make sure that people are aware of the new research going on in the organization. You know, it's often hidden in silos, um, all the way through to how do we incorporate it into particular kinds of process? You know, whether that's design process, product specifications and roadmaps, to the extent that, you know, whatever formats teams are using, the depth of documentation that they're using. You could always include links to resources, research as the rationale for why, even if it's a lightweight document, um, and then, you know, all the way up through leadership resource, uh, planning, you know, thinking through the bigger picture, business reporting. How do we make research more present so that it's more of a source of voice of the customer rather than just, you know, a, uh, point, a bit of learning for a particular group of stakeholders. Uh, I'll stop there. Obviously, you know, it's a whole book, so I could keep going.

Moshe Mikanovsky: This is great. Different overview. The of as you're talking, I'm thinking of like it's a nerve center and it's a repository. But like, I like the point of integrating because as product managers, you know, sometimes we just, we do as a checkbox, we're like, we need to do research. Uh, but you don't know the holistic, you don't know what everybody else knows. And so you go out and you do market research, you do customer research, but there's not a repository for it. So getting that information in and out and making sure that people know where to go to. Yes, from an operational standpoint, I think that's a really key component. Is there any tool out there that you, that you're using that would help with that? I know, uh, Moshe and I have talked to people about repositories before. So is there a tool that you recommend?

Jake Burkhart: You know, I, I'll give sort of a, uh, My first answer is I always look at what's already available in an organization because if something is already part of the product work, why create another login, another space, another thing. So like I have a strong bias towards tools that are already in tool integral to the work that research wants to influence more. And that product People are already. Because that idea of integration. Right. You don't want to make it a distant island. That being said, you, there are, it's a boom time for research tech and there are just amazing tools. Not to mention all of the, um, you know, I use insight platforms.com to keep track of it. It's just a newsletter every week. I'm blown away by how much is going on in the space. But then at the same time, you know, to our earlier conversation about AI before we started recording it, you know, there's a lot of people just experimenting with rolling their own with various sanctioned internal AI tools that are coming up with interesting results as well. So snow one size fits all. Um, but you know, compared to five years ago, then the number of useful options is just going through the roof.

Speaker D: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, we did cover, you know, a few other tools in other type of areas that were not necessarily talking about research specifically, but maybe that was part of what they were meaning as well. Uh, we talk about competitive research, uh, recently. Uh, we talked in the past with um, a startup that was building Bagel, that was building um, uh, a way to connect sales and customer support with product. So all of those, um, information that they already get close the loop with product on both ways. Right. So I'm sure there is a lot of things out there, but what I like about what you're doing is looking a bit from the side. Not so much about here is the tools and try to use them. But first identify what is the problem in our organization and then what will be the right tool to fix that.

Jake Burkhart: Absolutely, yeah. I mean a lot of research teams that are advocating for user centered design because they have a checkbox in their goal set to launch a repository are falling into the trap that they're always complaining about, which is just selecting a tool without really thinking through what's needed. Um, so, you know, I love that point. And it's really about taking stock and really saying what's unique about an organization and acknowledging that managing knowledge takes time and effort and it's expensive and we can't do everything right. So that product mindset of saying where are the most important places where research should be showing up more and then how can we work backwards from that? Um, and do, you know, experiments and try and keep it to the minimum to get more value out of existing research rather than, you know, looking for some amazing tool that promises the world, uh, that may not fit our needs.

Speaker D: Right. What's from your experience are the traits of a company that were very successful Implementing this that are really using. Don't wasting their. Their research and are able to um. The outcome of that is that they have better product solving real problems to their users. Mhm.

Jake Burkhart: Yeah. I mean I think there are a couple of attributes outside of the researchers that I've seen and then I'll speak to the researchers themselves. You know the. If there is a strong product operating model, if there is a clear place for researchers to plug in where let's say I'm down in a silo and I've uncovered an insight that can influence another team and a lot of organizations I talk to, there's no clear path to routing that insight to that team. Right. And so we're just kind of wasting that. Right. It, it's uh, so the structure, whether it's you know, influencing goals or knowing where you can kind of ticket folks or whatever the operating model that an organization operates under, just to have some clarity, um, where you hear a lot of folks say I know my team, but I don't know the rest. So I think that that's. It doesn't. We're not looking for, you know, obviously some perfect crafted thing. It's just enough right. To be able to say if I found something, I could do something. And I um, think another aspect is if there are robust. You know, you mentioned sales and customer support. I think a lot of this is sort of in a voice of the customer mindse. If an organization has a track record of going after one type of customer research or customer input, it's sort of um, and, and they are incorporating into plans. It's sort of a, a waypoint that you can expand from and say okay, well here are other sources and you know, how can we can expand on that? So organizationally those are a couple of things I think from the researcher side. What it's very individualistic work often. Right. If you're a product manager doing it for yourself, you're not really thinking of the next team over oftentimes because you're rushing a deadline where if you had just some quick ways to kind of pitch your work into a space and know that it's gonna. If someone finds it, you know, they could get more value out of uh, doesn't have to be a big extra. Right. But you have to kind of have a mindset where you're stepping up a little bit. And for researchers this can be a real problem where they're so rewarded for delivering to particular product people or particular directors. Particular, you know, um, this is why it's not a one and done thing and it's more of a marathon is you kind of have to build the idea that we are taking those connected points and we are um, going to build a shared problem space in a way and create an opportunity for us to um, you know, step up from all those individual things and, and get some bigger picture perspective and that you know it could take a little bit of reframing of the work. So that's an attribute of organizations uh, that get this right. I don't, I don't know that anybody has it nailed. I think we're in early days right. Like um, all these repository tools and this emphasis on repositories in industry um, for research is, is relatively new and I talked to some folks who have champions that, where they're you know, in particular areas they're doing really well with research, informed planning and they're trying to scale it out. I think is probably the best point that I've seen. Um, certainly that's where I left things off when I was in house is um, influencing some teams goals but not across the board because the operating models weren't clear enough and it was just a lot of work work.

Moshe Mikanovsky: I really like that you mentioned voice of customer. I oversee that from the product side. So I work with customer success. So you know that's like a, that's a gym for, for product people working with operations and success teams because they're on the front lines so they're, they're taking that feedback and if you don't have that implemented in your, in your business, you know, I think you're at a disadvantage. They really are getting that pipeline of uh, feedback coming in and then you're prioritizing what need to work, what we need to work on. And so I really like that you call that as a research arm.

Speaker D: Another thought that I had while you were, you were mentioning that is um, I joined um, um as a teacher instructor. Um, my student called me professor, uh, but my official title is instructor in the university here in Toronto a few years ago. And you know there is that flip side of that that universities are very good at research and I think they're good at sharing the research with everyone. Uh, and they have the resources for that and et cetera. But they don't know how to make it into real product and into real uh, life applications sometimes. Um, and in the industry it's the other way around. Uh, we think we're good at uh, I'm adding the thing because sometimes we're not even that but we think we're good at uh, implementing it into good product, but we don't have that research. So maybe it's somewhere like have you find maybe in your research that there are organizations like universities, uh, that they have a much better organizations that the industry can learn from.

Jake Burkhart: Yeah, I mean it's such a great question this. So many researchers, full time researchers come from academia and then they have this sort of, of shock of adapting. Right. It's two different worldviews. Right. And product, um, world is so specific and it takes a lot of mentorship to bring, you know, a PhD researcher into the fold. And I do think that they bring certain kinds of uh, advocacy that is often, you know, can be kind of beaten down in product where they're really kind of saying well what about this, what about this? And focusing on rigor more and, and those sorts of things. But like, more to the heart of your question, you know, um, I, I think that those two worlds are so separate but we can learn a lot from them. Like in the book I just have a couple references to the field of scientometrics, which is like attribution of um, papers and how, you know, academics kind of look from a quantitative perspective how different research is being used in the body of research knowledge. I think, think in when we look at planning systems and we think about how research and whether it's voice of the customer or a UX research study or a market research study or a data science analysis, if we kind of pooled them and given them identifiers, how can we be better at thinking of it as a system of knowledge that gets tracked in planning? Um, you know, AI makes this sort of accounting easier. Where I did a lot of bean counting work in the past to understand the value of research and where it was being integrated. And now if you kind of throw a common identifier on set, uh, a bar for what research is, put it in some common places, give it identifiers, ask people to cite them. It's never going to be 100%. That's not the goal. Right. It's just to turn up a little, continue to find ways to make it more valuable so people want to cite it. Suddenly you have the sort of visibility potential that didn't exist even just a couple of years ago because every system was so separate. And you know, I feel like a lot of the value that AI has delivered is not the, the models themselves, it's model context protocol where suddenly we're able to kind of connect these things in other ways and we could be writing if Then code. But we're using generative AI just because it was the thing that connected them. So that's one academic thing. I think another academic thing I'm seeing is um, because of Gen AI and summation a lot more researchers are as a first step turning to academic research where they didn' because the thought of looking at a pile of papers um, in the timelines of industry just didn't make sense. But if you can zoom in on a few things to consider that you didn't consider before that sort of expansion role that Gen AI can play, I do see uh, more people talking about using more academic research in their work.

Speaker D: Interesting. Um, yeah, I work for um, an AI company before ChatGPT and we uh, had um, the engineers and then we had the scientists and there was always this um, discussion are we um, a research company or are we a um, product or software company? And I think some of it was really targeted at the leadership because what I find sometimes, and maybe you mentioned that already but uh, just to highlight that a bit more is that organizations don't always give you the time to do this research. They don't give you the time, the breath because these things are not all research by definition is unknown the results. And uh, some managers just cannot deal with unknowns. They want to make sure everything is known and their hypotheses are right. So that's also a mindset that is quite, I don't know, foreign but uh, unnatural to some leaders.

Moshe Mikanovsky: Mhm.

Jake Burkhart: Yeah. I think there's so many kinds of research that are trying to inform product planning that the two complaints that you hear doesn't matter what kind of stripe or discipline it comes from, is that it's um, too late. You know I needed that yesterday just because the, the actual decision making deadlines, you set the milestones but the decisions happened earlier. Right. Or, and you know, all sorts of tooling available in the industry. The speed that you can gather insights is just going faster and faster but still that problem comes up and then when folks get results back and to your point about they were really just looking for validation that's totally. But a pivot is in order.

Moshe Mikanovsky: It's confirmation bias. So I've been in those situations where the leadership has already decided to do X and you basically just I need to go out and confirm that this is, this is the confirmation like we need, we need to confirm we're doing this, we're going to do it anyways. But uh, yeah, we definitely fall into that trap sometimes.

Jake Burkhart: Yeah. But I think part of the Value is, um, of consolidating research and making it available for later and keeping it alive is, you know, you've been there in that moment. You're. You're rushing, you're about to deliver. You just can't take it in. Right. You're not questioning the validity of it. You're just, it's not the right time, but it can show up at the right time. And I've brought insights, the same insights back to teams at a moment where they were thinking big about what's next and gotten entirely different responses. So that's. That's part of the value of kind of recognizing the realities of this, you know, very difficult product development world and saying, how can we make research into a tool that's valuable? Given that acknowledgment and timing is everything. Right. And often one time is not enough. You know, folks have to kind of encounter insights multiple times. Happens in voice of the customer all the time. Right. Oh, we saw a few customers talk about this. Now we're seeing more. And if one of the things that voice of the customer often doesn't do, that drives me crazy is they don't sum. Right. They just do timeframes. Yes. Um, and so, you know, a lot of this mindset in the book is about summing. It's saying it's not going away. Yeah, I can talk to you about this in six months, you know, and maybe more interested in there. Yeah.

Speaker D: Interesting, interesting. Um, what about, um, product Ops? Uh, because to me, it feels like it's a very hard thing for one product manager or, you know, different product managers to do that. But it's more like if they had product ops, they could have taken that role of putting all of that in place for them. Is that right?

Jake Burkhart: Yeah, I mean, uh, I try and take a pragmatic approach in the book and not assume that anybody has particular kinds of roles and that this kind of work can be picked up by different folks. The agency. The kind of examples I wrote into the book are different roles, but at the front, it's, you know, what, what do research ops, design ops, product ops, uh, mean in relation to the ship, to this book and product ops. When Denise Tillers and Melissa Perry's book came out, you know, I immediately felt a kinship to the customer and market intelligence pillar. You know, one third of their pillars. It absolutely slots into there. And it's work that product ops people are doing. So they are one of the audiences for the book. I've been talking on product ops podcasts as well, and a Lot of organizations don't have product ops people. So, you know, I'm always looking for who's the next person to pick up the work. Right.

Speaker D: Yeah, I think most organizations don't have product ops.

Jake Burkhart: Right.

Speaker D: To me, I never had one and to me it feels like, um, uh, organizations need uh, to mature into that somehow.

Moshe Mikanovsky: Yeah, they don't completely understand the value of one on. Yeah.

Speaker D: So, so what, uh, what would be your recommendation to someone that don't have product ops? Uh, where can they start?

Jake Burkhart: I love that question. So if you're a product person in an org saying, you know, I'm not seeing the research that I want to see and that I know is going on, I'm obviously not going to do all this work myself, but I have sort of a little bit of room to instigate, right. And try and be the person that starts a ball rolling. Um, you know, what can you do in that scenario? And I think the first thing is just to, you know, start figuring out ways, take stock of the researchers that are in your organization, uh, whether they're full time staff or people that are doing great research as part of their work, kind of put out the call and try and, you know, just hold a meeting to get people together and start a communication channel and ask people to broadcast their work a little bit more. I think at the most basic level, just turning up some visibility and asking for more visibility, becoming a person who's known for caring about research, you can kind of over time shift the culture. And then if you have those sorts of spaces when your next project comes along, you could be pooling that brain trust. And um, you know, I think product people, you know, it's, it's sort of obvious. But just to state it, researchers aren't often setting their own roadmap entirely. Right. You know, they are listening carefully to what's going on in their organization and as experts figuring out ways to match it all the way to, you know, the other end of the extreme is they are order takers from product people. Right. Where product has a lot of sway over the nature of research work, not the details of methods and things, but what's studied and how it's used. And so, you know, if, if you make it clear that you're interested, start to kind of ask people to pull together, maybe start throwing their new deliverables into a shared space that you create and then you start citing their research more in your work as rationale and you publicize that you're doing that, you sort of champion the approach of More uh, rationale and sort of research based planning. Maybe it's something you're already doing with Voice of the Customer, but how can you do it with, you know, another source and another source and suddenly, you know, if you're on the, the insight generating side of this, suddenly new pathways to impact are opening up for you. Like the what's in it for me? Why should I change? Part of change management. Right. Um, you know, you're starting to see, oh, there's these product people that care and they're kind of, of starting to open up these channels and maybe at that point you can start making some asks, you know, can you consolidate more? Have you thought about this? Can we broadcast all insights or whatever they might be? There's a lot of ideas in the book.

Speaker D: Mhm, mhm. Yeah. That's great.

Moshe Mikanovsky: When research is mentioned to me, I instantly go to the front of the line. I think about product research, business strategy, like what are we going to do next? Vision. But a big part of this and something of interest for me is go to market and launching. So I think a lot of teams struggle with how do we launch this, how do we go to market with it? Pricing, packaging, sales enablement and all these components that, where you have to involve all the different groups in the business. So that's a research arm as well. You have to research how uh, you get one chance to make a first impression. I think so. So I think research, you know, in that area as well is a big benefit. When you think about how are we going to do this and how is everybody going to handle this and execute on their roles.

Jake Burkhart: Yeah. And you know, I've worked in a big product development organization, you know, delivering devices and figuring out a way to sort of make sure that the downstream folks, you know, for lack of a better term, because they should be overlapped and upstream, but in this case they were fairly downstream. Make sure that they're aware of everything that's been learned about the product so far. What are the pieces that have resonated, you know, in terms of messaging, what are the things that we're going to market with that we know are not optimal?

Speaker D: Right.

Jake Burkhart: You know, there's a lot of things where existing research can inform those conversations so that, you know, customer support isn't shocked when they're hearing about something because it's like a known deficit that's being worked on that was discovered in research. Um, so absolutely, I love that and I think um, that's a place where research really off in a lot of organizations is not making that connection that I talk to, you know, they're, they're in influencing a product backlog, but they don't think, you know, for those audience, those additional audiences, it's the last mile.

Moshe Mikanovsky: The team's so tired by the team, by the time you get to launch, it's like that's the last thing. Let's just get it over the line and get it out the door. Um, so I think that's a real little opportunity for, for further research as well.

Speaker D: Yeah, absolutely. And at the end of the day is, is about creating empathy as product people towards every touch point of the product. And the touch points of the product are, you know, much more than just when we decide what to put in it and when we develop it and make it available. That's more development touch points. There is way more before that and there is way more after that.

Moshe Mikanovsky: Mhm, mhm.

Speaker D: No, a lot of the things that you said, I was looking back at my career and I'm like, no, I never had researches, I had to do it myself. I never had product ops. I had to do it myself. I mean there's a lot of that, There is a lot of that going on. Um, so I'm kind of sometimes jealous that people that do have all those resources at their disposal that they can actually do that. But now I hear that they have problems too. So it's never perfect. It's never perfect, right.

Jake Burkhart: Yeah. I often end up talking to a researcher in a particular stripe and they're, they're like, I'm the only researcher and I, I often question that. You know, I, at organization scale, it sounds like your case is very different, but one of the things that I find is that, oh yeah, you're the only UX researcher, but you're not really connecting with data science. You're not really connecting with that person who's deeply analyzing customer support. You know, there are others in the organization, um, even in relatively small organizations that all have the same AIM team, right. They are hoping to generate insights that are influential in planning what's next, refining, you know, thinking about the best way to deliver for customer business value. And there's. We can think of all these things as independent streams and we can all vi. You know, oftentimes as a product person, it's the opposite of what you said, where they have five different sources coming at them where independently. Right. And they can sort of pick and choose what they want and they have to do the interpretive labor of connecting those things together. You know, what did these sources Say, versus these sources where, you know, researchers could be offloading some of that work and saying, um, you know, here are of all the things we've learned from m, these different sources. Here's some of the most valuable things for you to think about. So a lot of opportunities to turn it up. But I agree, if there's no research in the organization, you don't need to stop wasting it. Yeah, you got a different problem. Time to turn it up.

Speaker D: Absolutely.

Moshe Mikanovsky: You're also, you're also challenging assumptions of leadership. Leadership often thinks like, we know best, we know we built this thing, we know everything. So the researcher coming in saying, hey, I'm seeing other things. And so there's, there's a challenge there to, to leadership's approach.

Speaker D: So that's also led me to think about exactly that point of leadership. Um, which company actually is better also in the research and utilizing the research. Probably not a feature factory, but, you know, a company that allows you to actually understand what the problem is and look at the problem and be, uh, empowered to solve the problem. And, and that mindset can also create, um, the space for research to first of all be a player at the table like anyone else and to really feed, uh, everyone's. To be empowered to make the right decision.

Jake Burkhart: Absolutely. Yeah. And it's often, I think we tend to think of organizations on a continuum, one, uh, continuum or another. And I guess in doing this work and talking to folks in an advising capacity, you know, it's really islands. You know, some folks are much more oriented towards working from research and other folks, you know, as you mentioned, are kind of charging ahead based on their assumptions and looking for validation for the assumption. It's often sort of a mixed bag and it's a question of like, where do you invest effort and try and show wins and then scale out from there. And I do think, you know, even in. It's obviously not to support the idea of feature factories, but even in feature factories, they, when you're creating something, you want to avoid known pitfalls. You want to refine things before, you know, um, they even get close to being evaluated. Right. You want to refine your, you know, you're building X. Right. The feature factory is, I'm going to deliver X. And then the question is, how can I get smart about whatever we know about that in order to deliver? And I've seen research repositories and sort of active research, knowledge management, rediscovery of past learning play an impact in that environment as well. So, um, obviously it's better when we use uh, research to identify problems and outcomes that we want to experiment towards, uh, as you say, but it fits into all sorts of different models.

Speaker D: I definitely agree that it can fit into the model. My hypothesis was that research will be handled better and will have more uh, traction and better connections if the mindset of the organization is in the empowerment. Um, that's my hypothesis. Have you seen that in reality?

Jake Burkhart: I mean researchers talk about sort of maturity scales and um, I guess I've never seen it across the board. I've talked to some folks who have run like a voice of the customer program that influenced the whole enterprise resource planning cycles for an organization. You know there things do exist where there is that level of buy in for planning what's next. But I think more often you're dealing with a lot of researchers that don't have access to the upper levels of leadership in an organization and you know, they're trying to influence from lower levels or mid levels. Even uh, in a small organization they may not, you know, they cut off at the director level in terms of sharing out their insights. And so a lot of what I talk about is sort of turning up the visibility more broadly in order that some of those folks can care so that they can develop those attitudes. Because like you know, everybody recognizes a good problem to solve, you know, if it's aligned with the strategy, if it's something they hadn't thought about before. In a lot of cases we can kind of say oh they're not using research or they're not research, uh, oriented or oriented to think from data about customer problems. But you know, have they seen it like a lot of the work is hidden. So how do we turn up the visibility?

Moshe Mikanovsky: Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. The level of scale of the enterprise you're working with. I work with a lot of small to medium sized companies so you know, but working with an Amazon, you know, how much empowerment do you have? How much your research voice do you have?

Speaker D: I'm actually really curious about that. You know you worked with Amazon, so if you're comfortable sharing with us, uh, you know, how that is done in Amazon or what you've seen in Amazon. That's really interesting.

Jake Burkhart: Yeah, I mean it's been a few years I would say in the DNA of the company is uh, ownership and dividing up problems down to particular functional owners. So it's clear who to influence with a particular insight. And you know there is value in written rationale so there's a benefit there for sure. But from there I think a Lot of the factors that we talked about, you know, there's sort of islands where it's working much better the last I saw and islands where it's more of an uphill battle. Um, and that's, I think it doesn't matter the size of the organization. You know, you could have um, you know two directors in an organization and one loves working from research and the other is really charging ahead based on their assumptions. And a lot of great projects are made from people making smart assumptions. But we also know from the startup market that um, a lot of them don't.

Moshe Mikanovsky: That's right.

Speaker D: Absolutely amazing. I'm not sure I have any other questions. What about you Matt?

Moshe Mikanovsky: We touched on it earlier, even before the call. Just how is AI impacting the research world? We're all using AI to ask questions and do this kind of research more and more in the product space. Uh, for better or for worse, uh, we still need to be talking to customers but you know, how is it impacting the work you're doing and what you're seeing in the research field?

Jake Burkhart: I love that question. I love that bit about you know, AI has labeled a bunch of things research into that first question you all asked about the definition part. You know, it's muddying the definition like crazy right now. Uh, because you know I, I got an answer uh, when I typed something in isn't that research? But like, like in among full time researchers in industry there's a wide variety of attitudes about AI. Some people kind of very ethically charged and concerned about any drop in quality all the way through to people who are experimenting hard, um, and sharing what they're learning. It's an exciting time where everybody's learning from each other and uh, you know, I think, think a, ah lot of the emphasis and when people think about AI, they think about synthesis. There's a lot of things that a researcher brings to synthesis processes pulling together diverse content to generate insights that isn't represented in you know, an uh, off the shelf gen AI model without a lot of careful chain of thought prompting and review along the way and a human in the loop.

Matt Green: Loop.

Jake Burkhart: So I think it's an interesting time where it, it's like cognitive um, science, you know the thinking, the brain is a computer really got us to think harder about what we're doing, you know and think more specifically about what people can do versus this metaphor that was being applied. And I, I think in all sorts of roles, product too. You know people are trying to figure out ways to automate product work. But when you know, the work work, you and your expert in it, you think, uh, you're able to kind of procedurally break things down and look for opportunities to automate and augment rather than just go after the whole thing. Um, I think the risk in industry right now is there's a lot of tools just promising full synthesis, uh, end to end research at the push of a button. And um, but at the same time I'm really excited about some of the prospects in, in the knowledge management space. I, I feel like there's a lot of underutilized potential there where agentic tech. I wrote an article recently, I can share with you all that, um, kind of, you know, breaks down a bunch of different cases where we could be automating small things that were hard so that, you know, this question of resourcing, you know, do you have product ops? Do you have this person? Really? You need some people to kind of monitor some things and run an agent, get outcomes that wouldn't have been possible before. So exciting times.

Moshe Mikanovsky: I like that a lot. I like the human and loop aspect because the validation of it all. Like Moshe and I talk about it all the time. Like at the end of the day you can't use it to offset your, your own thoughts and your own work and your own mind. You know, I think a lot of times you're like, you ask a question, it gives you an answer and you're like, you, you know there's something wrong about it. And so you go, yeah, that's wrong. It goes, oh yes, I apologize, you are right. And so you get into this feedback loop where you're actually, you're actually teaching it. Like that's wrong.

Jake Burkhart: But if you're learning, it's not learning.

Moshe Mikanovsky: But. Yeah, but if you, if you just take it for what it is at face value, it's an easy button, it gives me an output. Then you're probably going to go off in the wrong direction often.

Speaker D: But, but that sometimes also is my issue with AI, because if I know it's wrong, then how can I trust it on other things that I don't know if it's wrong or not? Yeah, and that's, that's like, why I always had this like um, you know, oil and water relationship with AI. Uh, even though recently, uh, the emulsion becomes much more mixed up. But uh, no, it's improving, it's improving. So that's good. And um, I'm also kind of like, um, gave up to the fact that it's not going away. So it is giving in Amazing.

Jake Burkhart: For research discovery. Just quickly, you know, I, I was, uh, giving a presentation to researchers about, you know, we can't just put a, um, off the shelf chatbot over our research and expect that we're going to get great outcomes. You know, we're kind of, uh, treating it as a discovery mechanism where there wasn't discovery possible before without, you know, we weren't investing. And suddenly this is easy to get to a certain step. And for finding a particular topic, you know, you turn it loose to your product partners. Right. And you expect that they're going to look. Do, do we have any studies on X? Hey, you know, it could be great. It could resurface citations that they can drill into. Excellent. Um, the problem is, is the real behavior often is what are the top 10 problems for this customer segment? And we're without realizing what we're offloading to it. So exciting times. But, you know, how do we kind of find those cases where it's really valuable and prune out the ones where it's overreach?

Speaker D: Exactly, exactly, exactly. Perfect. Um, where can people find, uh, you if they want to reach out to you?

Jake Burkhart: I appreciate it. Yeah, I'm, I enjoy connections and conversations on LinkedIn. You can find me at Jake Burkhart, uh, integrating research dot com. And I'm, I write frequently on Medium as well, so you can find me there.

Speaker D: Okay, we can, um, if you could just send me all of those links after we'll share them in the notes. Um, and, uh, what about the book? Where they can buy the book?

Jake Burkhart: It's, uh, from Rosenfeld Media. So you can support a small publisher by going to Rosenfeld Media dot com. It's called Stop Wasting Research. Maximize the product impact of your organization's customer insights. That being said, it's available in all sorts of places where books are sold.

Speaker D: Amazing. So we can also share that link in the, uh, episode notes and, uh,

Jake Burkhart: I'll share a discount code as well.

Speaker D: Oh, amazing. Thank you so much and, uh, I'm sure all our readers will appreciate that.

Moshe Mikanovsky: Thank you so much, Jake. Really appreciate you coming on and talking about all this. This is a fascinating topic. So thanks for, uh, being a part of the show, Moshe. Thank you. As always. Thank you to all the listeners and we'll talk to everybody next time.

Jake Burkhart: Thanks so much.

Speaker D: Thank you so much, Jake. Thank you, man. Take care, everyone.

Moshe Mikanovsky: Thank you to all the listeners. We really appreciate the feedback and support. Please leave us a review to help others find the show on Apple or Spotify or anywhere else. You're listening to the show.

Jake Burkhart: Sam?

Speaker D: Mhm.