5 Ways to Drive Impact with Research
Exploring the varied ways that research can benefit products and companies
Any researcher working in industry understands that research has to drive positive business value. Companies hire researchers because they believe their investment will pay off when it comes to the bottom line.
But how exactly does research create impact? The most common form of impact in my experience—running research to validate a product team’s emerging concepts—may be the least compelling route for a researcher to make a significant impact. So here are 5 different types of impact that researchers can work toward. Some are more traditional and reactive while others are more forward-looking and proactive.
Impact #1: Validating good concepts
A common contribution from a researcher on a product team is in validating emerging product concepts. The process runs something like this:
A product manager has a product idea or multiple competing ideas in development
Designers prepare rough mocks of how each idea will appear in the product
The team asks a researcher to test those mocks with prospective users and recommend how to move forward
This is a very natural way for a researcher to unblock a team on making progress and meeting goals. A good product team will value early feedback from users before they push ahead too far with an idea (see my previous post on collecting that feedback). Early feedback provides them with opportunities to revise concepts before launch and helps to boost confidence that the team is on the right track.
To do this well, a researcher needs to have an open mind about the product ideas, and avoid being pushed around too much by an overenthusiastic product manager. Impact requires careful attention to what the team needs, but it also requires a healthy skepticism about whether any of the team’s current ideas or solutions are appropriate. If you’re only seeking supportive signals for a product idea, you may drive “artificial impact”—you will unblock the team on moving forward in the short term, but you may ultimately lead them to a dead end.
Unfortunately, I think it’s common for researchers to feel that they should find a way to approve an idea, especially for more junior researchers who don’t yet feel confident enough to disagree with partners or provide disappointing feedback. To counterbalance this energy, a researcher needs to embrace a second way of achieving major impact: recommend killing a bad idea.
Impact #2: Killing bad concepts
As a research manager, my most frequent guidance to researchers may be “killing a bad idea is positive impact”. There’s a natural inclination to believe that achieving impact means launching a new product, but that’s not true. If anything, preventing a wasted investment may be the most convincing way for a researcher to achieve impact, since they can immediately point to how much money their single recommendation saved by forcing a team to cancel an ineffective launch. New launches may or may not provide a big win down the road, but prevented launches are always an immediate saving when user insights are convincingly unfavorable.
To be clear, a positive and optimistic mindset is essential and a researcher needs to be as invested in team ambitions as any other role. A researcher shouldn’t appear to be an obstacle to progress, since a team will quickly start circumventing research in that case. A well-integrated researcher should be a partner that everyone loves working with and a partner that is actively seeking a positive way forward. At times though, a researcher should also be someone who is willing to recommend, “Sorry everyone, this ain’t it. Back to the drawing board”.
Both supporting a launch and recommending against a launch are important ways to achieve impact. However, the underlying tasks for both types of impact tend to be driven forward by product managers and requested of researchers. Researchers don’t need to wait for requests though—they can also proactively discover opportunities and open new paths for their teams.
Impact #3: Solving known product problems
Sometimes, there’s a specific problem with product performance and an urgent need to solve it. When there’s a lack of knowledge about what’s causing that specific problem, researchers can provide the necessary clarity.
This is often tactical rather than strategic work since it’s solving an immediate problem with focused scope, but unlike with concept testing (#1 and #2 above), the need for this research is often identified by researchers rather than other product partners (though it could equally come from anyone on the team).
This is a big category since progress can be blocked in so many ways; a problem could relate to pricing challenges, sudden user acquisition dips, a new government regulation that affects app development, etc. The commonality is that it requires diagnosing a specific product problem in a way that clarifies what the next steps should be. It requires the ability to notice something is wrong and then choose the appropriate methods to identify why and what can be done about it.
I’ll give one example here. A product team was once trying to understand why their new product concept wasn’t popular with people even though it was driving up user engagement stats. People were spending record time on using the new feature in A/B tests, yet they’d come away saying they didn’t like it. To work out what was happening, a researcher did some detective work interviewing the relevant users and found that people spent so long on the feature because it wasn’t doing what they wanted it to do. They’d get stuck going back and forth in a particular interaction sequence, not getting what they expected, even though they actively wanted what the feature was offering. This mismatch caused more time spent on the feature but also a deep irritation among users. Without the researcher’s ability to run the right research at the right time, the product team may have wasted significant resources on a launch they’d have to roll back weeks or months later.
Impact #4: Creating new measurements
Measurement is crucial in tracking user behavior, assessing product performance, and identifying signals of success/failure in progress. Often, researchers are the best positioned people—together with data partners—to identify opportunities to improve measurement strategies.
In the past, researchers on my teams have contributed to creating user tracking metrics for remedying retention problems, installing effective new output variables to judge success in A/B tests, and launching longitudinal surveys to monitor user perception over time. In most of these cases, the researcher was the origin and the driving force behind the effort. Nobody told them what to do—they simply spotted a gap in how we were measuring particular processes or outcomes and they found solutions to fix it.
Efforts like this are often challenging and require building new cross-functional collaborative networks. But the challenge pays off because it builds a researcher’s reputation across a company and establishes them as visionary product partners rather than purely reactive resources or consultants. While research on product concepts or narrow problems is great at unblocking progress, its impact tends to be limited to a specific issue at a specific time. When you establish a new measure, it may be used every week across multiple teams at the company, long after your research has ended.
Impact #5: Improving foundational awareness
Although direct and justified impact is important, exploratory research has value too. Sometimes, there’s a general sense that something is important to understand but no immediate problem it would solve. That shouldn’t scare a researcher off since long-term impact often starts with exploratory research, and it can pave the way for a big leap forward rather than smaller iterative steps.
In many work environments, there’s a pressure against exploratory research. Long-term impact is harder to justify with immediate metric movements and it doesn’t always provide a researcher with quick signals of success. A researcher needs to demonstrate how a stronger foundational awareness of a particular problem can open up new opportunities, and they need a clear milestone plan to demonstrate their meaningful contributions each step of the way.
Some of the most memorable examples of impactful research in my own mind come from exploratory work that was used to boost foundational awareness in a particular space. That includes projects that identified unexpected pain points for particular user segments, projects that provided a more holistic understanding of user well-being, and projects that established deeper insights into how different types of people onboard into a product.
Although the specific impact of the research effort wasn’t clear at the first step of research design in these cases, the researchers ultimately delivered insights that benefited multiple teams across multiple projects over multiple timepoints—and that’s the best kind of impact.
Choose your path
Here’s how each of these types of impact sits in my own mental structure:
This list above isn’t comprehensive - you could probably come up with other forms of impact you have as a researcher. However, these examples of impact should reinforce the importance of a researcher crafting their own path and not limiting themselves to reactively responding to other people’s asks. Researchers are naturally the experts at research, and that means they often have the best view of which insights a team should be prioritizing at any given moment.
Immediate, tactical impact is often essential for team progress, but at other times, a researcher may be better off prioritizing a longer-term strategic ambition. The biggest examples of long-term impact require ingenuity, planning, and vision, and that all requires careful thought and attention. By taking more control of how they spend their time, researchers can become more impactful product partners.
“The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice.”
~ George Eliot
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This was fantastic and much needed! So helpful in articulating the value prop of research on product teams thank you!