Stop Wasting Research
Maximize the Product Impact of Your Organization's Customer Insights
Why do crucial customer insights often fail to drive product decisions? The answer: wasted research. Jake Burghardt identifies the insidious root causes of research waste, giving actionable ideas to increase the impact of siloed research. You’ll learn to enhance collaboration, maximize learning, and drive research-informed product launches. Anyone—from UX researchers and insight generators to data scientists and CX analysts—will benefit from these crucial customer insights.
Who Should Read This Book
This book is for anyone who’s seen too many important customer insights that failed to drive next steps in their business. It’s for leaders and practitioners who want to experiment with new ways to increase their organization’s research use in product development and delivery. Specifically, it’s perfect for researchers from any discipline from UX to CX to sales to data science. It’s also a must-read for leaders of product, design, marketing, and engineering —anyone who wants to improve decision-making based on available customer research. And that includes operations people.
Takeaways
- Uncover tools and methods to reduce research waste.
- Learn how to find and use hidden research that might have lasting impact on your organization.
- Discover knowledge-consolidating tools and requirements for repositories.
- Increase the impact of any type of customer research on your organization.
- Note the special “IDEA” sections that show possible actions to choose based on what makes sense for your current resources and organizational context
- See “You Might Be Asking” sidebars, which give answers to common questions.
- Search for “Imagine a Way Forward” sidebars that highlight special scenarios—telling a story of action ideas as step-by-step narratives.
- Look for insightful interviews from experts in the field.
- Read the chapter summaries of key proposals to get more value from research, including a distillation of what success might look like.
Why do crucial customer insights often fail to drive product decisions? The answer: wasted research. Jake Burghardt identifies the insidious root causes of research waste, giving actionable ideas to increase the impact of siloed research. You’ll learn to enhance collaboration, maximize learning, and drive research-informed product launches. Anyone—from UX researchers and insight generators to data scientists and CX analysts—will benefit from these crucial customer insights.
Who Should Read This Book
This book is for anyone who’s seen too many important customer insights that failed to drive next steps in their business. It’s for leaders and practitioners who want to experiment with new ways to increase their organization’s research use in product development and delivery. Specifically, it’s perfect for researchers from any discipline from UX to CX to sales to data science. It’s also a must-read for leaders of product, design, marketing, and engineering —anyone who wants to improve decision-making based on available customer research. And that includes operations people.
Takeaways
- Uncover tools and methods to reduce research waste.
- Learn how to find and use hidden research that might have lasting impact on your organization.
- Discover knowledge-consolidating tools and requirements for repositories.
- Increase the impact of any type of customer research on your organization.
- Note the special “IDEA” sections that show possible actions to choose based on what makes sense for your current resources and organizational context
- See “You Might Be Asking” sidebars, which give answers to common questions.
- Search for “Imagine a Way Forward” sidebars that highlight special scenarios—telling a story of action ideas as step-by-step narratives.
- Look for insightful interviews from experts in the field.
- Read the chapter summaries of key proposals to get more value from research, including a distillation of what success might look like.
Testimonials
Stop Wasting Research explodes the idea that managing research knowledge is only about building a library or repository. In this first-of-a-kind book, Burghardt redefines the field and offers an abundance of practical ideas for transforming scattered research into a dynamic resource for insight-hungry stakeholders.
—Kate Towsey, strategic advisor, author of Research That Scales, and founder of the Cha Cha Club
The blueprint I wish I’d had years ago—equipping leaders to build organizations where customer insights are seamlessly integrated into culture and decision-making.
—Michael Nguyen, Head of Customer Intelligence at Enterpret, former Research & Strategy Leader at Figma and Asana
Stop Wasting Research is a must-read for anyone who wants to see their organization’s research have a real impact on product development.
—Jenny Blackburn, Vice President of User Experience, Google Deep Mind
A vital resource for anyone looking to power innovation, amplify the voice of the user, and inspire insights into ideas. If you’ve been wondering how to build the gold standard in research repositories and influence, this book is it.
—Danielle Teska, Executive UX Design & Research Leader, Salesforce, formerly Amazon and Chewy
Stop Wasting Research brilliantly helps product organizations turn dormant customer insights into actionable strategy—a must-read for any product leader.
—Antonia Landi, Product Operations Coach & Consultant
Burghardt delivers an actionable framework that researchers, product partners, engineers, analysts, designers, and others can use to improve their relationships with each other and increase impact. Great read that allowed me to reflect and create a plan for my own work!
—Kerstan Cole, Senior Manager of Data Science & Quantitative UXR, ServiceNow
Essential read: shifting from fragmented research to sustainable insight ecosystem, fueling UX professionals to tackle business challenges with clarity.
—Shuo-Hsiu Hsu, Design Governance, AIRBUS
Stop Wasting Research is an essential guide for unlocking the full value of customer insights within your organization—it’s a solid blueprint that will help you turn research, both old and new, into a lasting competitive advantage.
—Zach Cordier, Director of Operations, Nimbly Research
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: What Is Research Waste?
Chapter 2: Understand Your Research Waste
Chapter 3: Start a Movement to Reduce Research Waste
Chapter 4: Step Up from Research Silos
Chapter 5: Launch Knowledge-Consolidating Tools
Chapter 6: Organize Now for Later Use
Chapter 7: Clarify What Matters Most
Chapter 8: Expand Ownership Across Roles
Chapter 9: Evolve Definitions of Success
Chapter 10: Push Recurring Interactions
Chapter 11: Link Research Rationale to Plans
Chapter 12: Sync to Decision Points
