Frequently Asked Questions
These common questions and their short answers are taken from Jake Burghardt’s book Stop Wasting Research: Maximize the Product Impact of Your Organization’s Customer Insights (2025). You can find longer answers to each in your copy of the book, either printed or digital version.
- Should all organizations care about research waste?
Almost every tech organization has some kind of customer research that they could revitalize. Even at early-stage startups, founding teams may hire full-time researchers to investigate markets, customer experiences, analytics, and more. Beyond specialists with a “research” job title, other roles will conduct different forms of customer-centered investigation. All of these branches of inquiry can generate customer insights. Many of those insights are unused and forgotten, even while they could be having more lasting effects on your organization. Over time, the accumulation of this forgotten research can be turned into a valuable internal asset for ongoing product planning. See Chapter 1, “What Is Research Waste.” - Will this book cover how to conduct new research?
No. This book is about increasing the impact of any type of customer research (described in Chapter 2, “Understand Your Research Waste”) rather than how to conduct any one kind of research. There are already other in-depth books that explain specific research methods (including several titles from Rosenfeld Media). - Doesn’t increasing research maturity solve this problem?
No, I’ve yet to see the nirvana of a fully mature, consistently “user-driven” product company. It’s true that an organization that’s considered lower research maturity—with a limited track record of using customer insights from research—is more likely to waste its known learning. However, some organizations rated high in research maturity are also routinely wasting critical research. Beyond typical maturity scales, there are missing practices and operations that are needed to drive research-based product planning. This book works to fill those practical gaps. - Is this book about research repository tools?
Yes—and a lot more. Research repositories are central enablers for the action ideas throughout this book, but there are also many concepts and approaches you could apply before formalizing how your organization’s research gets stored. Chapter 5, “Launch Knowledge-Consolidating Tools,” covers requirements for two types of repositories: “report libraries” and “insight summary hubs.” Chapters 6-12 cover a range of ideas that apply these repositories to intervene in your organization’s ways of working. It’s worth noting that this book will not tell you which tool or repository vendor to use. The marketplace of applications is changing too fast for that, and exploring options is a great way for you to build organizational momentum toward reducing research waste. - What research metadata do you recommend?
Metadata is data that describes and amends other data. When talking about research systems—such as research repositories—metadata is often one of the first things that people ask about. Research metadata is a varied topic that can be reductively lumped into a single discussion. Different types of metadata can enable different outcomes. These types are expensive to define, apply, and maintain over time. You’ll need to consider pros and cons carefully before committing to any tag set, hierarchy, or other defined structure. This book outlines possibilities for the following metadata types:
–Descriptive: Characterizes the source of any research asset (see Chapter 4, “Step Up from Research Silos”).
–Insight types: Defines insights by their functional role and hierarchical relationships (described in Chapter 5).
–Primary findability: Enables locating research by important categories for reducing research waste (see Chapter 6, “Organize Now for Later Use”).
–Prioritization: Defines which insights matter most from different perspectives (described in Chapter 7, “Clarify What Matters Most”).
–Citations and progress: Connects research to product planning actions, status, and impacts (see Chapter 11, “Link Research Rationale to Plans”). - You’re talking about “waste”—is this a book about “Lean” methods?
No. This book’s ideas are not tied to Toyota’s Lean Manufacturing or related software methodologies (which can be useful for many quality improvement and optimization challenges). - How does this fit with ResearchOps, ProductOps, and DesignOps?
Several operational disciplines have claimed an interest in managing research knowledge. No one discipline owns this territory across the tech industry. That’s just fine. Improving how varied customer research gets applied in product development and delivery has to be a team effort. Any initiative to reduce waste will need to span your organization’s silos—but it also will need to “live” somewhere in your org chart (described in Chapter 3 “Start a Movement to Reduce Research Waste”). If your organization already has some operational roles in place, then they may rise to become “owners” of waste reduction. At the very least, they can become key contributors.
For more on operational topics not covered in this book, see the Rosenfeld Media titles: Research That Scales: The Research Operations Handbook by Kate Towsey and The Design Conductors: Your Essential Guide to Design Operations by Rachel Posman and John Calhoun. See also Product Operations: How Successful Companies Build Better Products at Scale by Melissa Perri and Denise Tilles. - Do I need to use all of this book to reduce research waste?
Not at all. No one is going to apply all the action ideas in this book. The first three chapters provide background for any effort to increase research-informed planning. Beyond those introductory chapters, you can choose only those ideas that make sense for your current resources and organizational context. Reducing research waste is a marathon, not a single sprint. There will always be more work to do, and any progress you make can catalyze future improvements.
