Bringing Customer Research to More Internal Teams
Summary
Key Insights
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Starting a research practice with operations first enables a 10x increase in research throughput by establishing consistent methods and infrastructure.
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Democratizing research lets hundreds of team members conduct their own studies, reserving the core research team for complex, cross-product questions.
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Creating a cross-functional Customer Intelligence Alliance (CIA) with data science, product marketing, and competitive intelligence improves insight generation and alignment.
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Recruiting research participants remains one of the biggest challenges, especially balancing enterprise and free/self-service user access.
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Monthly research deep-dive workshops and on-demand training help build research maturity and consistent quality among internal teams.
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Templates, note-taking frameworks, and review checkpoints are critical to maintaining documentation quality and meaningful insight sharing.
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Early demonstration studies that show research process and outcomes can accelerate adoption and maturity among internal stakeholders.
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Research ops frameworks like the 'eight pillars' help prioritize focus areas like tooling, knowledge management, and infrastructure when building or scaling a practice.
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A centralized research team can tackle complex, strategic questions beyond individual product scope, such as broad user sign-in behavior.
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Continuous collaboration between qualitative and quantitative research teams, including data science, improves understanding and validates hypotheses.
Notable Quotes
"We went from about one study per quarter to about one per team per quarter — about a 10x increase — which is absolutely insane."
"I should have done a few studies first to show people what it looks like, so they could copy templates and methods."
"Recruiting sucks, especially in enterprise B2B, so building robust recruiting pipelines and processes was critical for us."
"We’re not gatekeepers; we’re here to make sure research is accurate, efficient, and impactful, not to block people."
"The Customer Intelligence Alliance brings together research, data science, product marketing, and competitive intelligence in regular discussions."
"Different perspectives across functions generate insights you never would have thought of on your own."
"We do monthly research deep dives on different methods with examples and practice, open to anyone in the company."
"If someone does research and says 70% of users do X, I remind them you can’t make quantitative claims with qualitative data."
"Research is a freight train barreling through the company — build the stations and rails first with operations or risk derailment."
"Start doing operations now; you don’t need a dedicated team to begin and it puts you at the top when jobs open."
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