Making Research Easy: Getting Teams to Adopt Continuous Research

You often hear teams complaining that their backlog is too large and that they already know what customers want, they just don’t have time to deliver on it. That is why generative research is often the first area to be sidelined. No amount of “selling the value” is going to change that.

It might sound hopeless, but it’s not. It just means that we’ve been going about the problem in the wrong way. BJ Fogg, a professor at Stanford, created the Fogg Behavioral Model to highlight how change actually happens. Instead of just relying on motivation there is another axis at play as well: ability. According to this model, for any change to happen, the balance of motivation and ease must cross the ‘action line’. The good news for us is that if we make a change easy, it doesn’t require much motivation at all.

How can we make research easy?

In most organisations, even ones who claim to be agile, predictability is king. The people who get the biggest bonuses and the earliest promotions are the ones who deliver on what they say will. Another way of saying this is that the projects they deliver are on-time and on-budget.

Trying to change this focus on time and cost is a losing battle. Motivating people on the end benefits for the product will not win a KPI battle. Instead we need to accept the reality and focus on how we can align with it. Unfortunately, continuous research conflicts with predictability in two key ways:

1. Research takes time and costs money. As we already mentioned, most teams have huge backlogs filled with ideas that people believe customers really want. We know the stats that 90% of features fail to deliver the expected business value but effectiveness is not the concern for someone who is being measured on time and cost.

2. Continuous research can lead to scope creep. If we are continuously talking to customers and evaluating solutions we might uncover that we need to make changes to our product. This is often used as a selling point for the value of research - catch changes early when it is cheapest to fix. But again, to someone who is focused on time and cost, this is a big risk.

Quick and cheap research

To address time and cost concerns, we can shift from large, upfront research phases to smaller, continuous efforts. For example, ask: What can we learn in just two hours per week?

I already know what you’re thinking - “Bad research is worse than no research at all”. Bad research can give teams false confidence in ineffective ideas, leading to wasted effort. But quick and cheap does not have to mean bad.

Diminishing returns on research

Academic research is focused on statistically significant results. To achieve this you need a lot data. And gathering a lot of data takes time. Luckily for us though, we can take advantage of the fact that research has a diminishing marginal utility of information. In plain english, this means each new piece of information adds less value than the previous one. If we focus our research efforts on the areas where we have least confidence each piece of information has high signal value.

Douglas W Hubbard goes into this in far more detail, and with some great examples, in his book “How to Measure Anything”.

If you’re on board that we can get valuable information quickly and cheaply, our next challenge though is to identify the research methods that will provide the most valuable insights in the shortest space of time.

To uncover current customer behaviours and patterns you can achieve a lot quickly with:

• Product Analytics: The real data on customer behavioral patterns

• Secondary Research: Leveraging existing industry reports, customer reviews, social media and analysing competitors

And to uncover the reasons why customers behave as they do you can use:

• Field studies: Quick observations in natural environments uncover real challenges and motivations

• Rapid Interviews: Even 3-5 targeted user conversations can reveal critical insights

Reducing the Scope Creep Concerns

The other key area of concern is that if we keep talking to customers we might discover that our solution has problems and needs to be modified. We need to assuage these fears in two ways.

1. We need to recognise that the perfect is the enemy of the good enough. Not every thing we learn from customers needs to be implemented. We cannot be amazing everywhere. We need to make the difficult decisions where our product is good enough so we can focus on the higher priority problems.

2. We need to leave the product / functional managers in control. Rather than jumping on the insights and fixing our product as we discover them, we need to work within the existing change control processes. We can share the insights but it is up to others to decide whether to implement any changes as a result.

Over time, as the company shifts away from outputs towards outcomes we can redraw the balance here. But in the meantime we need to make adopting research as easy as possible.

Conclusion

The choice we face isn't between perfect research and bad research—it's between getting some insights and no research at all. By embracing quick, targeted research methods, we can gather valuable user insights without compromising project timelines or budgets.

While our focus has been on making research more accessible through quick, lightweight methods, this doesn't diminish the value of more comprehensive research initiatives. In fact, these approaches complement each other: quick research keeps teams connected to daily user needs, while deeper research provides foundational insights for long-term strategy. The key is recognising that different teams serve different research purposes—stream teams conduct continuous, lightweight research, while centralised teams handle larger research initiatives.

Start small, but start now. Begin with just two hours per week dedicated to user research. Focus on a single pressing question. Share what you learn. As teams experience the impact of even modest research efforts, motivation will naturally grow, and research will become an integral part of how we work.