So You Have the Insight. Now What?

Research is not the answer. It is the beginning of the conversation.

I have spent most of my career asking questions.

Why are people behaving this way? What is stopping them from doing something? What do they like? What frustrates them? What would make them choose one product over another?

I still love those questions.

But after years of doing research, I have become much more interested in what happens after we get the answer.

Knowing that customers are frustrated is useful. Knowing why they are frustrated is more useful. But even that is not enough.

Someone still has to decide what to do about it.

Should the product change? Should the process change? Is the problem actually the proposition? Is there a communication gap? Is this something worth solving now or something that can wait?

This is why I have become increasingly interested in the space between customer understanding and business decisions.

Research can give you evidence. It can challenge assumptions. It can reveal something you had not seen before. It can help you understand what is happening and why. But it cannot make the decision for you.

The most interesting part of the work, for me, is what happens when the insight enters the room with product, CX, marketing, commercial or business teams and everyone starts asking, “So what does this mean for what we do?”

That is where research becomes useful.

Not because it gives us the answer, but because it puts something real on the table for the business to challenge, build on and act on.