Why research teams need budget more than influence
An odd thing is happening inside many research organizations. Their work has gotten dramatically faster, but their influence hasn't necessarily grown alongside it.
Researchers can recruit participants, generate prototypes, analyze transcripts and search years of organizational knowledge with a simple prompt. Tasks that once consumed days or weeks can now be completed in an afternoon. If you look only at the mechanics of research, the profession is becoming remarkably efficient.
Yet when you talk to heads of research, the conversations often sound surprisingly familiar.
They're still trying to get involved before key decisions are made. They're still fighting for a seat at planning conversations. They're still watching roadmaps take shape without the benefit of customer insight. They're still being asked to validate decisions rather than help frame them.
If research is becoming easier to scale, why doesn't it feel more influential?
The folks at Design Better spent the past several months speaking with research leaders at Microsoft AI, Instacart, Carta, and Google Ventures while developing our playbook, Research as Organizational Intelligence. We expected to hear a lot about AI workflows, repositories, and automation. We did. But what surprised us was how often the conversation returned to something else entirely.
Leadership.
Not leadership in the traditional sense of managing teams and allocating resources. Leadership as the ability to shape how an organization thinks, learns, and makes decisions.
Again and again, the most influential research leaders described their work in ways that had surprisingly little to do with research execution. They talked about building relationships. They talked about creating shared experiences. They talked about translating customer understanding into business action.
In other words, it’s not enough to produce insight, you have to help your organization make sense of it.
Three practices surfaced repeatedly.
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Find allies before you need them
Many research leaders make the same mistake when they join a new organization.
They immediately focus on the skeptics.
The executive who doesn't believe in research. The product leader who bypasses the team. The stakeholder who sees customer insight as a nice-to-have rather than a strategic input.
It's understandable. Those are the people we most want to convince.
But several of the leaders we interviewed described taking the opposite approach.
Rather than spending their energy trying to convert skeptics, they focused on the people who already believed. They looked for product managers, designers, and leaders who were naturally curious about customers and eager to use research in their work. Then they helped those people win.
The logic is simple.
A successful research project creates more advocates than an argument ever will.
When a product manager avoids an expensive mistake because of customer feedback, they tell that story. When a design team ships a stronger experience because research got involved early, they remember it. Over time, those stories travel further than the research team can travel on its own.
Influence spreads through trusted relationships.
The best research leaders understand that and invest accordingly.
Run a “Watch Party”
Most research teams communicate findings through decks, reports, or presentations. While those formats are necessary, they can also be limiting. We propose a "Watch Party" as an alternative.
A slide deck asks stakeholders to trust the researcher's interpretation of what happened.But a Watch Party lets them see it for themselves.
Michael Margolis of Google Ventures has long used Watch Parties as a way of bringing founders, designers, engineers, and product leaders directly into customer conversations. Participants observe sessions together, take notes, and debrief afterward.
The format sounds almost too simple to be powerful. Yet several leaders pointed to shared observation as one of the fastest ways to build organizational alignment.
When stakeholders watch a customer struggle with a workflow they assumed was intuitive, something changes. The conversation shifts from whether the finding is valid to what the team should do about it. The researcher is no longer acting as a messenger delivering insights from elsewhere. They're creating a shared experience that helps the organization learn together.
That's a different kind of influence, one that's often more durable.
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Translate research into business language
There’s plenty of good research that never gets connected to a business decision.
Researchers are trained to understand people. Executives are responsible for growth, retention, efficiency, risk, and strategy. Those aren't necessarily competing perspectives, but they are different languages.
Several leaders described a simple habit that dramatically increased the impact of their work. Before presenting a finding, write the corresponding business sentence. For example:
If customers struggle to complete onboarding, what does that mean for activation?
If users can't find a key feature, what does that mean for retention?
If support tickets keep surfacing the same issue, what does that mean for operational cost?
The goal isn't to turn every insight into a revenue story. The goal is to help stakeholders understand why a customer problem deserves organizational attention.
The strongest research leaders are exceptionally good translators.They move comfortably between customer language and business language, helping decision-makers understand not just what users are experiencing, but why it matters.
Leadership is becoming a larger share of research's value
One of the assumptions underlying many conversations about AI is that research leadership will become less important as more work becomes automated. Our conversations suggested the opposite.
As AI reduces the cost of execution, leadership becomes a larger share of the value research provides. Running studies is becoming easier. Synthesizing information is becoming easier. Generating insights is becoming easier.
What remains difficult is creating shared understanding and turning insight into action.
That's why the research leaders who thrive in the coming years may spend less time thinking about how to produce more research and more time thinking about how to make research consequential.
Finding allies. Creating shared experiences. Translating customer understanding into business action.
None of these practices require a larger budget. But they can dramatically increase the influence of the team you already have.
These are just three of the leadership plays featured in Research as Organizational Intelligence, our new playbook based on conversations with research leaders at Microsoft AI, Instacart, Carta, and Google Ventures.
The full report explores how research organizations can evolve from service providers into strategic intelligence functions through new approaches to leadership, process, and tooling in the age of AI.
