Turning Unused Insights Into Impact

Episode Timestamps

00:00 – Introduction of the podcast and guest Jake Burkhardt

00:40 – Overview of Jake’s background and book launch

03:49 – Focus of Jake’s book on product teams and long-term value

05:05 – Definition and significance of research waste

11:28 – Identifying the three main causes of research waste

20:10 – The challenge of organizational silos in research

25:20 – The evolving role of research in product development

28:30 – Future outlook on research and AI’s impact

32:00 – Conclusion and key takeaways from the discussion

Main Insights From The Conversation

“If you have the opportunity to look under the hood a little bit at a set of research, you see those wins worth celebrating, but you also see a lot of really crucial insights that didn’t make the cut. Things that have everything to do with what’s being discussed now, where the company wants to go, but somehow they got lost in the shuffle”.​

For Jake Burgard, author of Stop Wasting Research: Maximize the Product Impact of Your Organization’s Customer Insights, this observation isn’t theoretical—it’s the culmination of over two decades working as a UX researcher and product manager at Microsoft, Amazon, and boutique consultancies tackling everything from financial trading systems to jet cockpit design.​​

Starting in 2000 during the dotcom era, Jake evolved from UX researcher to generalist, following his interests through complex knowledge work across scientific computing, solar power plant design, and novel productivity interactions. But after years of throwing research to clients and hoping things went well, he hit a wall. He wanted follow-through. He went in-house.​​

Six and a half years at Amazon as principal UX researcher and then principal product manager gave Jake a unique vantage point: he saw how organizations could create new systems for extracting more value from insights. Serving on the Research Ops Community board exposed him to fast-evolving practices across the industry. And digging into volumes of research across these experiences revealed a surprising truth: a remarkable amount of unused insights remain durable and could be reactivated if brought back to the right people in the right format at the right time.​​

In this conversation, Jake unpacks the three root causes of research waste—preparation, motivation, and integration—and explains why insights are business assets that organizations are leaving on the cutting room floor. He discusses breaking down silos between UX researchers, market researchers, data scientists, customer support analysts, and the growing number of “people who do research”. And he makes a compelling case that as implementation gets easier through AI and new tools, customer understanding becomes the defensible differentiator.​

His core message? Research is not just what we’re learning now—it’s what we’ve learned. And organizations that figure out how to continuously rediscover, not just continuously discover, will build the shared understanding needed to create genuinely differentiated products.​​

From Dotcom to Deep Dives: Jake’s Journey

Jake introduces himself with characteristic scope:​

“My name is Jake Burkhard. The title of that book that I just launched is Stop Wasting Research: Maximize the Product Impact of Your Organization’s Customer Insights. And I’m also doing some consulting and advising around those topics at integrating research”.​

The Early Years: 2000-Era Consulting

“I got started around 2000 in dotcom in consulting and working as a UX researcher to begin with, and it’s always been sort of a core discipline as I evolved as sort of a generalist over time”.​​

Following the Complex Work

“And I worked on different kinds of complex knowledge work—starting out in financial trading, ended up working in small boutique consultancies on things like scientific computing, solar power plant design, jet cockpit at one point. I ended up kind of following around my interests around really kind of novel and complex work”.​​

The Wall: Wanting Follow-Through

“But eventually I hit a wall where I got tired of throwing things to clients and kind of checking in and hoping that things were going well. I wanted to be more involved in the follow-through. And so I went in-house”.​

Microsoft’s Productivity Lab

“I spent some time at a lab within Microsoft that focused on new kind of productivity interactions. Did that for a while”.​​

Six and a Half Years at Amazon

“And then I spent a good chunk of time—six and a half years at Amazon—as a principal UX researcher and then a principal product manager focused on creating new systems for getting more value out of insights”.​​

Research Ops Community Board

“And since then I’ve worked on the Research Ops Community board and learned so much from what’s going on in this fast-evolving industry—so many amazing things that people are working towards. And I tried to fold some of them into my book”.​​

“And again, just been doing some advising and continuing the research around this topic”.​

The Book: Not for Conducting Research

When asked if the book targets product teams, Jake clarifies the scope:​

“When you think about getting more value from research, there’s so many hands that have to be involved. And there’s a lot of books that are written for researchers about conducting research. This book isn’t one of them”.​​

“This is about getting more value out of research over the long term, and that necessitates sort of new kinds of systems and more involvement from more folks in product development”.​​

What Inspired the Book: The Cutting Room Floor

Jake explains the genesis of Stop Wasting Research:​

“Over the course of my career at different times—whether it’s developing a new product and looking at the literature to try and inform something genuinely novel, or whether it was stopping off in a research community and reviewing large volumes of studies—there’s always this sense of amazing wins that researchers can unlock with their work”.​​

Careers Are Advancing, But…

“Careers are advancing. Clearly, you don’t write a book called Stop Wasting Research unless you care a lot about research. And from dreaming up new products to iterating them to finding that market and getting to the right message all the way across the board, research adds so much value”.​​

The Lost Insights

“But I think to your point, if you have the opportunity to kind of look under the hood a little bit and take a step back at a set of research, you see those wins worth celebrating, but you also see a lot of really crucial insights that didn’t make the cut”.​

“Things that have everything to do with what’s being discussed now, where the company wants to go, but somehow they got lost in the shuffle. They were out of sync at the time, but that doesn’t mean that they necessarily have to stay out of sync. There’s something that we can reactivate and bring back”.​​

The Gap in the Literature

“And there’s so much written about optimizing study processes, but the current emphasis on sort of research repositories and kind of storing research—I wanted to take a more active perspective on that space and explore things that I’ve tried, things that other folks have tried that I met through the Research Ops Community and other conversations”.​​

“And I just saw a gap and wanted to dive into it. Started writing it on Medium, got positive responses along the way, and here we are”.​​

The Research Ops Community Experience

When asked about his time on the Research Ops board, Jake shares:​​

“I served on the board under Holly. There’s been so many people that have come along in this process of developing research ops that have made such big contributions. My piece of it and working with this team of amazing people was collaborating with Jonathan Richardson to develop more content from the community”.​

“How can we harvest more of the learning that’s going on and share in a really emerging field? And so that’s what I focused on”.​​

Still Vibrant

“And for folks who are listening who haven’t tuned in, researcherops.community is the website, and there’s a way to apply to join the Slack group. Unlike a lot of Slack groups that sort of have a peak and conversation dies out, the Research Ops Community continues to be a really lively place. Highly recommended”.​​

Defining Research Waste

Jake unpacks the activating term that anchors his book:​

“It’s a term that in trying to take that sort of active approach to getting more value out of research, it hits sort of an activating emotion, right? Where you can imagine running studies, and there are plenty of studies where all the insights are used depending on the nature of the study, where folks are in their process, where the product’s at in the development”.​​

Not Always a Problem, But Often

“You know, there are plenty of cases where there isn’t a big remainder. But that’s often not the case, as you called out”.​

The First Article: Fighting Insight Waste

“And I wrote an article—the first article I wrote on Medium was I think it was called ‘Fighting Insight Waste with Research Repositories.’ And I didn’t—that articulation, I don’t know where it came from, but it really resonated with folks”.​​

Breaking Down the Output

“So what I’m using the concept for—and there’s a lot more particulars in the definition in the book—but you can kind of imagine at the outcome of a study, a report or some kind of research output can be broken down into a set of insights”.​​

“And some of those insights advance, and they chalk up the wins that are advancing researchers’ careers and products and organizations today. But some of them don’t. They’re somehow out of sync in the study time frame”.​​

Why Insights Don’t Advance

Jake identifies the culprits:​

“You know, there may not be enough data in some cases. That may not reach the right team. As organizations continue to fragment, it’s harder and harder for researchers to get in sync with all the teams that they could be influencing with their learning”.​​

“Or it just may be a team is executing in a certain space and they’re just not thinking in that area. But if the insight was brought back to them at the right time, they would be open to thinking about it”.​​

The Durable Remainder

“So we have this remainder. Some of it, not all of it, stays durable, but a lot of it does. A surprising amount does. That’s been my experience digging into volumes of research”.​​

“And we can pick up that cutting room floor of unused insights or underutilized insights, and we can bring them back to the right people in a useful format at the right time and try and build new bridges into product planning”.​​

Research Wealth vs Research Waste

“And so that’s what the idea of research waste ended up coming together within the book. And you can think of it just as unused insights that are overlooked, that are underutilized, and they’re a business asset”.​​

“The opposite of research waste is research wealth, right? I mean, when you look into volumes of research, you can’t help but just get excited—or I can’t—about what could be done there. So how can we bring that wealth back into current conversations?”.​​

Three Root Causes of Wasting Research Impact

Jake explains the organizing framework that shapes the book:​

“Writing a book, there’s so many ways you can organize a set of ideas, and I had a different sort of outline that was more focused on sort of an order of things—these might be early moves, these might be later moves”.​​

Lou Rosenfeld’s Influence

“I kept that sort of model where no one thing is going to get rid of research waste or cause all insights to be activated. Really we’re just trying to turn up the ratio over time, and we can think of it as sort of experiments that we might turn into rituals, practices, operations if they’re successful and grow that out over time”.​​

“And so that kind of mindset stuck around. But Lou Rosenfeld in the proposal process really encouraged me to think about what’s a model that folks can walk away from this book where it can be something that even if they’re not remembering all the particulars, the model helps them kind of keep those ideas alive”.​​

“And so I wanted to think about root causes, and I spent a bunch of time looking at different articles and thinking around the industry and talking to folks. And I came up with three: preparation, motivation, and integration”.​​

Root Cause #1: Preparation

Jake defines the first root cause:​​

“Preparation is just—we as researchers, it’s very individualistic work. We do projects over a timeline. It kind of doesn’t matter the discipline. The idea ends up being the same, and it results in some sort of output. And then there’s a conveyor belt sort of mindset often where you’re moving on to the next thing, and there’s not a lot of connection between studies”.​​

Already Doing Amazing Things, But…

“Speaking generally, some people are already doing amazing things with that. But there’s a lot more we can do to prepare our work for use over the long term”.​​

Hard to Pick Up Reports

“So it’s hard to pick up a research report that has all these different kinds of learnings in it and apply it to a plan. What are the things we can do to really surface what’s most important and atomize them in ways that can be useful later? So that’s the preparation root cause”.​​

Root Cause #2: Motivation

Jake tackles the toughest nut to crack:​​

“Motivation is that insights are often seen as sort of optional inputs rather than long-term product drivers. If you’re a decision maker, you can have all sorts of streams of research depending on your organization, where it’s at, at scale, the types of folks you have involved”.​​

“But different people are coming to you with insights, and there’s something that either aligns to how you’re thinking and how you’re working, and you can sort of choose the ones that fit”.​​

Even Researchers Don’t See It

“And even some researchers don’t see their old work as motivating future decisions”.​​

Creating an Internal Product

“So how can we kind of change the motivation structures around research—creating a product that people want to use to tell the rationale story of what they’re building? So something that really adds value, an internal product”.​​

Root Cause #3: Integration

Jake describes the visibility problem:​​

“Integration—the last of the three root causes—is really about if you think about the touch points of a set of insights to a decision maker around the time frame of a study. Ideally, they’re involved in the process. It’s—they help develop the insights. Ideally, all those great research practices”.​​

After the Study Concludes

“After the study’s concluded, how many more touch points do they really have with those insights? Meanwhile, there’s an onslaught of other things coming in that are demanding very busy people’s attention”.​​

Creating the Right Touch Points

“So how can we create more of the right touch points to create visibility, mind share, and presence at the times when decisions are really made that we want to influence with research, where research can add a lot of value?”.​​

A Menu, Not a Mandate

“So preparation, motivation, and integration. And the book has three chapters full of action ideas that it’s sort of a menu that no one will do all of them. But there are certain things that you can give a try to go after those root causes”.​​

Which Root Cause Is Hardest?

When asked which is most challenging for product organizations, Jake offers nuance:​

“It’s a great question. None of them are simple, right? Hence a book. There’s definitely an iterative learning mindset. And I mentioned sort of a model of building out over time—like a mindset of we’re going to start at a crawl, we’re going to walk and run and eventually marathon our way to kind of making improvements”.​​

Preparation: Within Researcher Control

“But just getting started at a crawl—preparation has a lot to do with researchers taking more ownership over their own materials and thinking about it differently and kind of working backwards from the decisions that they want to influence”.​​

“Thinking about how do we get our work ready for that involves all sorts of new collaboration, maybe some new information structures, some prioritization kind of thinking. But it does fall within a single set of audiences. So you could say that that one maybe isn’t as hard as the other ones”.​​

Motivation: The Newness Halo

“Motivation is—I agree—a very tough nut to crack in that folks are most interested in the front of the ticker tape of research. Newness has a halo to it that we have to show over time the value of existing insights for influencing things that the organization really cares about”.​​

“We have to create case studies around that. And I have chapters about prioritizing insights. You can’t bring every insight back, right? You got to think more like a product manager, and you got to come together as a research community and partners and say what’s most important in all of this”.​​

What Makes Insights Motivating

Jake lists the drivers:​​

“That’s motivating. Tying into goal structures and thinking about how research can align there—that’s motivating. Looking at poor-performing metrics and how the organization is measuring itself and trying to get insights closer to that—that’s motivating. There’s a bunch of ideas. Challenging, but I hope I’ve given some concrete ways forward that people find useful”.​​

Integration: Visibility and Timing

“Integration—there’s a couple parts of it. One part is just coming to people on a cadence that is defined by research, just to keep insights present, to make sure that there’s mind share, to show the latest evidence, to show what’s new from a research community”.​​

“Because without visibility, how can anybody care? To show where the wins are, to kind of build norms around it on your own cadence”.​​

The Hard Part: Decision Milestones

“But the hard part of integration is knowing when different decisions might be made and showing up with research at those times. So making sure that folks always have it in their Slack or their inbox or it’s not far—it’s in the tools that they already use”.​​

“But then in some cases, I’ve spent a lot of time coming to teams with sets of insights trying to hit those milestones. And that can be really challenging. Product ops can really help here”.​​

Process Leveling

“The more that there’s sort of leveling of the playing field of different processes where it makes sense—not to get too heavy-handed—but figuring out for researchers, it’s hard enough in a study to line up just right. Milestones slip, and ‘Oh, those insights aren’t useful to us now'”.​​

“But after the fact, thinking about bigger organizational processes—that’s a tough one. Integrating. But even a little bit of advancement can go a long way for a research community”.​​

Breaking Down Silos

Jake identifies multiple categories of silos addressed in the book:​

Researchers Siloing Their Own Studies

“You can think about silos in this sort of context. When you think about those root causes, you can think about different categories of silos. If we’re talking about that conveyor belt mindset, it’s almost like researchers are siloing their own studies”.​​

“So at some sense, it’s about starting to accumulate what’s been learned—to treat each research question as an opportunity to continuously rediscover, not just continuously discover new data. So that’s one sort of silo to break down”.​​

Different Kinds of Insight Generators

“I think what ends up getting called ‘silo’ the most in the book is between different kinds of insight generators. I use sort of a big tent definition of customer research in the book”.​​

“You know, there’s all those full-time people. You may have market researchers, UX researchers, sales analysts—all sorts of people doing research full-time in your organization. Data science, another big one, obviously”.​​

People Who Do Research

“And then there’s the folks that do research but may not consider themselves researchers. Like they’re down in customer support doing great analyses that aren’t in structured study format, but how do we bring them into the fold?”.​​

“And then with the ‘people who do research’ idea kind of introduced by Kate Towsey, where we’re seeing a proliferation of tools and approaches for allowing people—designers, product managers, marketers, all sorts of folks—to conduct their own research, the scope of research just keeps getting bigger”.​​

The Golden Rule of Collaboration

“And so if we’re trying to stitch together what we’ve learned, those silos end up being really important for thinking about how do we prepare. Because if you create summaries of insights that bring in information from those different places, you’re giving a clear locus of collaboration. Everybody that’s involved gets to count the win”.​​

“And so that’s how these things can sort of snowball over time, where you have to get more out of it than you put into it—is sort of the golden rule”.​​

Crossing the Insight-to-Planning Chasm

“And then I think the last kind of silos I’ll mention is just crossing that chasm between insight and planning, where there’s owning teams for different insights. Finding the right owning team gets increasingly complicated”.​​

“I think this is with the old mindset of research where you’re sort of aligning with a nearby group of stakeholders. A lot of studies find things that could be influencing teams in multiple parts of an organization. But it’s really hard for individual researchers to do that. How can collective infrastructure help with that?”.​​

Visibility Up the Org Chart

“So crossing those sorts of silos—and so many researchers are cut off in the org chart in terms of the visibility of their work, sort of like a silo at director level and below or what have you. So how can we turn up visibility for the most important things and reach up higher?”.​​

Advice: Building Stronger Cases Over Time

When asked about making research not lose impact, Jake offers practical guidance:​

“Well, I mean, the process of tuning a study—all that craft—it’s not the focus of this book, but it is where it all starts, right? Finding those unknowns, those assumptions, those decisions that can really be fueled by research that aren’t just about validating something, but will actually make a difference based on what information comes back”.​​

“And tuning the whole study process, all that craft through those phases and involvement of people—obviously that’s a primary path to impact. That’s what the industry is focused on for the majority of the time. I’m trying to bring something new here”.​​

Pulling Together Multiple Sources

“So to the nature of your question and kind of picking up the remainder and trying to get those things to impact—I think that it really is about pulling together more evidence for those things that are hard, that people don’t want to hear about in the first place. They’re executing—you got to wait for the right time for them to be open to it and pull together evidence for it”.​​

“So like building a stronger case as researchers for insights by using multiple sources within an organization, finding those times—to the integration point—about when are people… I’ve brought the exact same insights back to teams at different times and gotten totally different conversations”.​​

Red Teams Can’t Hear About What’s Next

“When the team is executing on a goal and they’re red, you can’t talk about what’s next. They are focused on now, right?”.​​

“So a lot of it is about aligning to where teams are at, to where organizations are at. And those are things that researchers already do in their study processes. It’s just about pulling together research and finding new ways to do that. And the book is full of ideas about that”.​​

Big Tent Definition: All Kinds of Research

When asked if the book focuses only on UX research, Jake clarifies:​

“As I said earlier, sort of giving my background, UX research is sort of a home discipline for me. But I spent a lot of time reaching out and compiling research and working with researchers in a lot of different disciplines. And that’s where this story about coming together and not just treating it as such individualistic work, but finding ways to build on each other’s work—they’re definitely included in there”.​​

Targeted Audiences

“And I’m trying to talk to folks in terms of targeted audiences for the book. All those stripes of research are folks that I’m interested in talking about, from everything from market research—a nearby one where I think a lot of this stuff is already resonating”.​​

Data Science Conversations

“I’ve talked to some data science folks in the process of writing the book. The things that are road map-oriented where they’re trying to influence road maps as opposed to building out features—there’s definitely the same problems”.​​

CX and Secondary Data

“And then yeah, I’ve tied CX—customer support data and different kinds of secondary data that’s already coming in, social data, all sorts of things—into insights before”.​​

Integrative Research Organizations

“I think part of the—and there’s some people in the book that do sidebars that talk about more integrative research organizations—and you could think of it as a reorg problem, or you could just think about it as stitching things together”.​​

“And why do people want to get involved in stitching together? Because they’ll get more impact out of it. It helps make a stronger case for insights”.​​

The Future: Research as Activity vs. Role

When asked about AI’s impact and the future of research, Jake offers an optimistic yet nuanced view:​

“I think research as an activity is only going to become more important. John Cutler wrote the forward to this book, Stop Wasting Research. And I couldn’t have asked for a better forward. He really saw what I was trying to do”.​​

Customer Understanding as Differentiator

“And what he argues—and I’ll paraphrase—is as implementation gets easier through these new tools, what’s really a differentiator for different organizations is how well they understand their customers and not just sort of learning and forgetting, but making meaningful structures and problem spaces and really holding that knowledge”.​​

“To kind of build on what he said, I love that sentiment. When I think about the future, I think about organizations that figure out new ways to get smarter about their customers through various technologies, through old methods that are refreshed a little bit. There’s a lot of tools in the toolbox”.​​

New Tools Find Their Roles

“New tools when they come along always seem like they’re the whole thing, and then they find their roles, right?”.​​

The Proliferation of Research Conductors

“And there’s certain mega trends that are going on where the number of people conducting research in organizations is increasing through the availability of new tools, just through a mindset shift”.​​

“And researchers’ roles as structuring and improving the quality of that and figuring out where to draw the line—where this is customer connection or this is a structured study or this is something that needs a lot of researcher attention—those sorts of things are new frontiers over the last few years that are causing a lot of friction in some cases. And some people are really putting forward case studies about how to advance through that”.​​

“So I think that that’s definitely another area of continued evolution”.​​

Systems of Learning

“I think what I’m putting forward is this idea that research is not just what we’re learning now—it’s what we’ve learned. And how can we bring what we’ve learned more forward? I think that there’s a lot to be done there”.​​

“This book is a toe in the water of that idea, and it’s not just this book. I mean, there’s a huge interest in research repositories. But there’s also this idea of the most common conversations are ‘What tool do you use?’ and then ‘Why is my tool failing?’ And there’s often just like a lack of clarity around goals and all these practices around it”.​​

The Defensible Asset

“So I think that any researchers’ focus on systems and systems of learning that they contribute to—and it’s just if we stay agile, the future is very bright. Because the focus on customer understanding as a defensible asset when things get easier to build and A/B test and all those sorts of things is something that I’m optimistic about”.​​

Shared Understanding: The Human Complexity Factor

The conversation turns to why customer understanding remains critical:​

“I think I also have an optimistic view, and I think humans are continuing to be as complex as we are. And therefore the customer understanding is a challenge. And usually product is not a function of one team. Production is an outcome of entire teams, set of teams working together”.​​

“And until they have a common, a shared understanding, it’s actually very difficult to make a good product. So I think AI is—at least at this stage, whatever is visible to me—looks like an enabler more than something that it will just be a genie where you give a command and things get done”.​​

“It may get there, for all you know. But probably that would take its own time because technology takes time to evolve. So that’s the thought that I have personally about the situation right now. It’s a kind of a stock market correction that’s going on right now, which can sometimes be quite unnerving. I think that’s the state we are in as a UX research industry as such”.​​

Jake’s Sidebar on AI

Jake mentions addressing this directly:​

“I mean, I had to include a sidebar that said, ‘Isn’t aren’t tools with AI going to solve all this?’ and try and unpack it. And because it’s a book and I wanted it to last a while, I ended up talking in terms of tenets”.​​

Humans in the Loop

“And I think I’m very optimistic about outsourcing operations where humans are in the loop and thinking of it in automation and all sorts of research tasks. But at the activity level, it’ll be interesting to see what’s possible as we move up the hierarchy to try and automate bigger picture, bigger pieces of work”.​​

“But really exciting things to do with transforming information, discovering information. But I think to your point about shared understanding and shared language—research tools, everybody going to a tool and finding different things, is not going to help us move forward on some major vectors in organization”.​​

“But it can help us get there. It can help us find those vectors”.​​

Key Takeaways: From Research Waste to Research Wealth

Jake’s two decades across consulting, Microsoft, Amazon, and the Research Ops Community board offer crucial lessons:​

1. Research is not just what we’re learning—it’s what we’ve learned​

The most transformative mindset shift is treating research as an accumulating asset, not a conveyor belt of one-off projects.​​

2. A surprising amount of unused insights remain durable​

The cutting room floor of insights that didn’t advance during study time frames often stays relevant and could be reactivated.​​

3. Three root causes: preparation, motivation, integration​

Preparation atomizes insights for future use; motivation positions insights as product drivers not optional inputs; integration creates touch points at decision moments.​​

4. Continuously rediscover, not just continuously discover​

Breaking the silo of individual studies means treating each research question as an opportunity to build on accumulated learning.​​

5. Big tent definition includes all insight generators​

UX researchers, market researchers, data scientists, customer support analysts, and “people who do research” all contribute to research wealth.​​

6. Stitching research together creates shared wins​

When summaries pull insights from multiple sources, everyone involved gets to count the win—the golden rule for snowballing collaboration.​​

7. Bring insights back at the right time​

The same insights get totally different conversations when brought to teams at different moments; red teams focused on execution can’t hear about what’s next.​​

8. Think like a product manager about insights​

You can’t bring every insight back; prioritize based on goal alignment, poor-performing metrics, and organizational measurement structures.​​

9. Product ops helps hit decision milestones​

Process leveling and understanding when decisions get made allows research to show up at the right moments, not just maintain visibility.​​

10. Customer understanding becomes the defensible asset​

As implementation gets easier through AI and new tools, how well organizations understand customers differentiates products.​​

11. Research repositories need active perspective​

Storage alone doesn’t activate insights; new systems, rituals, and practices turn repositories from archives into living knowledge bases.​​

12. The Research Ops Community remains vibrant​

Unlike many Slack groups that peak and fade, this community continues as a lively place to harvest learning in a fast-evolving field.​​

Final Thoughts: Heating Up vs. Always Available

Jake’s journey from throwing research to clients and hoping things went well to building systems at Amazon for extracting insight value reveals a fundamental truth about knowledge work.​​

Organizations repeat research not because they enjoy waste, but because finding and applying existing insights is harder than starting fresh. The conveyor belt mindset—finish study, move to next project, individualistic work flowing forward with minimal connection—creates silos within single researchers’ own bodies of work. Before addressing organizational silos, we must address how researchers prepare their own outputs for long-term use.​

The three root causes framework offers a memorable model that persists even when particulars fade. Preparation means atomizing insights and surfacing what’s important rather than leaving everything buried in reports. Motivation transforms insights from optional inputs decision-makers can cherry-pick into long-term product drivers with clear ties to goals and metrics. Integration creates touch points beyond the study time frame, building visibility and mind share, then showing up with research at decision milestones when teams are actually open to it.​

The big tent definition of customer research acknowledges that insight generation happens everywhere. Market researchers, UX researchers, data scientists, sales analysts, customer support teams, and the growing number of designers and product managers conducting their own studies all create knowledge. Stitching these sources together into stronger cases for insights creates the golden rule scenario: everyone gets more out than they put in, so collaboration snowballs.​

Timing matters as much as content. Jake’s experience bringing identical insights to teams at different moments and getting totally different conversations reveals that execution-focused “red” teams can’t hear about what’s next. Researchers already align studies to stakeholder needs; extending that skill to post-study integration means understanding organizational rhythms and product planning cycles.​

The Research Ops Community’s continued vibrancy stands out in a landscape of Slack groups that peak and fade. Jake’s work with Jonathan Richardson harvesting community learning reflects the same philosophy as Stop Wasting Research: knowledge that gets captured and activated compounds; knowledge that dissipates after its moment wastes collective investment.​

John Cutler’s forward captures the future Jake sees. As implementation becomes easier through AI and no-code tools, customer understanding becomes the defensible differentiator. Not just learning, but making meaningful structures and problem spaces that hold knowledge over time. Not asking “What tool do you use?” followed by “Why is my tool failing?” but clarifying goals and building practices around systems of learning.​

The book isn’t about conducting research—there are plenty of those. It’s about getting more value from research long-term, which necessitates new systems and involvement from more people in product development. It’s a toe in the water of an active approach to research repositories. And it’s optimistic about an industry where research as an activity grows even as roles evolve.​

The opposite of research waste is research wealth. When you dig into volumes of studies, you can’t help but get excited about what could be done. The cutting room floor of insights that were out of sync in their moment but remain durable and relevant—that’s the business asset organizations are overlooking. Bringing that wealth back into current conversations through preparation, motivation, and integration turns unused insights into product impact.​

Not all insights advance during their study time frames. But a surprising amount stays relevant. And organizations that continuously rediscover, not just continuously discover, build the shared understanding needed when product is an outcome of entire teams working together.​​

From dotcom consultant tired of hoping things went well, to Amazon principal building insight value systems, to Research Ops board member harvesting community learning, Jake’s career arc embodies the book’s message: research is not disposable. It’s wealth waiting to be activated.​

Thank you for reading!

If Jake’s insights on turning research waste into research wealth, the three root causes framework, and building systems for continuous rediscovery resonated with you, share this article with researchers and product teams seeking to maximize insight impact.

Have questions about research repositories, breaking down silos, or integrating insights into product planning? Connect with us at hi@uxarmy.com

Special thanks to Jake Burgard for writing Stop Wasting Research and sharing hard-won lessons from Microsoft, Amazon, and the Research Ops Community about treating customer understanding as a defensible organizational asset.

And to all of you, thank you for being part of the User Insights community.

⚡ This podcast is brought to you by UXArmy, an all-in-one UX research tool.