DesignOps Global Conference 2022

Presenter Profile: Jake Burghardt is a product design leader with 20 years experience in product research, vision, planning, design, and experimentation that collaboratively steers technologies toward people’s real needs. Jake is currently exploring how to continuously integrate customer research in order to build better products. This entails integrating research content (data, observations, findings, feedback, insights) in order to better integrate customer needs into planning processes over the long haul. Previously, Jake spent 6 years activating research at Amazon, owning repositories of collated insights from multiple research sources, first in Retail and then in Alexa and Devices. Prior to Amazon, Jake consulted on products in a range of different domains, including power plant operation, new space engineering, cockpit avionics, genetics instrumentation, creative production workflow, and financial trading.

Presentation Title: Designing Research Programs –  ResearchOps  

Outline: Even though tech organizations conduct many different types of customer-focused research and analyses, they often act like laboratories without collective notebooks — unlocking only limited value from their diverse research investments. Product teams are unaware of what others within their walls have previously learned. Teams also often have a recency bias toward the latest research outputs, even though some of their most valuable insights may in fact be “old.” 

When organizations do not cultivate ongoing value from their existing research outputs, they are less connected to what really matters to the people they are striving to serve. In the great lists of potential features to build, core customer priorities are not effectively represented at the top of the queue. Research repositories, in their many forms, can be part of the solution. Leaders of these initiatives should set their sights on better integrating insights into planning processes, not just launching new software destinations that put a search box over researchers’ centralized work products. In this talk, you’ll learn about some key considerations for designing research programs and systems to make customer insights more accessible, findable, useful, and impactful for multiple audiences.

Company Website: Https://IntegratingResearch.com