I spend a lot of time helping teams figure out what they actually need to research before they start researching it. That sounds obvious, but most people jump straight into investigation mode without clarity on their real question. Is it "what's the market size?" or "why are customers switching to competitors?" These are totally different problems requiring different approaches.
The framing stage is where I push back hardest. I ask a lot of questions. What decision hangs on this research? Who needs to believe the answer? What would change your mind? Sometimes after twenty minutes of this, people realize they don't need a market report at all—they need user interviews or competitive pricing analysis instead. Other times they discover their actual question is much narrower than they thought, which saves everyone time.
When I do move into the research phase, I'm mostly trying to build a picture from multiple angles and then find where the sources agree and disagree. That's where the real insight lives, in the tensions and contradictions. I use ResearchMaster AI to handle the heavy lifting of gathering and organizing information when I'm working under time pressure, but the actual sense-making still requires reading through what's been found and asking whether it actually answers the original question.
The biggest lesson I've learned is that good research is as much about asking the right thing as it is about finding information. A perfect answer to the wrong question is just noise.
Top comments (0)