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In today’s article, David Yin, a marketing and insights expert with over 20 years of experience introducing groundbreaking consumer products – from CPG (Clorox, Avon), to start-ups (Eventbrite, Fitbit), to category leaders (Ancestry, Labcorp) – shares his playbook for building Research & Insights teams, uncovering transformative insights, and scaling these insights to fuel billion-dollar products.

A good insight is worth millions. A great insight is worth billions. A breakthrough insight creates an enduring company. The process to uncover insights can vary — from a very intuitive feel (any <10 person startup) to a very structured sequential process (think Apple).

Early on, you often identify insights based on gut feel — you’ve experienced the problem first hand and have been in the shoes of the customer — you know the pain, why existing products fail, and have a unique perspective on how to solve it. As you scale, the knowledge and connectedness to these insights varies. You hire new executives, new product managers, new marketers. Each coming in with their lived experiences and assumptions about who the customer is and what to build for them. 

As customer knowledge becomes diffuse, everyone in the company develops their own opinion about the customer, frequently lacking scalable data to back these views. Taken to its logical conclusion, each person believes their own opinion holds the highest value. These opinions become like different currencies. And suddenly you have hundreds of people vying for their own currency to be most valuable. Insights gathered from real customers are like a unified currency: when everyone agrees on their value – execution is accelerated. But when one person's 'dollar' is valued differently by another, progress grinds to a halt. Value alignment reduces friction. 

To address this, companies have gone to great lengths to prioritize customer centricity in their operating principles. Amazon has an empty chair in every meeting. Intuit displays a kitchen table at headquarters. Airbnb models meeting rooms after popular listings. These aren’t just cultural artifacts; they underscore how crucial customer centricity is to each company. This focus, often rooted in the founder's values, customer centricity, and the insights that it produces, is a competitive advantage.

Creating a Competitive Advantage

The job of the Research & Insights team shouldn’t be to “run surveys and interviews”. It should be to build the organization's data-driven intuition. Sometimes Research & Insights teams can get bogged down in hundreds of research requests on every little question. The goal is to make teams confident enough in their knowledge of the target customers/market that they only need to make research requests when they are confronted with new strategic questions or exploring new horizons.

 Without a strong commitment to customer insights, companies risk fading into mediocrity. That’s why they should commit resources to building a Research & Insights team that is given the remit to create competitive advantage. Bland offerings and uninspired releases often follow when Research & Insights teams are absent or disempowered. Often companies don’t realize they’re not approaching Insights the right way to get the outcome they want. Strong insights aren’t a luxury—they are the foundation of standout businesses in any market.

I’ll share how you can establish and operate a Research and Insights function that consistently delivers insights which fuel billion-dollar products. The performance bar is for the company and its executives to understand customers and the market so deeply, it's a competitive advantage. For this to be true, the team must demonstrate 5 core capabilities beyond just conducting the research: 

• Dig up capital “I” insights ⛏️

• Nurture the faith 🙏

• Connect the dots  🌐

• Inform the strategy ↗️

• Build customer champions ❤️

Let’s dive in. 

Dig up capital “I” insights ⛏️

What exactly is an insight? How is a fact or observation different from an insight? What is a capital “I” insight? People use the word ‘insight’ all the time and they don’t really know what it means. The definition I use and teach my teams is that a true "Insight" has to pass the three pillar test:

The Three Pillar Test

Below are two basic examples, one that passes the three pillars test and one that does not.

Let’s look at two illustrative insights around smart watches and an insight around fun.

Nurture the faith 🙏

The effectiveness of consumer insights is built on faith. The company must believe that insights from customers are valuable in order for them to be actionable. It's like currency: if we don't both agree on its value, we can't exchange it to move forward. It’s important to actively nurture and develop an organization’s faith in customer insights and avoid pitfalls that can lead teams to believe “research doesn’t work”. For example, there’s a ton of lore about leaders like Steve Jobs and Henry Ford saying “consumers can’t tell you what they want”. Here’s the thing, a great consumer researcher will agree, consumers can’t tell you what they want - don’t ask them for solutions. What consumers can tell, or show, you is what they need, which can unlock all kinds of new ideas 

To nurture the faith with executives and cross-functional leaders, a Research & Insights team must connect with all their stakeholders regularly and manage the research for three key attributes: quality, clarity, and actionability.

Quality

• Quality: Ensure data accuracy and reliability through rigorous evaluation and continuous attention to detail.  Place an emphasis on the Research & Insights team’s technical research fundamentals in order to reduce biases and boost research reliability. Manage respondent quality by partnering with high quality vendors and creating processes to weed out poor responses. 

• Pragmatic Analysis: Identify which questions need robust research and which can be solved intuitively. Not all research efforts require the same level of fidelity.

• Find the Pattern: A single result isn't an insight. To deeply understand a customer, the Research &  Insights team must connect new findings with existing knowledge. At 90% confidence, results are by definition potentially wrong one out of ten times.

Clarity

• Simplify Language: Use clear, jargon-free language for easy understanding by all stakeholders. Balance accuracy with accessibility, avoiding technical terms for those less familiar with the research. 

• Create Narratives: Many teams in an organization can easily become overwhelmed when too much data is shared at once. Create a story about the customer insights that can be more easily remembered - most people remember stories, not stats. Leverage executive summaries, so the audience can easily absorb all the findings. Still include a full report or other mechanism for those that want to ‘double click’ on the process and learnings.

• Visual Storytelling: Employ images, diagrams, charts, and infographics to convey insights intuitively. Using visual framing can be an effective way to show the audience the broader system and how an individual research read-out fits into the big picture. 

• Contextual Relevance: Provide just enough context to explain the significance and implications of the data. What you’ve learned about customers should fit into what the business is trying to accomplish.

Actionability

• Practical Recommendations: Translate insights into specific, actionable steps for teams such as product and marketing.

• Feasibility Considerations: Learn enough about what other teams do to ensure recommendations are practical and align with the organization’s capabilities.

• Business Impact: Highlight the potential business impact of research findings whenever possible to help prioritize efforts and resources.

• Follow-Up Mechanisms: Set up processes to track implementation and impact, making adjustments as needed.

• Partnership Style: Ultimately, Research & Insights teams are “influence” functions that don’t own execution. These teams should remember that how they communicate with other teams can be at the crux of whether learnings are put into action.

Delivering on those three dimensions is necessary, but not sufficient for nurturing the faith. Two additional building blocks are cultivating an executive champion and partnering with advocates.

• Cultivate an Executive Champion: an executive sponsor is a prerequisite to an effective R&I function. It's about leveraging your executive champion to get into the right rooms and ask the right questions. When establishing the function, understand where the executive demand for insights will come from, align on expectations for what insights will solve, and assess willingness to invest and adjust expectations accordingly. Once you’ve identified your executive champion, nurture the relationship by checking in regularly, understanding their biggest business issues, identifying areas where research could make the biggest impact, and closing the loop on “big wins” and potential opportunities that have been identified through the research. 

• Partner with Advocates: Identify and partner with your advocates across Product, Marketing, and Operations to ensure insights are integrated effectively. Not every person on these teams will be receptive. Find the individuals that are most open, create visible value for those initial partners, and expand partnership opportunities based on those visible wins.

How Insights can partner with advocates

Insights <> Product

• Collaborate Early: Engage PMs early to align insights with product needs for relevance.

• Define Target Users: Work with PMs to identify customer needs and use cases for high-impact features.

• Continuous Feedback: Stay involved in alpha/beta phases to synthesize feedback and prioritize features.

• Showcasing Impact: Highlight successful cases where insights influenced product decisions to build trust.

Application: At Fitbit, we implemented a 3x/year feature prioritization process with the product team to inform and refine the roadmap for maximum consumer impact.

Insights <> Marketing

• Define Target Audience: Partner with Marketing to refine market segments and target audience definitions.

• Pricing & Packaging: Use research (e.g., discrete choice models, etc.) to guide feature-pricing combos that drive adoption.

• Brand Health Metrics: Track brand and marketing efforts to measure  awareness, perception, trust, and key  attributes that influence the business.

• Guide Messaging: Inspire and refine messaging based on ongoing customer feedback and research.

• Effective Creative: Provide insights that inspire new creative. Test concepts in the early stages of creative development. Conduct creative testing early enough that insights are still actiable before campaigns launch.

• Support Press: Offer insights and data to enhance press coverage and media impact.

Application: At Fitbit, we conducted an annual feature-pricing conjoint to understand how new features would impact consumer choice across the portfolio and which ones most influenced purchase

One of the first things I do when starting Research & Insights functions is to set up basic Brand Tracking since their value is rooted in trends over time.

Insights <> Operations

• Customer Satisfaction: Partner with Operations to pinpoint and address key customer experience gaps using data.

• Gather Signals: Conduct regular experience & satisfaction studies to gather quality signals, especially during launch to help teams adjust quickly and drive adoption

• Correlate to Outcomes: Develop the relationship between customer feedback and key metrics.

Application: Similar to Brand Tracking, Customer Satisfaction/Experience Measurement is one of the first studies/processes I implement when starting an R&I function. It’s one of the places cross-functional teams find obvious value in order to start building trust and influence.

Connect the dots 🌐

Insights come from across the business – customer-facing teams, sales, product, marketing, customer success – sometimes in structured output but often it’s less structured and emergent. There should be a team that is actively engaging across the company to gather signals and synthesize everything into a point of view based on the business needs. A team who also teaches and empowers the whole organization to champion the customer. That should be the Research & Insights team.

Inform the strategy 🎯

Implementing and operating a successful Research & Insights function is about teaching and influencing. While there are foundational skills for both qualitative and quantitative researchers, for the team to become invaluable to the organization, those skills aren’t enough. 

The team has to meet the organization beyond the research to teach and influence cross-functional partners, helping them to build their data-driven intuition and champion the consumer. Great Research & Insights teams eventually grow into strategic leaders by addressing foundational questions about the market and the customer, forging strong partnerships, and informing strategy by implementing effective 1) synthesis, 2) frameworks, and 3) processes. 

Answer Foundational Questions: There are two kinds of research: tactical and foundational. Research & Insights teams need to get beyond tactical research, that informs decisions in the moment, to foundational research that will act as the basis for longer term decision making. 

Research & Insights teams need to gather these bigger foundational questions as they come up, make space to invest in answering them at high fidelity, and set the stage for teaching and influencing. 

1) Synthesis: leverage the whole body of knowledge to influence; don’t get overly focused on the specific project or question you’re trying to answer. Connect work back to the broader business context and customer knowledge your team has been gathering. 

• Holistic Integration: Leverage the entire body of knowledge to inform decisions when possible, not just individual studies. Partner teams often have specific requests, but Insights should use historical and surrounding data to share patterns and context. Connect the dots across various sources such as customer feedback, market trends, and competitor analysis to craft the strongest narratives and recommendations.

• Focusing Documents: Regularly create insights summaries that synthesize and compile research findings across the body of work conducted to capture the most important and actionable parts of the customer and market narrative. Help cross-functional teams see the forest for the trees. 

2) Frameworks: teams often need help to frame their problems and questions. Insights teams can help to create clarity by actively developing rationales for how disparate ideas and findings are connected to one another. The ultimate goal is to build system-level thinking and guide choices that fit into a bigger picture. A useful approach is to use frameworks that help teams understand the broader context of their decisions and the customer perspective. There are many frameworks R&I teams can use. Five of my favorites for informing strategy are: value vs frequency, Kano model, benefit ladders, habit cycle, and attention/decision/retention. 

1. Value vs Frequency

When to use: Product Strategy

Helpful for contextualizing the value your product delivers and whether it’s sufficient for success.

Mapping out how often consumers touch each part of an experience and what they get from it can be useful for framing discussions and choices.

2. Kano Model

When to use: Feature Prioritization

Helpful to delineate which features are simply nice to have vs ones that will delight customers.

The Kano theory includes a built-in way to frame survey responses into categories so there’s a better understanding of what is a “good response”.

3. Benefit Ladder

When to use: Product/Marketing Connection

Helpful for teams to create the link between product attributes and marketing messages/promises

Product and marketing can often feel like they’re on different pages. Actively creating a bridge between the work of the two teams through the customer lens can facilitate productive conversations. 

4. Habit Cycle

When to use: Product Role in Habit Formation

Helpful for helping teams understand the experience cycle with the product. 

The language around habit formation (trigger-action-reward) has made its way into the mainstream, but teams still need help connecting the role of their specific product in that cycle. 

At Fitbit and Ancestry the products were part of a consumer’s habits in different ways and identifying that intersection for teams can be a significant unlock (Is the product itself the trigger for the habit? Does the product require an external trigger to start the habit?)

5. Attention/Decision/Retention

When to use: Insights in Funnel Context

Helpful for addressing perceived conflicts in the consumer learnings. 

Teams will sometimes say “our insights are inconsistent/conflict with one another”. One of the main reasons for this conflict is that they aren’t considering the insights in the right context. What gets a consumer's Attention, isn’t always what drives their purchase Decision, and it’s likely not what drives their Retention. 

A classic example is shampoo. A particular message in an ad may have gotten someone’s Attention to check out a new shampoo. However, at the shelf, consumers generally grab the bottle, flip it open, and take a whiff before deciding whether to buy. If they don’t like the smell, they put it back, which may have nothing to do with the ad. Similarly, when they get the product home and use it, the reason they love it may not be exactly because of what they saw in the ad or even the smell.

3) Processes: build a shared, consistent understanding with partner teams on how and when to work with the Research & Insights team. Failure is when Research & Insights operates as a silo or a reactive service. The most effective model is when their work is integrated into the partner team’s workflows.

• Row Together: Establish a rhythm for regular activities like annual, bi-annual, or quarterly programs so cross-functional teams know when to plug in and incorporate into their workflows.

• Collaborative Sessions: Facilitate workshops where cross-functional teams can generate solutions, practice applying insights, and take ownership from insight to implementation. Help them build their data-driven intuition.

• Tools and Templates: Implement standardized research approaches to answer specific recurring questions and templates for research briefs, insights presentations, and action plans/roadmaps. 

Build customer champions ❤️

The Research & Insights Team can’t be everywhere. What they can do is build the comfort level and confidence of the broader organization to champion the customer when they aren’t present. A crucial step in that process is to go on Insights Roadshows, proactively sharing, teaching, and reinforcing actionable insights for the cross functional teams to build their data-driven intuition. Research & Insights teams often default to presenting once and moving on, but repetition and practice with the data is necessary for teams to fully absorb and activate new knowledge. 

Two example of Roadshows from Fitbit:

• Annual Insights Year in Review: We synthesized all the learnings from the previous year and then proactively went around the company to share and reinforce the most important insights. In some cases these were meetings scheduled specifically for this purpose. Other times we joined existing monthly team meetings. We found what worked for each of the different teams to meet them where they were. One year, we gave the Year in Review presentation over 30 times.

• Segmentation Activation: Once we had the results of our market segmentation, we not only scheduled presentations with teams across the organization, but we also created a “segmentation workshop in a box”. As part of the share-out, we reserved time for hands-on exercises that gave team members the ability to practice with their new knowledge and build confidence that they truly understood the distinctions between segments. 

What to expect when a Research & Insights Team is living its potential  

A strong Research & Insights function plays a crucial role in enabling data-driven decision making and strategic planning through deep customer and market intuition. Expect the team to provide sharp market and customer insights through qualitative and quantitative research, gathering signals from across the org and customer journey, and strategic synthesis and framing that clarifies the way forward for growth.