Creating a Shippable Research Mindset

How to marry insight and action to put new things into the world with intentionality

By Alice Lee

In the past ten years of working with digital product teams, I’ve seen a trend emerging that poses a challenge to successfully shipping impactful products: the tradeoff between research and speed.

There are a number of contributing factors. A few to start: methodologies like Lean and Agile have become mainstream; competition and speed-to-market pressures have increased; and the need to cut costs has become ever more pressing in face of macroeconomic headwinds like higher interest rates. As the product lifecycle shortens in order to keep up with all these demands, product teams have naturally looked for ways to optimize as they try to balance well-informed decision-making with the need to move quickly. And this is where they can get stuck.

There’s a perceived tension between analysis and creativity, the rigors of research and the imperative for innovation, being precious about insights and being irresponsible about speed. Two opposing camps emerge: “slow and safe” researchers and “just ship it” executors — both of which create obstacles for organizations trying to launch impactful products with confidence.

But it doesn’t have to be either-or. Research is just a tool that, when applied thoughtfully, can be an accelerator rather than a drag, and an efficiency-driver rather than a resource drain. It’s about making your research shippable, and taking a practical, goal-oriented approach to learning that generates insights with direct contributions to launchable product strategies.

Erika Hall, author of Just Enough Research, puts it best: “Relevance to the real world is what separates innovation from invention.”

Why Now?

Collectively, we’re at a critical juncture. As we race forward into the age of GenAI, it’s becoming evident just how many unintended consequences there can be for products that don’t have enough of a forward-looking, intentional view of their value. And I use the term “value” here in an expansive and multi-faceted sense of the word: not only financial value to businesses, but also use-value to the lives of real people, and more broadly, pro-social value to the global society that we live in.

Technologies are shaping the world around us faster than they ever have, and it’s up to us as product leaders to responsibly shape those technologies in turn. Shippable Research is one tool in our kit, combining intentional inquiry with flexible practices to help teams balance learning with execution.

Shippable Research In Action

Shippable Research is about enduring principles, not rigid prescriptions. Here are three guiding ideas to bring into your own work:

Design is research, and research is design

Your team is not divided between thinkers and do-ers, researchers and executors, strategists and designers. Silos hold back the work; insights are the work of anyone and everyone on the team. Sometimes it’s in the act of design that the most actionable insights and research opportunities present themselves — since the knowledge needs become clearest as we explore and pressure-test our hypotheses.

This is one of the reasons why at Work & Co, instead of the traditional waterfall process, we run our strategy and design workstreams in parallel. The design team starts sketching and creating concepts at the same time that strategists plan and run the research to define the strategic vision. This is, frankly, scary on both sides. Designers can feel like the opportunity space is too wide-open and undefined; strategists can feel like they’re always one step behind in the forward march of the project.

But through this parallel approach, we find out in real time what we really need to learn to make decisions. Designers often identify the most helpful insights — whether they exist or need to be found through research. This empowers us to be laser-focused in our learning objectives and activities, rather than casting a wide net and fishing for findings that might be helpful.

Research is a mindset, not a checkbox

Research isn’t a rigid exercise that happens at a single point in time, or something that we include as a line item in a scope for appearances’ sake. Research is learning, and learning is something that happens continuously, informing every product iteration. The traditional big discovery phase upfront can break down — and often should be broken down — into progressive rounds of quicker learning that build upon each other.

Jakob Nielsen has famously argued that a good investment is to start with a qualitative study of five users to capture formative insights, design and iterate, then test again. The same principle works across other research applications beyond user studies, from competitive analysis, analytics, business research, to more. Be efficient about gathering just enough signal to inform a workable hypothesis in the early stages, then progressively iterate on the product hypothesis and body of insights as you move forward.

These smaller, faster, and more cost-effective rounds of research act as de-risking mechanisms. They allow you to hone in on more targeted learning objectives and to bring your stakeholders along the learning journey, step by step.

Stay true to objectives, not processes

Finally, product development is inherently messy. Priorities shift, teams change, the market transforms around you, sometimes in a flash. It can be easy to fall back on processes in times of complexity and let muscle-memory take over.

In those situations, less important than clinging to a specific “how” is coming back to the “why.” Return to the foundational objectives that your team and product are trying to achieve, and be open to getting flexible and creative to achieve them.

By enacting the previous two principles — enrolling the whole team in the work of insight-creation, and breaking down research into a nimbler, progressive series of activities —as part of an objective-centered approach, your product team can help maintain direction, adapt to change, and ensure value-driven outcomes even in the face of complexity and change.

Conclusion

Shippable Research is a mindset that democratizes the work of learning, making it accessible to and actionable for everyone on the team. It fosters a culture of transparency and continuous learning, breaking down silos and enrolling all stakeholders in the learning journey. It builds resilience for product teams to validate assumptions, navigate ambiguity, and course-correct as needed. It creates incremental confidence in each design decision, leading to more impactful outcomes.

Above all, Shippable Research ensures that we as an industry keep progressing and putting new things into the world with intentionality. This is one of the most powerful things we can do as product leaders and as people, looking ahead to a better-designed future.

About the author

Alice Lee is a design researcher and strategist who helps interdisciplinary teams solve complex problems. She clarifies how products and services can create lasting value: for the people who use them, for the businesses they support, and for the society they inevitably create. At Work & Co, she brings this value-centered approach to define new brand and product experiences for clients including Google, Netflix, Best Buy, and GoFundMe. Previously, Alice was Product Director at AREA 17, where she led product strategy for Fortune 500 clients like Zappos and Clinique. She also honed her deep understanding of brand, content, and product development at Stink Studios, Firstborn, Batten & Co, and BBDO.