Lenny Rachitsky: observation

Transcript context

…Middle range research is usually focused on a more specific set of research questions or a constituency. So if macro is like, "Let's understand the overall competitive landscape. Let's do a concept car type project where we really look ahead. Let's get involved with strategic planning," which is a wonderful thing for researchers to do, do TAM studies, other things like that, that stuff lives in the macro space. The middle range space is like, what's a good example? "We want to know how Airbnb hosts feel about their payment options." That's a really interesting, reasonable question. And we can go out and do research on that, but it's not that specific. It's not really targeted at a business problem yet. It could be. Maybe that's a result of the research, but it yields these middle range insights in which we've learned things like, "Well, hosts want flexibility about their payment options." I'm making this up. And that's a good example where it's like, "It's not that that's not an interesting set of questions, it's just not quite pointed enough." And it's not framed in the language of the funnel, or the business strategy, or the OKRs. It's not quite enough aligned enough to that. It's too blobular in that middle level and it ends up not driving impact. I think it also leads to a lot of the things as you described, people don't like about research. It delays everything. You have to wait for the research to be done to have an answer, to make a clear decision. It also creates this issue that people complain about, that PMs and product teams don't want to just make a decision on their own. They're like, "I will get this additional data point and make sure research tells us this is the right answer instead of just trusting there. " God, I guess maybe along those lines, this might be going off a little track, but what's your advice there for, say, product managers or PMs or product teams to not necessarily rely on research for that middle research? I think the reason why so many PMs ask for those middle range questions is because they haven't really gotten deep with their researcher in a way which can leverage it for maximum impact. So if the question is like, "Hey, Judd, you just pointed out a bunch of problems, can you be more solutions oriented?" Well, the solution is simple but not easy to me. It's that we need to restructure the way we make products in a way which integrates research much more fully. It looks like consistent relationships in which researchers, and the work, and the insights they provide are a part of the process from beginning to end. And I think, Lenny, you as a PM, that's how you worked. I remember you, I know who you worked with. You worked with great researchers. But honestly, most product processes are not that way. And so that's when research is a service function. It gets called in right at the end. It's reactive in the sense that a researcher in the room listening and participating in the conversation could have a ton of impact on framing exactly the right question that will drive maximum business impact, maximum product improvement at that moment, and then go do it quick, and get back, and we're onto the next. But they weren't there, the relationship wasn't there. They're not engaged in the project from the beginning. And that's the number one root of the problem. As long as research is a service discipline, I think we're going to be stuck in this spot.…

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