Does Product Ops multiply Research impact? | Jake Burghardt

In Episode 24 of Talking Roadmaps, Justin Woods speaks with Jake Burghardt about whether Product Operations can multiply the impact of research. They explore how research often goes unused, how Product Ops can operationalise insights across teams, and practical ways organisations can ensure discovery work actually influences product decisions and roadmaps.

Jake is the author of "Stop Wasting Research" from Rosenfeld Media and consultant at Integrating Research. Previously, he owned insight activation initiatives in Amazon’s Retail and Alexa divisions, among a range of other roles in 20+ years in tech.

Here is an audio-only version if that’s your preferred medium - and you can access it through your favourite podcasting platform if you prefer (Apple, Spotify, Amazon).

Does Product Ops multiply Research impact? | Jake Burghardt

Jake Burghardt and Justin Woods

In the next episode we have Gerisha Nadaraju, Podcaster and Senior Director of Product Operations @ Bentley Systems. So watch out for episode 25!

• Transcript

  - It's really a routing question. You know, how do we get those insights to that place? And different organisations, you know, it might be different deliverables that are sort of contributing to a roadmap or maybe the roadmap itself. But if we work backwards from there, how do we bridge what researchers are striving to create to get there and make that connection? And not because in some vindication for researchers, but because they can deliver enormous value. You know, these are the things that leaders wish they saw. As soon as they see them, they go, oh, amazing.

  - Welcome everybody to "Talking Roadmaps." In Series 2, we're talking product operations. And today's special guest is Jake. Jake, welcome. Please introduce yourself to our guests.

  - Thanks so much for having me. My name's Jake Burghardt. I am a writer and consultant at integratingresearch.com, and I really focus on the customer and market intelligence area of product operations. My background started in research in design teams, moved on to be sort of a generalist, working on everything from discovery through to design and road mapping, supporting engineering teams before product management was really a role. And then spent a lot of time in-house at different organisations, particularly at Amazon, figuring out ways to collect and amplify customer research in order to inform product roadmaps. And, you know, I wrote a book called, "Stop Wasting Research: Maximise the Product Impact of Your Organization's Customer Insights," which is very much in this vein for Rosenfeld media people's I've been advising companies on how to get more juice out of what they've learned in their organisation about their customers and their market. How can they turn it from something that's just Terry Spark into something that's more durable, something that's easy to apply, something that really shows up as proof for the importance of a bet in a product roadmap.

  - If you're enjoying the channel, subscribe, hit the bell icon and give us a like. Really nice, well, you're amongst great company here. I'm hearing product operations. I know your research background and the book. I think we've even had a couple of guests on "Talking Roadmaps" already who have provided forward words or recommendations within your book as well. Is that right?

  - Difference, that's right. Yeah. Hugo Froze was a early reviewer for me. Cutler wrote the Forward and Antonia Landi blurb did. So I to be in your series,

  - Well, you fit here, Jake. So it is great to have you here. And I want to talk about more about and bias the episode, if you will, on some of the research side of things. 'cause that that fascinates me as kind of a core component of product operations, but also product management as well. So, please feel free to elaborate into that space as we go through some of the questions, because series two is about product operations. Maybe let's start there first and I'm curious from your experience why companies might even need product operations in the first place.

  - And we're talking about sort of the how of envisioning, designing, defining, delivering products. You know, there's so many ways to go. Organisations start, they figure out ways that work for them till they don't. And you know, when it comes to my focus in you know, customer and market insights, small organisations, they learn together. They place a big bet. They often have an initial idea about a problem to solve. But as there's even a small amount of scale, suddenly things get disconnected. And we have a bunch of different touch points with learning about customers, which can be great. It can be fantastic to, you know, how are we making sense of what we're learning across? And as the number of different sources of customer insight in an organisation scales, the problem becomes more difficult. It's not long before, you know, choose from the list. You could have market researchers, data scientists, CX analysts, UX researchers, sales folks, customer support folks, you know, research scientists, any number of people generating insights that are often only hitting a small part of the organisation. And because of that, they're not fulfilling their potential value, not just as a piece of information, but as a durable business asset. So, you know, as coding becomes streamlined through AI, generative AI tooling, and we look at the change in roles in organisations and shift in what the primary work is, and how we invest effort, you know, there's clearly understanding customers in order to have a longer roadmap is a, you know, your understanding as an organisation is a competitive differentiator. You know, when we're thinking about how to deliver value to customers in a way that builds a business, treating often these different pieces of understanding within an organisation as scattered units that we don't see the big picture of and how can we to make more of the most important decisions that go on in organisation, live up to that aspiration of being grounded in research. And if we start from there and work backwards, what are sort of the operations and practises that are gonna help us get there? So kind of a walkway of an answer to that question, but just to give you an idea of the perspective I'm working from.

  - It makes sense. And what I really like about that is talking about the research and understanding customers, but then packaging that as a company asset, that's not just an input to product management, but I think is actually a valuable asset for the entire company. So that for instance, sales might develop deeper empathy, or marketing might understand the customer better, and the personas that are active there. And I think that was really a light bulb moment for me thinking of it is, is actually something that benefits all functions within the company.

  - It's interesting to think, you know, the different perspectives on product operations. You know, I work a lot in research operations as well, and design operate, you can really focus on serving your one role, or as roles become a little bit more decentralised, as folks are reaching out into each other's areas. With generative AI, you know, it's more about thinking about how are we supporting product development at large? And a lot of insights are having impacts with particular groups of stakeholders. Researchers are doing amazing things, bringing teams along, in the discovery process for a particular set of questions. But to your point, it that's not the end of the story. And that business asset, you know, the quote that resonated the most when people were viewing the book was what would an your competitor pay to know the insights that your organisation is actively forgetting, peers you know, that's not just about, that's can be role independent, and it can go all the way up to leadership. So on a programme podcast called, "Talking Roadmaps," we can think about aligning more research to the ideas that are already in place, but oftentimes argument think about, you know, setting vectors and the bigger decisions, you know, how can we make research more present in those discussions as well. So a whole variety of roles.

  - And so you mentioned companies figure out ways that work for them until they don't. And I think product operations is often seen as a function that helps companies to scale. What do you think is the purpose of product operations?

  - Space of customer and market intelligence and building operations. We can look at enabling more high quality research, and the research ops piece of it, so that when you need to discover something, you're not facing all of these common barriers. So we're moving roadblocks, just making sure that there's compliance, all those sorts of things is a big piece of research operations. And then along with that, not just focus on covering new information. I think kind of the thread across these different ideas is how do we turn the process into continuous rediscovery so that product operations, you know, and one of our function, you know, I talk to folks that are tool makers. I talk to folks who are research leaders, research ops, design ops, product ops, you know, whoever's doing this role, they're working to enable folks to remove those barriers from using research and their understanding. And in my case it's customer and market intelligence. But I think to the more, to the scope of your question, it could be on the business and you know, business side, of the intelligence, it could be understanding, the processes and structures of the organisation, and where to plug in, which is often a a common problem. You know, researchers are baffled by their organization's product operating model, and trying to plug in even though they know their insights could be useful in other places. So streamlining those sorts of things in order to, I think make organisations into the learning laboratories that they aspire to be.

  - The thing that stood out for me, there was, and what I've seen, and I'm sure you have, and maybe this is an anti-patent of research, is specific research for a specific functionality, but then you discard the research, it doesn't become evergreen, or it doesn't become referenced multiple times, even though it might have uncovered incredible insights. It got used for a piece of functionality and then discarded. Mentioned about this continuous rediscovery, how can that work within an organisation?

  - There's many ways how explosion in research tooling and different sorts of insight tooling organise market and there's sort of a tendency to think of these things as the solution, right? But obviously, you know, operations people know that there's a lot more that, you know, tools are enablers, they're not the whole thing. And so, you know, what I talk to organisations about a lot is rhetoric knowledge of any kind is expensive, and it's the kind of thing that really pains a lot of product development organisations that want to work very lean. And so how do we work backwards from the decisions that were kind of recurring decisions in the product operating model that we want to have more influence on? And we think about how do we structure things in order to enable that. And inevitably there's a lot about consolidating the information and making it more available where if research is, there's no deliberate management of across different streams, how do we kind of bring those streams together? There's a lot about sort of turning up general visibility because new research has a halo around it, that gets people excited and, and ready to jump forward. Newness in product development is a really powerful lever for research. But then I think more to your point is if a researcher down in a silo, on working on a particular feature, as you say, like conducts a study and ends up discovering 10 other things, you know, a lot of times I talk to folks who don't even document them, or don't think about having a conversation because there is no clear route for them to have impact. You know, there's barriers up that we can take down as operations people to say, if you find these things, we will combine them with like information, help you build a stronger case for those. So we're not just generating points of information, we're developing perspectives on individual problems to solve and insights. And then we'll help keep them alive in conversations and route them to people who would find them valuable. And that can't be for every last insight, right? But for the things that really matter, the things that we can look at and say, that is clearly a mover for the customer and the business. How do we keep 'em alive? There's no one way to do it. Stop wasting research. But this book is full of a lot of ideas, a menu for people to kinda choose from to explore.

  - Nice, and that's one of the things we talked about in a previous session is you can read this end to end if you want to, but it's also a dipping reference if you wanna pick up on a specific area and then put it back down again, right? Kind of like a, a pocket handbook of research operations.

  - My hope is that there's some framing ideas at the start that people find valuable and they may run off, and do things from there. And then, you know, a lot of it is sort of individual ideas within a framework of different root causes of wasted research. And yeah, give the ones that resonate based on the resources you have and what's going on in your organisation. Maybe you give them a try and if you see success, you turn 'em into operations. But there's no dictates here and there's really no one pattern to getting more done with research, you know, as is common in all sorts of product operations, right? This is where the role thrives is figuring out those and prioritising those particular points in the overall ways of working where we can really smooth things along, drive efficiencies, increase quality, make a difference.

  - I think I know the answer to this question already, but who does product operations and also if you'd like to talk about research operations in that, who do they help in the organisation?

  - I mean in this customer and market intelligence pillar, I think just different types of learning that happens and they can go to different bands and have different roles. So I mean, I think you brought up earlier sort of the empathy building in general customer understanding that especially as organisations start to scale becomes more difficult to distribute. So, you know, obviously mechanisms for direct customer connection, participation, research, and that listening in, or watching things is a valuable thing, but also distributing new insights. You know, the top insights for particular audiences helping frameworks, they help build sort of broad understanding. I call this sort of conceptual foundational insights. And then there's the ones that are, you know, I really encourage researchers to focus on insights statements that are problems to solve. So that if we're collecting a set of insights from a whole bunch of different sources over time, it doesn't take long before you have quite a list, right? How we think of this as sort of a backlog for the customer. How can you frame these as sort of problems to solve and make them parallel from there. You can think about applying different prioritisation to it, but the role and function of those in the audience, you know, are the owners of those problems. So we can talk about sort of general understanding. We could talk about, you know, getting the organisation to understand some of the core jobs a little bit better, but then where the value's gonna happen. Where we're gonna say that's a plan, that's a bet that one that was based on research, is when we develop, you know, summaries of insights, from multiple sources, multiple studies that make a compelling case, that are directly linked into plans. And that may be a product owner, that may be a designer, that may be, you know, an engineering leader, or you know, you know, reaching out into marketing. This is, we're framing this message because of this. And one of the things that was exciting about sort of owning these sorts of initiatives, and talking to teams about how they might advance this sort of thinking is it's always surprising, who makes reuse of insights and you know, researchers can kind of imagine an audience and often it's much bigger than what they, if you turn up visibility and you make things accessible, things get applied in all sorts of fascinating ways. And there's a traceability to that that allows researchers to say, well if they're linking to my node, in this collected hub of information, then you know, that's a way of justifying the work that I do, and proving my impact as effectively a cost centre oftentimes.

  - But actually, and this is, I think that's very an interesting point that you raised there, but actually when you create a function that is around problems to solve an alignment to value, it does explain why, you've seen product operations just kind of explode in the industry right now. It's something that we've always done I think to a certain extent, but making it a dedicated function that doesn't just serve product management but actually serves the business and research ops as well. I think is one of the ways that made it so successful. And actually a question to you it would be, how do you even justify having product operations or research operations in the first place? How does that happen?

  - I mean, some organisations hit a scale, and it's easy to do a back of the napkin calculation, and make the case. In many cases that's a harder argument. And you know, a lot of this is starting, especially in this market, we have to acknowledge the challenge of this time where a lot of teams are very leanly resourced. I didn't write the book with one particular role in mind. There's all sorts of people that can pick up this work. Operations folks are a primary audience in that. But you know, I tried to keep it distributed because we're in a pragmatic time where someone who's passionate about this can start experimenting and moving the needle and look to build a coalition. So know that you're lead demonstrating value in a way that builds the case for resourcing rather than assuming that it starts with a resource in this market in particular, then great things will happen. There's enough of an emphasis on sort of this being a marathon, not a particular moment. You know, if you want to reduce research waste in your organisation, that's obviously not a one and done. And then it's a question of who's passionate about it. How can you build a coalition of the willing around that, and get enough wins that other people see what you're doing, and they want in as well. It's about turning research into sort of an internal product and eventually more of a stakeholder. And so you're not, you're never taking away the work of other people, but you're turning research from ideally something that's not just an information source but also a prioritised point of view that folks can take factor into their priorities. You're never telling people what their priorities are.

  - Yes, and this is a purely personal, you know, interest question here, but how do you share the insights of that research? And what I mean by that is that you guys might uncover a gold mine of something that you found interesting, but then how do you actually bring that with context to the rest of the organisation without it almost sounding like random announcements of things. How does that work?

  - And search can serve up some non-sequitur. It's true. 'Cause you always discover things that you're not expecting. You know, people are interesting that way. That's the nature of it. That's part of what keeps me interested. That's part of what ends up developing great products, right? Of where people find differentiators. You know, there's a good amount about stitching together an insight generating community. If you think about all those sources I mentioned earlier, they're all kind of shouting to different people in an organisation intelligent about what they're doing, their jobs, great impacts, otherwise they wouldn't exist, and their careers are advancing and all those great things. But I think what we're talking about is adding a layer on top of that where we say, okay, you're doing great things. I can add more value and help you generate more impact if you participate in this. And so, you know, it's about developing you know, a lot of this is sort of internal marketing, right? There's two different factors. I break it down between sort of there's mind share, which I think to your point can be a scattered mess if you're not careful. Or it can be a very controlled thing where you have a weekly and you know, in the research repository message that people opt into, you have things that are monthly, that go out to all decision makers and product that summarise some of the top themes. You have that are auto-generated for particular teams that are available to them when they're thinking big about what they might do next. You know, there's all sorts of nodes that I talk about in the book to take out the randomization. But it all starts with, some coherence across those sources, which, you know, is often missing. Some organisations, I mean one trend in the industry, very product ops people about tuned into or part of, is consolidating insight functions where research leaders or you know, particular voice of the customer leaders are pulling in more of the insight sources in an organisation. You know, I end up talking to a lot of UX folks, because I'm published with a UX publisher and I'm shocked by how many research leaders that traditionally focus on sort of user qual are suddenly adopting all of these other sources and getting them pulled under their umbrella. So there's a wide variety of patterns. A lot of it just starts with building a more unified voice and then figuring out where to plug in.

  - Cool, thank you for sharing that with me. I think one of the things I enjoy about this podcast is learning from experts such as yourself. And even though I've been a product manager in the past, the research side of it is something that has evolved massively over the last 10, 15, 20 years even. More tools, more insights, more analytics, even as a consultant now, I'm a bit more removed from the product that, you know, the product management space, the research side of things is particularly interesting to me. So thank you for sharing that. If we talk a little bit about the good and bad of product operations, and I'm wondering what you consider, to be maybe a good practise in product operations.

  - It's the most important things, you know, worth in this change management of often working from limited resources, trying to make organisational shifts happen through little levers. You know, it's, I think a lot of, in terms of best practises when people comment about the book is sort of a change management book is about figuring out these small want behaviours and moves that can change perception and sort of snowball over time. 'Cause you know, if research is viewed as a momentary spark, as something that's delivered to individual teams, as something that the C-suite may never see, you're not gonna change that overnight. And so, you know, in a road mapping sense, it's what are the first levers I can kind of move to move towards that larger goal. There's, in terms of best practises, I think that applies to the, you know, business intelligence side of things. You know, changing a product operating model, same thing doesn't happen overnight. So much of taking a, a very gradual mindset, and the mindset that we use for iterating products, and applying it to practises and processes and to suds and behaviours that we want to change, rituals we want to tie into, which is something when I talk to different sources of information in an organisation that are eager to, for their work to be more used, they can't quite imagine sort of a programme of experiments. They don't have that sort of mindset. So I think that that's sort of a best practise that I keep having to come back to. They're coming towards a tool. I mean to the other half of your question, the tool's not gonna solve everything. You know, what are the things that you could do before you're even thinking about tooling and, you know, to kind of set this bigger picture outcome, just like, it's sort of like the feature versus outcome idea or problems to solve, but written at the level of increasing a certain kind of value in an organisation.

  - A saying came to mind and I can't give the source, but it often comes to mind, which is a fool with a tool is still a fool. And that's just something that stuck with me. And you're quite right, a tool is there to expedite a process, but the on top of that is the process and the people side of things as well. So totally makes sense. I suppose the reverse of that question then would be what antipattern or bad practises you typically see with product operations? And the second part of that question would be also, what antipattern or bad practises do you see with research ops? And I wonder if your book is probably a hint to where you might go with that.

  - They want, I think, you know, antipattern are thinking about monolithic change in trying to sell it from the top down instead of building some momentum among the community of folks that will have to make the day-to-day change. Anti-pattern is not thinking enough about the return on investment of the actions that you're asking people to take. So, you know, to dig into specifically the research piece, but this applies to anything, you know, the calculus that folks do. You should get a lot more out of contributing to something like this than you put into it. I have made this mistake repeatedly and some didn't think I was, I thought I was delivering enough value but I was asking for too much and have to par it back along the way. I think that those are some anti-pattern and things like this, like shooting for the moon, or not bringing, trying to bring folks along for the ride but not being clear enough about the value proposition for them and being realistic about it. Now the research space in particular research operations, I think it is a broad space. You know, if you look at sort of the pillars and different models that people build, it's eight, there are a lot of potential things you can invest in. A lot of what gets discussed is, you know, how are you prioritising in this organisation or that or organisation and so much of what can go wrong bench trying to do too much too fast, or charging ahead with enabling, I research an organisation, you know, when research ops first started, it was a lot about supporting researchers. The craft of research was done by researchers and you know, just in the space of a few years with the tooling explosion and changes in attitudes in the industry and resourcing and beliefs in, you know, what AI will do versus what people will do. And you know, in some cases will, in some cases it won't objects, been distribution to people who do research, and research operations is about, you know, coaching and enabling and all these things. So one of the anti-patterns that comes up a lot is just sort of setting people loose. The more, you know, I think a lot of product operations content, it talks about pulling together the different sources of customer and market insights. And we kind of munged together a lot of times in the discussion. You know, raw evidence, somewhat interpreted evidence, carefully studied and researched insights, you know, and we kind of throw these things into a common bucket, and by opening up tools quickly, you know, we're enabling people to have something that looks like a structured study trying to maybe delivering quotes and, you know, snippets that are so biassed that are being, you know, is in a sense. There's some of it, there's a whole spectrum of, there's people who are just looking to make the case for what they want to build. There's always been a theme in product development. I admire the passion, I've been that person myself. There's a lot of good intentions and how do we kind of scaffold people towards that? And reuse of research is a great scaffold because if you know it comes from a quality source already and it applies to you what could be easier, right? You don't have to invest that time. And that's really where I'm bet I'm, you know, the focus I'm placing in stop wasting research is less about conducting new research. 'Cause there's so much in the industry about that. More about how do we get more value out of the assets that we have.

  - Follow on question to that. And again, pure curiosity from my perspective, how do we make sure that that information is contemporary and is is still relevant and doesn't have a shelf life? How do we do that?

  - It's one of the most common concerns me, no one single answer, but I'll tell you some approaches I take. And in terms of expiration checks, not expiration dates, there may be governance things in research where we're legally required to remove certain customer evidence over time based on our agreements with customers, based on the laws of the land, that's baseline. Yes. Yeah. We don't, you know, obviously we comply. Beyond that, you know, especially when we're abstracting up a little bit. We're removing personally identifiable information. We're thinking about is this insight still valid? And there's a judgement call there, and we could use kind of dates to kind of prompt us to say, is this still valid? 'Cause we don't wanna have, especially insight catalogue report, library, you know, keep everything you've ever learned, right? But focusing saying these are important insights, you need to make sure that they are. And it's a judgement check. And what I've found, and people are often shocked, you know, I've done projects where I looked across hundreds of studies over, several teams over years, and there's a staggering amount that is still directly applicable. There were ethnographic studies on a device I worked on, that were four years old where everything still applied, you know, so I think in a world, in technology driven companies, we tend to think of the front of the ticker tape of that latest source. By all means, you know, where it's there, let's grab it. But for a lot of things, they're just not studied that often or the signals are weak, but they're still really valuable. We can use judgement and is not anybody that digs into this exercise with a volume of research will be surprised by how much is still useful.

  - Makes sense, a lot of this comes into human behaviours, it comes into socioeconomic factors that really don't change over decades. And so the things that we learn at one point are still relevant. Maybe they just need dusting off a little bit and you know, plumping up. But essentially it's still relevant there. So yeah, thank you for sharing that with me. That was a personal curiosity, but if we might have a bit of fun with, you know, obviously the show is called, "Talking Roadmaps." I wanna talk a bit about operations and roadmaps and I wanna talk a bit, again, I'm gonna ask you a second question more on research ops, but what do you think product operations involvement is in road mapping? What have you seen?

  - Enabling the how to thinking about where an organisation is placing a sequential set of bets towards customer value that are gonna deliver business value. You know, there's a lot of sort of consumption of different sources of information living in people's minds that then gets outputted into various formats, and communicated in conversation, maybe appears in some documents, but you know, the role of where does this come from? You know, what's justifying this? What's the rationale for this piece of roadmap, I think is the operational problem that I'm very excited about. Where if these organisations are sort of R&D laboratories towards, you know, studies to value over time, in these roadmaps, how are we justifying that? Where's the proof? And if I'm a leader looking at a teams roadmap, how do I know that you're not just pulling things out of thin air and sometimes great things are pulled out of thin air, right? So don't get me wrong, but how can we increase the ratio of things that have direct justification in some sort of intelligence? And then to your research ops question, you know, that intelligence for me is very much about customer and market intelligence and you know, it's the exact place where researchers talk about wanting to be. If you talk to researchers about their career path and where they want to go, they'll talk about, well I'm working on some tactical things now, but eventually I hope to work on these projects that are gonna change the roadmap. The mindset that I'm trying to shift and you know, those communities and in different organisations is this is a kind of a false dichotomy, and focusing on the type of research is not really what it's gonna get us there. You have to have some big picture insights, but those can come from all sorts of studies and we can do take mixed kinds of studies. We don't have to do it either or. And it's really a routing question, you know, how do we get those insights to that place. And different organisations, you know, it might be different deliverables that are sort of contributing to a roadmap or it may be the roadmap itself, but if we work backwards from there, how do we bridge what researchers are striving to create to get there and make that connection? And not because in some vindication for researchers, but because they can deliver enormous value. You know, these are the things that leaders wish they saw. As soon as they see them they go, oh amazing. You know, they're just invisible to them oftentimes.

  - And so kind of like this beautiful conflation of what we're talking about now. Should we have research roadmaps, Jake?

  - Yeah, absolutely. I mean, to speak to two different levels. I mean on the level of the book where I'm talking about some sort of initiative to get more value out of research in an organisation, to figure out ways to operationalize more leverage from these researcher business assets. Obviously you're not doing that all at once. This is a roadmap problem. This is experimentation towards certain outcomes. And then research roadmaps, you know, individual teams create as a person who has consolidated a lot of research and organisations, you inevitably get the question of, oh, okay, that's what's known what's coming next. Leaders are fascinated by this, right? They in a sense, if you work backwards from I have a question about something, you imagine the different sources, right? You imagine drawing from existing research. Okay, it, there isn't quite the thing that I want, I'm learning a lot. I've got some adjacent things which always happens, you know, like, oh I didn't think of that. And then from there it's okay, is any new research going on about this? And then if there isn't, how can I plug in and get this question answered? You know, that sort of sequence is not very functional in most organisations, and a lot of research teams are creating individual roadmaps for their particular silo. But I've a few times gone through and helped teams kinda like pull together collective roadmaps and it's amazing the overlap between them, and then you publicise that and leaders get really excited and suddenly researchers find audiences that could get their work into roadmaps that they wouldn't have had otherwise just by publishing the collective roadmap. That idea made it into the book is one of the ideas.

  - And I think it positions research not as being a de-risking function. I.E we had an idea, let's research the idea, but it comes from, in a place like you said, it's a lever, it's a place where actual requirements and insights can come from, that can actually inform the roadmap, not just to de-risk ideas that we've already had. And I think that's really important. I'm a big fan of roadmapping, the discovery work, the research work, in fact roadmapping a lot that isn't just product development because that is a disservice to product management in general because we do much more than just development, right? Oh building features. So I'm a big fan of that. I wonder, I said we mentioned at the beginning of the episode during great company here, I wonder whose advice on product ops, and research ops as well, that you listen to.

  - Oh yeah, I mean thank you for that question. I think, you know, I am eagerly anticipating Melissa Perri and Denise Tilles second edition of "Product Operations" with more of an AI focus. I think that that's some of the fundamental, you know, this shift is just everybody's learning together and I know they're gonna be a great resource there. John Cutler, endless inspiration on all things organisation around product development and you know, Antonia Landi product ops Confidential is something that I tune into every time it comes into my inbox. We mentioned Hugo as well. You know, the thing that's fascinating there is he worked on the research ops community board for a while, so he's very much plugged into these different sides. So I'm always interested in his perspective. And on the research ops side, you know, I'd encourage folks to, and I can share links for the Research Ops Review, and the Research Ops Community, both have publications, that are sharing topics in this space and you know, a whole bunch of different thought leaders that kind of publish into those spaces an exciting time, you know, all these things are developing so fast, the list could be very long.

  - No, I really appreciate that and it's fantastic. We've had some of those people on the channel already, so if you folks listening at home, in the audience, please go through and look at some of the back catalogue. We've had some wonderful guests that have shared some information here, which Jake has shared, so definitely check them out. Jake, I want to talk a little bit about your philosophy of product operations and whether you are able to distil that into a couple of sentences and you're welcome to take, you know, a bit of time to think about that as well. How would you distil it down into its essence?

  - Challenging question 'cause it's the kind of, there's so much dependency on the particulars of organisations that are easy to get off and into the weeds on, but you know, to really get down to the centre of it is, for me, we are improving the how of product development at large product management in particular in order to find and really make the most of those opportunities that are valuable for the customer, and will deliver for the business. And in the research ops piece in particular, or if we think, you know, more broadly to the customer and market insights pillar, you know, I really, I come back to this idea, my intent and where I believe the value, untapped value is making more visible and turning up, the number of decisions that where you can clearly see that research was an enabler, and from there there's a positive feedback loop. So longer than two sentences.

  - Yeah, no, absolutely, and it is a tough question, right, because it really, the classic answer is it depends, but I think what you've shared there makes sense, and is along the similar vein that we've heard before, it's an enabling function. You mentioned product development, product management, but actually some of the best product operations, it serves the company. I think the common misbelief is the product operations is there just to make product management people's lives better, but really it's there to, as an enabler for the entire organisation. So let's step a little bit away from product operations. I'm wondering if there was something that I should have asked you about research operations, that I didn't or something that you'd just like to share. Anything that comes top of mind.

  - One of the things that I'm talking to teams about lately that may be interesting to your listeners is, as we're all figuring out the role of Generative AI and agents in different operational facets when it comes to, you know, accruing knowledge and getting more value out of it, a default pattern I'm seeing is, you know, sort of a file pile of different kinds of customer content, whether it is raw evidence from a feed or, you know, highly interpreted research with general purpose agent on top without much special prompting. And I think this is the next space that I'm going to be writing into is, you know, if that's the norm that's developed in a lot of organisations, and it is accomplishable and it is potentially, you know, a V-zero that we can build from, where can we build from there? And there's just so much we can do in the system prompting for these agents that, like you would for any other specialised process where what we reflect relative value of different information sources. Is it raw data or is it heavily interpreted? Help people navigate that information. We point to raw sources so that you mentioned context earlier. I feel like we're losing a lot of context as AI are summarising and I have concerns operationally, you know, if we're opening the door there in that sort of way, what is research compared to just the data feed? We're not helping perceptions in a time when we want to be elevating and educating and building research literacy in organisations, not in some academic sense, but so that we don't make mistakes from data. We see the numbers and we see quotes, and we see different evidence points, and we can trust that they're from a great process. So there's one thought that comes to mind, I think that's sort of my burning question right now as I talk to different teams is how can we move on from that? And I'm sure one of your listeners has some great ideas that I'm all ears.

  - Amazing, and that's just a lovely segue into the next piece, which is, Jake, I've loved learning from you today. How can people get in contact with you? Tell us a little bit more about your book, and the work that you're doing with integrating research.

  - Oh yeah, thank you. So the book is called, "Stop Wasting Research: Maximise the Product Impact of Your Organization's Customer Insights." I'll share a discount code for the show nodes. And you know, I welcome any conversation in this space. If you're listening to this and this is your jam, or if this is something that you're just beginning to think about, please feel free to reach out. I'm a active on LinkedIn, or you can find me at integratingresearch.com. I've been advising companies as they sort of move into these spaces to get more juice out of their learning and to develop more evidence-based roadmaps. So I'd love to hear from you.

  - Well, Jake, it just leaves me to say thank you so much for being a fan of the channel. Thank you so much for reaching out to us. Thank you for sharing the wealth of knowledge that you have in product operations and specifically the research side of that. As I mentioned, it's an area that I don't have a lot of experience in, but personally find very interesting. I think it's something that we've all done, whether we've known it or not, but actually what you are bringing is those best practises. And I love the thought of, you know, that a lot of research exists already out there. Let's stop wasting it. I think, you know, that's a fantastic mission to go after. So all that leads me to say is thank you so much for joining on the channel. For those of you that are listening at home, on the podcast, on YouTube, if something that Jake's mentioned really resonates with you, please do give us a like, consider subscribing to the channel, or drop a comment. Jake's already shared his details if you want to get in contact, so please do. He's an incredible resource and a gem within the community. So Jake, that just leaves me to say thank you so much for joining us.

  - Thank you so much, Justin. It's been a pleasure.