Democratizing Research is Product Management

Nis Frome, Co-Founder and VP of Product at Feedback Loop, Roddy Knowles, VP of Research at Feedback Loop, and Alexa Szal, Product Manager at Feedback Loop, discuss how Feedback Loop built an organizational strategy around data democratization, and how product teams and insights professionals can co-create the future state of research. 

The world has gone from complicated to complex, resulting in a decision-making gap facing many companies today: a lack of access to actionable data and silos that prevent organizational-wide learning.

Companies, needing to adapt to the rapid pace of change, have adopted new tools and tech to help them scale data and insights gathering. Feedback Loop is one of those tools. Feedback Loop, a rapid consumer feedback platform, gives companies the ability to go from data to insight to intelligence.

The product has evolved significantly since Feedback Loop was founded in 2014. “Five years ago, I remember when we were selling to product and digital teams. The conversation was just selling the concept of experimentation,” says Nis Frome, co-founder and VP of Product at Feedback Loop. “So, interestingly, most of our users were not researchers historically. We didn't normally interface with consumer insights teams.”

As more and more non-product teams use Feedback Loop to scale agile research, these new insight gathering techniques have affected the research industry, which has historically prioritized statistical rigor, not speed.

“If your product team is agile, which most are, what does it actually mean? It means not trying to find one answer and make a business decision off of it, which can be what market research is. It's about constant learning, constant testing, and directionality. I think that's an interesting thing to market research sometimes,” says Roddy Knowles, VP of Research at Feedback Loop. “There is no one right direction. You're constantly moving and ebbing and flowing. Constant directionality is something that a lot of researchers have to grapple with. Sometimes it can be a bit of a mindset shift when you're trying to work and collaborate with product teams."

The answer to the speed vs. rigor debate, according to Roddy, lies in how research and product teams find better ways to collaborate. Insights professionals must figure out which parts of the research process they can make more efficient, without cutting corners. It helps too, he says, for organizations to recognize that the true value of agile will be the increased frequency of learning, not speed.

In fact, Feedback Loop’s product evolution that Nis described can be attributed to agile research and experimentation. As Alexa Szal, Product Manager at Feedback Loop, explained, one example was the launch of research templates which, like other product features that came before it, was informed by a series of iterative experiments, customer feedback, and testing.

In this episode, you’ll learn a lot about data democratization, agile research, collaboration, and insights sharing.

Here are the highlights: 

• Industry trends and challenges companies are facing today (5:22)
• How new insight gathering techniques have affected the research industry (10:48)
• Roddy gives an overview of suggested approaches for research and product collaboration (13:34)
• How Alpha’s product evolution was informed by agile research (23:32)
• The ways leaders can create a culture that encourages learning (28:02)