Where do you begin?

01.04.25 12:30 AM

It's a Thursday, and all week, you've heard rumblings about this new technology that people seem to be really excited about. Your manager asked if you'd heard about it yet, and they sang its praises, talking about how it could totally change your industry. What started as a sense of excitement started to shift in the air. It subtly seemed to shift from excitement to worry; there were brainstorm sessions being scheduled to talk about how this new technology could be incorporated into existing processes to improve them. There were contests to see who could come up with the best idea, and then, when nobody seemed to participate because the prize was kinda lame, there was an open box of sorts for ideas to be submitted whenever they struck.

A couple of weeks go by, and the rumbling seems to have died down, with a few folks still seeming pretty excited about this tech, but that seems to be it.

Then, you're sitting in a meeting with your manager, talking about career development, and your manager says, "I'd like to offer you a bit of a stretch assignment. You know that tech everyone was talking about a few weeks ago? It seems like a lot of vendors in this space are already adopting it and offering it in their solutions. I want you to go out there and see what exists, and come back with recommendations on what we should buy to try out for our own team. Can you take this on for the next few weeks and, say, in a month, come back with some initial thoughts?"

Great, now what?

You've never had to go shopping for research tools before. You ask if there's a budget. "Not really - we don't know what kind of pricing to expect, since this is so new. So that will be part of what I need you to find out; how much should we expect this to cost us?" You ask if there's a particular type of solution your manager has in mind? "Not really - it's still so early, we don't know what this tech can do quite yet, and it keeps evolving quickly. Just see what vendors are doing with it that seems exciting."

Being sent to look for research technology without a problem to be solved by the technology is a little like having a hammer in search of a nail. Actually, in this case, it's more like looking for a tool without knowing if you need it to be a hammer, a wrench, a mallet, a screwdriver, or a saw.

Setting yourself up for success

Instead of searching online for vendors who use the new tech, start by polling your peers. What about their day-to-day market research work do they wish was easier? What tasks seem to be unnecessarily complicated, and make them think, "There HAS to be a better way to do this." What are they hearing their colleagues at other companies using or doing that seems to be working well?

Take stock of what types of research are being conducted by yourself and your peers, and how much that research costs. You might want to glance over the tracker that runs twice a year, but it might cost $2.5 million to run, and might be ready for a serious overhaul that would cut that cost while increasing the flexibility of the study. Or, your team might do a lot of early-stage concept testing that runs about $2,000 per test, but if you look at the rest of the testing that happens before the concept is ready to be sent into production to get put on shelves, you find everyone is doing things differently, with different tools and vendors, on different timelines, at different costs, and there's an opportunity to create a more standard process and set of tools to get everyone on the same testing schedule and make things more predictable.

Every team has a wish list, and finding out that wish list before going out to vendors to learn about their technology solutions will help you in a few key ways.

You have a problem to be solved and criteria about what a good solution should include. This becomes the basis of your scorecard for any technology you decide to test.
You have expectations of the tech that you can describe to a salesperson. This makes sales' job easier because they will know how to cater their demo to you so that it's relevant. This makes your job easier because you won't have to wonder if anything the salesperson is showing you would actually be useful to you or any of your peers.
You have narrowed down the type of project you could use if the vendor offers a pilot study for you to test the tools. If you can use a project that was run previously with a trusted vendor, you can compare the experience, including the data quality, the speed, and the call-outs that made up that wish list for improvements to the project flow.
You have peers who can be involved in the tool evaluation who will be using this tool, so they can get to know the tool and provide feedback before any decisions are made on whether or not to purchase the tool. This gets their buy-in much earlier in the process and makes change management easier down the road.
Your recommendations for tools that use this fancy new tech will actually be relevant to your team, making excellent use of budget and resources.

So, if you are asked to go find out what's out there that uses the latest and greatest in the tech world, start with strategy. Take a few days to interview your peers to uncover the problems to be solved so that you set out with defined outcomes that will benefit your team. They will thank you for it later.

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Where do you begin?

Great, now what?

Setting yourself up for success

Z Johnson