Research that changes the roadmap, not just the deck

Quill’s research team used to produce beautiful reports. People read them, said they were fascinating, and built what they had planned to build anyway. The research was right. It simply arrived in the wrong shape, at the wrong time, to the wrong people.

Inês tells the story of the study that changed that: three months spent finding out why learners quit Quill in their third week. Instead of a final report, the team ran weekly sessions that engineers and product managers watched live, kept a running list of the decisions each finding affected, and paired every insight with a small experiment that someone had agreed to ship. A redesign of Quill’s first month followed, and so did a lasting rise in retention.

The talk is about the mechanics of influence: timing, format, who is in the room, and how a research team earns a seat at planning rather than a slot after it.

What you will take away

• Formats that put findings in front of the people who decide, while they are still deciding
• How to tie each insight to a decision or an experiment, and track what happened next
• Ways to get engineers to research sessions, voluntarily