Building new pathways for customer insights to add more value to products

Hi, I’m Jake Burghardt

I help organizations improve their business outcomes by

Aligning their
product development and delivery

Product, marketing, engineering, growth, sales, service, customer support, and other functions

To their customer research assets

UX, market, CX, research science, data science, strategists, customer success or sales analysts, business intelligence, people who do research, and other sources

New book

Stop Wasting Research:
Maximize the Product Impact of Your Organization's Customer Insights

By Jake Burghardt

UX research, market research, data science, CX analysts, and other insight-generators fuel decisions in today’s product organizations—yet many of their most crucial customer insights fail to drive what’s next. Stop Wasting Research identifies root causes for this waste, then explores action ideas to increase the impact of siloed research resources. Use it to enhance collaboration, amplify learning, and drive research-informed launches.

What people are saying:

  • “Stop Wasting Research explodes the idea that managing research knowledge is only about building a library or repository. In this first-of-a-kind book, Burghardt redefines the field and offers an abundance of practical ideas for transforming scattered research into a dynamic resource for insight-hungry stakeholders.” 
    —Kate Towsey, strategic advisor, author of Research That Scales, and founder of the Cha Cha Club

  • "The blueprint I wish I'd had years ago—equipping leaders to build organizations where customer insights are seamlessly integrated into culture and decision-making."
    —Michael Nguyen, Head of Customer Intelligence at Enterpret, former Research & Strategy Leader at Figma and Asana

  • "Stop Wasting Research is a must-read for anyone who wants to see their organization's research have a real impact on product development."
    —Jenny Blackburn, Vice President of User Experience, Google Deep Mind

  • "A vital resource for anyone looking to power innovation, amplify the voice of the user, and inspire insights into ideas. If you've been wondering how to build the gold standard in research repositories and influence, this book is it." 
    —Danielle Teska, Executive UX Design & Research Leader, Salesforce

Advising

Need some advice about getting more juice out of your organization’s research?

I have plenty of ideas, experiences, and encouragement to offer!

Schedule a free intro session as sample, then purchase a block of advising time to spend over six months.

Learn more about how it works

Training

Stop Wasting Research 101:
Initiatives to Increase Research Impact in Product Development

Online training that extends the value of the Stop Wasting Research book. 

$101 self-paced course currently in development. 

Sign up for monthly newsletter to receive updates on when training becomes available.

Articles

  • Printing press in a dark room producing a roll of green squares onto the floor

    Isn’t “old” user research out of date?

    View

  • Researchers can take some basic steps to increase collaboration across silos. i.R. logo. 'Stop Wasting Research' advice

    Early steps toward cross-silo collaborations between different customer researchers

    View

  • Research insights belong in product goals, and there's different ways to get there. i.R. logo. 'Stop Wasting Research' advice.

    Integrating customer research into product goals

    View on Medium

  • AI generated geometric shapes, arranged in a grid

    Won’t Tools with AI Solve Research Waste?

    View

  • Researchers shouldn't be judged on the impact of every single insight. i.R. logo. Integrating research office hours advice

    The risks of “insight trackers” and how to avoid them

    View

  • Increase visibility of customer insights to drive action. i.R. logo. Integrating Research 'office hours' advice.

    Increasing visibility of customer insights to drive action

    View

  • Grid of letters on a board not spelling out any particular message

    “Research-Informed” not “Evidence-Based”

    View

  • What's blocking some researchers from wanting to make thier insights self-service for product people across their organization? Less context and connection with people. Create unnecessary work. Use the wrong insights. Draw the wrong conclusions....

    Opening the gates: Addressing concerns about research repositories broadening access to insights

    View

View more articles on Medium

Contact to discuss writing for your publication

Speaking

Internal presentations for your team

If your team places a bulk order for Stop Wasting Research books, I can remotely provide an overview presentation followed by Q+A (contact for details and discount codes).

Podcasts

Currently booking podcast appearances to discuss Stop Wasting Research book topics (contact to discuss). See recent appearances, below.

Webinars and conference sessions

Currently booking remote presentations to discuss Stop Wasting Research book topics (contact for details and discount codes). See recent appearances, below.

Appearances

  • Rosenfeld Media logo, an abstracted elephant

    Advancing Research


    Research repositories that deliver
    (Completed day-long workshop)

    View description

  • Limina Podcast


    Episode 3: Research and Insight Operations with Jake Burghardt

    Listen

  • Re+Ops

    ReOpsConf Presentation


    Activating insights to overcome common barriers to impact

  • DesignOps Global Conference


    Talk: “Designing research programs to increase impact"

    View description

  • ResearchOps Podcast


    Episode 16: Jake Burghardt interview

    Listen

View list of past appearances in the “Projects” section of my LinkedIn profile.

Contact to discuss appearance opportunities

About

Integrating Research is the consulting office of Jake Burghardt.

Jake’s mission is to shift expectations in the tech industry so that more of the most important product roadmap, prioritization, and design decisions are grounded in research about people and real world systems.

Jake helps organizations drive product value, outcomes, and quality by:

1. Extracting more impact from existing research assets,
2. Achieving a useful mix of new research, and
3. Integrating insights into crucial product decisions.

20+ years experience (Ex Amazon, Microsoft) in product research, vision, planning, design, and experimentation. Focused on collaboratively steering technologies toward people's real needs. 

From big tech to niche products, domains I’ve worked on include:
multi-modal AI, global e-commerce, logistics workflow, automated document authoring, power plant operation, “new space race” engineering, cockpit avionics, genetics instrumentation, creative production, and financial trading.

  • “Before he arrived, we were awash in a sea of research and feedback without any substantial insights or ways to connect them. When Jake came into the team, he started work with such tenacity and energy that he soon had leaders and practitioners with him on a journey to identify and prioritize customer pain points, and was able to get commitments from teams to address them.”

    — Amy Jiménez Márquez
    Currently VP of Product Design, Zillow

  • “Jake’s research spurred new product and design thinking at a team, organization, and company level… Jake worked closely with company leadership, design, product, and engineering to shine a light on customer pain points and resolve them. He’s a leader with impeccable judgment, helping teams to see possibilities, understand trade offs, and secure commitment and resourcing for key initiatives.”

    — Danielle Teska
    Currently VP of UX Design at Salesforce

  • “Jake's ability to deliver on promises, coupled with his innovative strategies and meticulous organization, has been instrumental in our community's success. His contributions have left an indelible mark, and it is clear that he possesses a rare blend of leadership, creativity, and organizational prowess.”

    — Holly Cole
    Executive Director, ResearchOps Community

  • “Jake is a consummate professional who holds himself to an impossible standard in both the quality of his work product and how he goes about it. Pair this with his incredible depth of field expertise and his ability to be plugged into his constituents like no one else really is and you get a true unicorn.”

    — Calvin Nguyen
    Currently VP Product Design & Insights, Noom

  • “Jake is one of the most perceptive and meticulous UX leaders I've worked with, and is an ideal collaborator… He is the perfect combination of designer, researcher, and product manager all in one – a type of person I never thought existed.”

    — Matthew Meschery,
    Currently Director of Insights & Analytics, Ford Digital Product Design

  • “His ability to dive deep and synthesize meaningful insight from customer data/observations is second-to-none. There is a certain thoroughness to his work that is difficult to replicate; rarely a stone left unturned. And beyond the high caliber craft of his research and analysis, Jake has a wonderfully elegant way of influencing the right outcomes, always driving high impact from his work.”

    — Reid Nelson
    Currently Principal UX Researcher, PayPal

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