Keeping customer insights available and actionable with research repositories

Earlier this week I had a great call with the research team at Guidewire (an insurance technology company), where we discussed the challenges of creating a research repository that people will continue to use over time.

Reusing research can save companies thousands of dollars in redundant effort and–in some cases–millions of dollars in engineering costs. But many teams abandon research repositories within months of adoption.

Why?

In my research on usage (and my own first-hand experience), I’ve found that friction is the #1 killer of research repositories. Many teams start off motivated to tag everything and create complex taxonomies, only to find that this creates too much of a burden for contributors over time. This leaves your big software investment gathering dust, while your research gets spread out (and lost) across unofficial file shares, Slack channels, and email inboxes.

Unless you’re going to hire someone to focus on research ops, the solution (I believe) is keeping administrative burden to a minimum, and prioritizing making sure that research gets INTO the repository in the first place.

Kudos to Guidewire’s research team for doing the work upfront to get it right, and to ensure that this is an investment that continues to benefit their team and the larger company.