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InsightHunt

Hunt the Insights

J

Judd Antin

Former Head of Research at Airbnb & Meta

Independent Consultant

🔍 User Research (1)👥 Team & Culture (1)🚀 Career & Leadership (1)

Key Takeaways

  • 1.User research is currently dying because it operates as a service function rather than a strategic partner.
  • 2.Stop doing 'Middle Range' research; focus on Macro (Strategic) and Micro (Tactical) research instead.
  • 3.User-Centered Performance is a trap where teams signal customer obsession without actually wanting to learn or change decisions.
  • 4.Researchers must understand the P&L, conversion funnels, and OKRs to be effective.
  • 5.Stop asking for validation; start asking researchers to falsify your assumptions.
  • 6.NPS is a flawed metric; use Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) instead for better data integrity.
  • 7.The best researchers are 'Swiss Army Knives' with skills in qual, quant, stats, surveys, and SQL/AI.

Methodologies(3)

🔍 User Research

A classification system for research impact. Teams should maximize Macro and Micro research while minimizing the nebulous 'Middle Range' research that often confirms biases or states the obvious.

Core Principles

  • 1.Focus on Macro: Strategic, forward-looking work like concept cars, TAM studies, and competitive landscape analysis.
  • 2.Focus on Micro: Tactical, fast evaluative work (usability testing, A/B test deep dives) that optimizes specific funnel steps.
  • 3.Eliminate Middle Range: Avoid vague questions like 'How do users feel about X?' which yield blobular insights that are hard to operationalize.

"Product managers love to ask for middle range research that they can use to justify decisions they're reluctant to make on their own."

#macro-middle-micro#research#users
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👥 Team & Culture

User-Centered Performance is doing work to signal customer obsession rather than to learn. To fix this, teams must shift from seeking validation to seeking falsification.

Core Principles

  • 1.Don't Validate, Falsify: Approach research wanting to be proven wrong. Look for evidence that destroys your assumptions.
  • 2.Avoid 'Check the Box' Studies: If the decision is already made or it's too late to change the product, do not run the study.
  • 3.Beware of Executive Listening: Founders/Execs sitting in focus groups often reinforces bias rather than providing rigorous insight.

"It's work we do to signal to each other how customer obsessed we are, not because we want to make a different decision."

#escaping#user-centered#performance
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🚀 Career & Leadership

Modern researchers cannot just be empathetic listeners. They must be 'Swiss Army Knives' capable of mixed methods to answer business questions quickly and rigorously.

Core Principles

  • 1.Formative/Generative: Innovation-focused, ethnographic fieldwork to find new opportunities.
  • 2.Evaluative: Usability testing to ensure execution excellence.
  • 3.Survey Design: Rigorous quantitative data collection (avoiding bad survey science).
  • +2 more...

"If all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail. You want a researcher who's got a Swiss army knife."

#5-tool#researcher#career
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