How do you build a research repository to house all your customer insights, market research, etc.?

Great question! I think this is always a great aspiration, because when you do it right, you can empower your whole company to be much more self-service in how they tap into company intelligence and institutional insights. That said, getting organized in this way can be a big task depending on how much work your team has built up. You’ll want to make sure that any repository is going to be well-used before putting too much time and effort into it.

When deciding how to build the right kind of research repository, I’d think through several factors:

1. How big is your company?

2. What kind of resources do you have to create and maintain this?

3. What is the informational culture like at your company?

4. Who are your largest internal consumers of research insights and what are their goals?

5. Who are all the other types of internal stakeholders who you need to serve with this solution?

6. How easy is it for you to categorize your efforts into an easy-to-follow information hierarchy?

7. How many researchers will be contributing to this repository, and how confident are you in their ability to follow a standard protocol for cataloguing things?

8. How fancy are you looking to get? Do you want a strong foldering system with search? Or are you looking to build a repository where there is more interaction, commenting, and interlinking?
   

A few things that I’ve seen work:

• Centralized slack channel

  • Pros: Real-time updates, threaded conversation, easy to mention people, easy and cheap to create and maintain

  • Cons: Not terribly organized, poor search

• Confluence or Notion space

  • Pros: Set up an information hierarchy that works with your business strategy and people’s mental models, great place to send new hires to get the lay of the land

  • Cons: Harder to update and maintain consistency, can feel overly passive, search is pretty dependent on your naming conventions

• Custom GPTs (though this can be hard to get right and runs up against limitations)

  • Pros: Can build more interactive layers in and focus on GPTs for specific audiences or business problems

  • Cons: Limited number of documents you can upload as the source of truth, may need to do a lot of shaping to make sure it doesn’t hallucinate and always shares its source location, may not get high adoption if it’s hard to use

• Insights management solutions like Looppanel, Dovetail, or Condens

  • Pros: These are products built for researchers to solve these problems! 

  • Cons: They cost money and time to set up and may or may not get high adoption internally

There’s no one right way to go. I recommend you take stock of what kinds of collaboration and information tools are the favorites of your organization and find ways to tie what you’re building back into those. Build where the people are!