Ali McCourt Turhal

I think about this the same way I think about writing a creative brief. If you don’t start with clarity on what problems you’re trying to understand or solve, you won’t g...

Short answer: you shouldn’t. Conversations are how you build real customer empathy and uncover the problems you can actually help solve. Without them, you’re building per...

AI is making research far more accessible. You don’t need big budgets or months of fieldwork just to get started. You can learn whatever you want quickly and use it to ki...

The biggest one I see is confusing a release with a launch. Teams ship code and call it a launch, then wonder why nobody cares. A release is an engineering event. A launc...

Funny, I was just in a sync with my PM counterparts on exactly this. Being launch ready isn't a product question, it's a business question. The bar is whether the product...

My go-to toolkit is all about balancing speed with signal. Some methods are powerful but slow (e.g. large-scale quant), others are quick but shallow. The goal is to balan...

The mistake a lot of teams make is treating research as one-off reports. They get filed away, rarely revisited, and the same questions get asked again and again. The real...

The biggest time sink in research is starting too broad or not being clear on what problem you’re solving. The fastest way to save time is to force clarity upfront. I use...

I’ve always believed scrappy research can have an outsized impact. The key is to tie research directly to a decision the company is already struggling with. If you can fr...

Market analysis and customer research are two sides of the same coin. Market analysis tells you the “what” - category trends, competitor moves, whitespace, adoption rates...