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 get the right output. That’s why I always write a simple one-page research brief before kicking anything off. It forces focus on the business decisions we need to make while giving the research team room to find the right methodology. Here’s the structure I use: Context: What’s happening in the business or market that makes this ...Read More

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 personas on partial truths. I’m a big believer that every piece of research should start with deep customer empathy. Now, I’m assuming the reason you can’t talk to buyers is because you’re in a B2B context where access is harder. If this were B2C, I’d push harder on finding creative ways to get in front of your audience - e.g. pane ...Read More

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 kickstart thinking. AI doesn’t replace thoughtful research design or human judgment, but it does lower the barrier to entry. The best teams use it to accelerate and focus their work. A few shifts I'm seeing: Landscape scans of competitors, customer conversations, or industry trends now take hours instead of weeks. AI can synthesiz ...Read More

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 launch is a go-to-market event. They're not the same thing, and treating them like they are creates noise without meaning. The second pitfall is launching features instead of telling a story. Nobody wakes up excited about a feature. They wake up excited about what their life looks like after using it. The best launches I've been part ...Read More

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 can deliver on the promise you're making. Not perfect, but enough that the people you bring in have a good experience and come back.One of the best forcing functions is starting very small with an alpha then beta, and setting a retention goal before you go broader. If you can't retain the small group you have, you're not ready ...Read More

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 balance both depending on the decision at hand. These four consistently deliver the most bang for the buck: Customer Conversations: Nothing beats a handful of well-structured interviews to unlock empathy, validate hypotheses, and capture language you can use immediately Call Mining: Recorded calls (e.g. Gong) are a goldmine of unfilt ...Read More

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 unlock is building a living system where insights compound over time. Here’s what that looks like: Executive Summaries: Every project comes with a 1-page TL;DR of context, key findings, and implications. That’s the piece people actually reuse and gets actioned on Longitudinal Trackers: The most powerful system is when you set u ...Read More

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 a simple one-page framework that acts like a research brief. It keeps the work focused and ensures you only gather what you need to make decisions. Here’s the structure: Context: What’s happening in the business or market that makes this research necessary? Objectives: What decisions are we trying to make, and what do we need t ...Read More

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. Customer research tells you the “why” - the human motivations, pain points, and behaviors driving those numbers. The real power is how they feed each other.Market analysis can set the stage for customer research. It helps you define the right questions to ask customer. For example, if the data shows competitor adoption is spik ...Read More

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 frame it as “we’re about to spend time/money doing X, and a few quick research inputs will de-risk that choice,” it stops sounding like a cost and starts sounding like leverage. The other unlock is showing how little you need to get signal. Five well-structured customer calls can be more valuable than a 50-slide deck. A quick win ...Read More