The Book
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I started my career as a PM. Shipping features, managing roadmaps, fighting for discovery time. Good work — but what I kept gravitating toward was the understanding part. Why users did what they did. What they actually needed. After two years, I made the shift into research and never looked back. A decade later, I've built research practices from scratch across companies of all sizes — often as the only researcher in the room, sometimes alongside designers and PMs who were already doing research without calling it that.
The hardest part was never the research itself. It was the infrastructure. The operations. The politics of getting people to actually use what you found. Every organization had the same problem: insights existed, but they never reached the right people at the right time.
That experience — ten years of building, screwing it up, and building again — plus years of conversations on the Finders to Builders podcast, became this book.
Most organizations don’t have a research problem but rather a distribution problem. The right insights aren’t reaching the right people at the right time — and no amount of studies, decks, or reports will fix that without the right infrastructure behind them.
Building the Research Engine is a practical guide for anyone responsible for making evidence matter in their organization — whether you’re a designer, product manager, founder, or researcher. It walks you through three stages of building a research practice from scratch: getting research to happen consistently, connecting it to real decisions, and making it self-sustaining so it outlasts any individual.
This is not a methods book. It assumes you know how to run a study. What it teaches is everything else: how to build the systems, culture, and communication infrastructure that turn occasional research into organizational capability.