Market Researcher: Sharing my daily learnings | 🎤 Speaker | ☕️ Coffee and 🍪 fan

Struggling to prove your research team’s value while juggling deadlines, budgets, and skeptical stakeholders?

Here’s the reality: 

Most organisations see research as a cost center. 

That won’t change, unless you do.

After 10+ years leading insight projects across agency, in-house, and SaaS, I’ve learned that real buy-in comes from translating “geek speak” into commercial impact.

What I do:

- Teach market researchers how to become commercially unmissable, not just “the KPI service desk.”

- Share frameworks for defending budgets, influencing decisions, and landing executive buy-in.

- Arm you with tactical playbooks, templates, and ROI scripts to use right away.

I help teams and leaders who want to:

1. Prove ROI to senior stakeholders
2. Get heard by the C-suite
3. Outperform the competition (without more budget)

Seen in: Forbes, Advertising Week, GreenBook, MRS, IBTM
Spoken at: MRS, Advertising Week, IBTM, corporate client offsites

How to connect:

Subscribe to the ResearchGeek Newsletter: 600+ researchers get short, actionable tips every Thursday

Follow for daily posts on LinkedIn (5x/week tactics you won’t see anywhere else)

Message if you want to collaborate or bring me in for your next event

P.S. If coffee is on the agenda… I’m in.

⚡️Jake Pryszlak

UX Research Lead | ReOps Specialist | Speaker

I'm Julian. I build research practices from scratch.

Whether in-house or as a consultant, I partner with founders, product and design leaders to establish research where there was none. The goal? Helping organizations make better informed decisions. Stakeholder buy-in, proving value, building the infrastructure that enables teams to actually learn from their users. 

I've always been either the first researcher or one of the first hires. At this point, it's less of a coincidence and more of a specialty. So I started sharing what I've learned along the way through Finders to Builders, a podcast and Substack about the messy reality of building research practices from zero. 

If you're trying to get research off the ground, or wondering why it's not flying yet, let's talk... or give me a follow.

DISCLAIMER: Views and opinions expressed are exclusively my own and do not reflect those of my current employer or any of my previous employers.

Julian Della Mattia

Fake research is worse than no research.
No research = you know you're guessing.
Fake research = you think you've stopped guessing, but you haven't. 

You've just made the uncertainty invisible.
And invisible uncertainty is the most dangerous kind.

The most common version right now: pasting a brief into an AI tool and asking it to tell you what your users think.

The output looks like insight. It has structure, it sounds confident, it uses the right words. 

But it's just hallucination built on fluff.

The AI is putting together a patchwork of data and giving it back to you disguised as a convincing insight.

If you are using that to inform your decisions thinking that "you've done some research", that's your red flag.

Author of Building the Research Engine (coming May 2026) | Building systems that turn evidence into decisions | Speaker & Facilitator | Senior User Insights Manager

"Validated" is one of the most misused words in product.

I once watched a fellow PM ask five existing customers: "You would probably use this feature if it saved you time, right?"

All five said yes.

It was "validated" so it was launched. Nobody used it.

"You would use this if it saved you time" is not a research question, it's a leading question with a wig.

Asking users something is not the same as learning from users.
Let alone putting words in your customers' mouth.
 
The gap between those two things can make or break your product.

Nope, synthesis is not summarizing. 
This distinction matters more than most people realize nowadays.

Summarizing = taking each source and restating what it says but shorter.
Synthesis = laying sources side by side and asking: "what's the one story that explains all of this?"

Imagine you're looking at:
- Retention is up
- Engagement per session is down
- Renewals are strong
- Users on average only use 10% of the available features

Each of might look like a different story individually.

But together, they tell one: someone (likely a manager or a team leader) is signing your solution and is trying to make their team adopt it, but the team is not really engaging with it.

That distinction doesn't show up in any single dashboard. It only appears when you lay the signals side by side.

Those surprises come from connecting different insight streams and triangulating. They are not available at first sight.

This is why building the right infrastructure and sustainable research practice matters.

That is one of the core ideas in Building the Research Engine, the book I wrote for PMs, designers, researchers, and anyone who wants to turn scattered data into better decisions.

I once had to explain the value of building a research practice to a VP of Product.

I asked her: "Imagine you have to bet $50,000 of your own money on a boxing match. The only thing you know is the fighters' names. How confident are you in that bet?"

"Not at all. That’s literally gambling." she said.

I said: "Okay. Now imagine you have their win/loss records. You have videos of their sparring sessions from last week. You know who is injured and who has been training at altitude. Would you bet on them?"

She nodded.

"That is what it is about. But we are not getting intel for just one fight, we are building an engine to consistently gather data and help you make more informed bets”.

After witnessing a couple of wins based on solid research, she became one of the fiercest advocates for the practice.

This is why building a replicable, cyclical and scalable engine is the key for better decisions.

Not single efforts. A sustained practice.

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The Battle

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Julian Della Mattia

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Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Julian Della Mattia's LinkedIn Performance

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