This one is for all the UX, market research, data science, CX researchers, and many other insight generators including JTBD researchers, analysts and consultants. As a researcher or analyst, no doubt you are already fueling all sorts of decisions with your studies. You make real impacts on product development and delivery that are worth celebrating. That's one truth. The other often overlooked truth is that too many of the most crucial customer insights that you share fail to drive what's next. In spite of everyone's hard work and the best intentions, they're not applied to projects, backlogs, or road maps during the time frame of a study.

Jake Burghardt is a consultant, author, and speaker at IntegratingResearch.com with 20+ years of experience in product research and the author of the book "Stop Wasting Research".

There are a lot of books out there about how to conduct research using all sorts of methods. This book is not one of them. Instead, stop wasting research is about how to get more value from any type of customer research that's already being conducted in your organization.

Links:

- Linkedin

- Website

- Blog

- Book

Today, we welcome Yael Mark.

Yael is a product consultant with Extra Product Brain, where she provides fractional product manager services for software products. Her specialty is in behavioral economics and customer behavior, something that is certainly relevant to product management.

Today, we welcome back Dr. Bart Jaworski.

In addition to being an experienced and full-time product manager, Bart is an author of the book, Next-Gen Product Management, and an entrepreneur as he offers multiple courses for product managers on DrBartPM.com

He’s also a super funny guy with the best memes on LinkedIn.

Today, we welcome Nesrine Changuel. Nesrine is a product management expert, author, and speaker who focuses on the concept of customer “delight.”

She has Phds in both Electrical/Electronics Engineering as well as physics, which is sure to give her an interesting take on product management.

Get the book here: https://nesrine-changuel.com/product-delight-book/

Today we happily welcome back Michele Hansen. Michele is the co-founder of the Software-as-a-Service company Geocodio – a SaaS that provides hassle free geocoding. Prior to being an entrepreneur, Michele was a product manager in financial publishing and a project manager for a web development agency.

Michele is the author of an excellent book on customer interviewing which I recommend everywhere I go “Deploy Empathy”. That’s the one with the yellow duck. Aaand after something like a two year break she’s again the co-host of the Software Social Podcast.

Today we will dive into the topic of AI in customer research. I want to add a few numbers from a Qualtrics trend report, just to kind of highlight the relevance of the topic if that’s needed at all. So in the 2025 trend report 69% of respondents say that they have used synthetic responses in their research, 83% plan to increase their AI investment and 73% agree that within 3 years synthetic data will make up more than half of the data they use. So, there’s definitively something going on here. Let’s dive in!

Links to sources: deployempathy.com

Paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4551487

Our guest today, Steven Weissenburger, is director of strategy and innovation at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. They are an inter consultancy that helps their company generate strategies and innovations to navigate complex, novel, and ambiguous situations.

We will be discussing the Estuarine Framework which is 1 of the three major frameworks in the Cynefin ecosystem which we have discussed on this podcast in past episodes namely with Tom Kerwin, Steven Bartlett or Kyle Godbey.

Steven has a lot of practical experience using this framework and we will talk about how it works in practice. The framework is used mostly in the context of dealing with complex situations within an organization or community, but I am sure it can bring super useful insights to listeners in the product and services innovation space, so I am hoping we can make a connection there.dsa

What really separates top sales performers from the rest? In this episode, sales excellence coach and former 3M leader Ivan Stevanovic breaks down the essential habits that fuel consistent sales success—and they might not be what you expect.

Forget gimmicks and silver-tongued persuasion. Great salespeople win because they prepare like professionals, ask better questions, and know when to walk away. They treat sales as a craft, not just a quota. Drawing on decades of experience coaching high-performing teams, Ivan shares powerful, practical advice on how to build trust, qualify opportunities, and develop the mindset needed to thrive in complex B2B sales environments.

Whether you're a seasoned rep, a consultant who dreads "selling," or a manager looking to level up your team, this episode is packed with real-world insights that will sharpen your approach and reignite your confidence.

🔥 If you’ve ever walked out of a sales call thinking, “What just happened?”—this is the episode you need.

Tune in now to learn how the best sellers prepare, adapt, and consistently deliver value.