The misguided rivalry between qualitative and quantitative research

Research is a critical part of developing products and services. It’s half of R&D, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at staffing numbers; usually corporations have way more people paid to build and do things, than learn things. Interestingly, the researchers you see in movies usually combine and exaggerate these roles: you see scientists as people using their hyper-specialized knowledge to build their advanced contraptions or schemes on their own. Actual researchers in corporations usually don’t write code, design interfaces, create prototypes or convince customers to buy something. Yet, taking away research removes a deep understanding of customers, the ability to evaluate the size and impact of an opportunity, and get a hint of the potential outcome of ideas and decisions before they are made. It also makes it hard to know how things are going, and identify when there’s a problem and how to fix it.

Researchers are not all the same
All of those things are not enabled by a single science-y skillset. There are as many types of researchers as there are designers or engineers. A computer engineer and a chemical engineer have overlapping job titles, they may even have some of the same training and similar perspectives on systems and problem solving, but their work looks really different. In the same way, market researchers, design…