“That's a lot of work, Chris”

I was describing how I run research to someone running an established positioning consultancy. Depending on the decision, I may interview customers and stakeholders, review sales calls, run website polls, and study competitors and category conventions before I write the positioning, messaging, and copy.

“That’s a lot of work, Chris.”

Fair, I thought. Their old research-heavy process had become expensive and slow, so they now move faster by extracting what the client already knows.

They also questioned how much of a market expert anyone could realistically become during a typical project.

They were right about one thing: I can’t become the expert in my client’s market after a few weeks of research. I don’t want to. Pretending otherwise would ignore years of product, customer, and category knowledge inside the company.

My job is different. I gather three perspectives, compare them directly, and use my beginner’s view to ask questions the team may have stopped asking.

You can jot down information in a brief, but you can’t brief someone into having an outsider’s perspective.

An internal marketing team can do this work without a consultant. An outside perspective becomes useful when a wrong answer could cost months of work and the same people defined the problem, chose the evidence, and already prefer one answer.

I’ve always believed one of my biggest strengths is that I know what I don’t know.

Sure, as an outsider I still arrive with biases, can ask bad questions, and may miss constraints that everyone inside the company already understands. But give me enough domain fluency and context to recognize what’s important and I’ll figure out what questions we need answers to.

My clients bring the market and product knowledge I cannot manufacture in a few weeks. I bring enough distance to ask questions insiders may no longer think to ask, then test the answers against the other perspectives.

Three useful perspectives

When I’m running research for a positioning, messaging, or copy project, I’m usually comparing three perspectives.

The internal perspective comes from leadership, product, sales, customer success, and the technical or operational constraints behind the offer. It explains what the company is building, what it believes, what it can prove, and what it can realistically deliver.

The external perspective comes from prospect and customer interviews, voice-of-customer material, lost deals, churn, and sales or support calls. These sources show how people describe the problem, what they compare, and where they hesitate. Website heatmaps, usability tests, and user recordings answer a different question: what people actually do rather than what they remember or say they would do.

Finally, the market perspective covers competitors, alternatives, category conventions, and changing conditions. It shows which options buyers compare and which expectations shape how they interpret the message.

When I join a client project, the marketing team has often gathered some of this research already. I don’t dismiss it. But if the company has chosen the questions, selected the quotes, and wrote the summaries, the research may still reinforce the story the team already believes.

If the internal, customer, and market perspectives all point the same way, I have more confidence in the direction. If they clash, I don’t smooth over the difference. I treat it as a sign that we’re either missing some context or asking the wrong question.

My goal is to identify what each group knows, what each group misses, and where they disagree.

Start with the decision

Gathering more perspectives does not justify endless research. Before I choose a method, I ask three questions: What decision are we making? What are we assuming? What happens if that assumption is wrong?

Then I scope the work around the answers:

1. Name the decision and owner. Write down exactly what the team must decide and name the person who will make the call.
2. Name the risky assumption. Write down the belief driving the decision and the evidence you still lack.
3. Audit the existing evidence. Check when the team collected it, which question it can answer, and who chose it.
4. Run the smallest useful test. Collect only enough new evidence to challenge the risky assumption.
5. Choose the output and stopping rule. Decide what the team must learn, which uncertainty can remain, and what evidence would let the owner make the call.

If you need internal support, don’t sell “more research.” Show the team the decision, the unsupported assumption, the smallest research round that could test it, the deadline, and what the right answer could improve.

Once I finish the research, I bring the people who will use it together and ask them: What changes now? Sales might decide how to answer more objections. Product might check whether the company can deliver on the value prop. Marketing might update the positioning, page, or campaign. If nobody can name one change, the research has not done its job.

This does not justify heavy research for every decision. If the team can reverse the decision cheaply and current evidence already answers the main question, use what you have and move fast.

But is deep research “a lot much work”? Debatable.

If a wrong decision would shape the positioning, messaging or copy for months, bring in someone who did not create the existing narrative and ask them to challenge the assumptions behind it before your team writes the next version.

Discovery

​It’s time to manage agent workforces​

George Sivulka argues that much of today’s AI waste is a management problem: weak context creates loops, scale multiplies dysfunction, and without evals nobody knows what good looks like.

A useful mental model is to stop treating agents like magic software and start managing them like a workforce—with clear roles, useful context, feedback, and standards.

​Every introduction is a bet​

Reid Hoffman’s primer on double opt-in introductions is a useful antidote to LinkedIn pitch-slaps. Before connecting two people, make sure both want the introduction and can see the likely value.

Good networking compounds trust by helping relationships before asking them to absorb someone else’s agenda.

Resonance