Jake Pryszlak
Founder of ResearchGeek

“Being right was never the point. Getting acted on is.”

A few years ago, I watched a senior researcher present twelve weeks of work to a leadership team. Twelve customer interviews. A survey of eight hundred respondents. Forty slides. The CFO checked his phone twice. The senior team thanked everyone. Nothing changed. Six weeks later, the business made the exact decision the research had argued against.

The work wasn’t wrong. It had been delivered as if being right was the point.

I’ve spent the last 10 years in market research — agency, client-side, and SaaS. Including Nike, Unilever, Google and F1. Different rooms, different decks, the same pattern showing up everywhere I went.

At agency-side, I learned how to deliver beautiful work that didn’t always move the needle. Brilliant methodologies. Polished readouts. And still, too often, research that ended up filed in a folder.

Client-side, I saw the other half of the problem. Decisions were already in motion before the research landed. Stakeholders had moved on. Frameworks were being applied to the wrong questions. The work hadn’t been ignored, it had missed its window.

In SaaS, I saw what “good” can look like when researchers operate as commercial partners. When they walk into the room with a point of view, not just a finding. When they make the recommendation specific enough to argue with. When they’re treated as the people who shape the decision, not the people who described the customer.

Across all three, the pattern was the same: the researchers who genuinely changed things weren’t the ones doing the best research. They were the ones who’d figured out that the research itself isn’t the job.