Sometimes Product Needs Insight Before It Needs Research

Most product teams aren’t starved for data. They’ve got usage dashboards, survey tools, helpdesk logs, and analytics stacks. And in many cases, they have a well-regarded internal insights function—smart researchers who know the business, understand the methods, and deliver quality work.

But when it comes to early-stage product questions—the ones that surface before a roadmap item is locked in or a sprint gets scoped—teams often find themselves without the input they really need.

Not because the insights team isn’t doing its job. But because the system wasn’t designed for the pace and ambiguity of early product development.

Product work moves fast. Priorities shift. Hypotheses change. Deadlines loom. And the moment a team starts asking, “Should we even build this?” is often the moment that gets overlooked in most research planning.

Why? Because many organizations have set up their research processes with scale and governance in mind. To initiate a study, there’s usually a scoping phase, alignment with stakeholders, vendor vetting, legal reviews, and scheduling. That machinery is built for rigor, not speed.

Which means that early-stage product decisions—the ones made when things are still fuzzy—often get made in the dark.

So PMs and designers do what they can. They tap known users, skim NPS comments, run back-of-the-napkin user flows, or rely on gut instinct. Some of that works. A lot of it doesn’t. Especially when the problems they’re trying to solve don’t show up cleanly in the data or get voiced by the average user.

The reality is, the most useful feedback at this stage doesn’t come from a representative sample. It comes from experienced, high-context users who see around corners. People who notice gaps that others gloss over. Who cobble together workarounds. Who find value and pain points in places the team never expected.

These are what we call Catalytic Customers—not early adopters or influencers, but highly engaged users who push the boundaries of what the product can do. They’re the ones who reveal blind spots and stretch the team’s thinking before ideas calcify into plans.

They don’t just report bugs or ask for features—they force better framing. They expose deeper problems. They make the product team smarter.

But most organizations don’t have a built-in way to find or listen to them. Especially not at the moment when their input would be most useful—before plans get locked in, before a prototype gets approved, before the team commits two months to a path that turns out to be a dead end.

This is the gap. Not between product and research as functions—but between the timing of product decisions and the accessibility of actionable insight.

Filling that gap doesn’t mean abandoning rigor. It means accepting that sometimes, early directional clarity is more valuable than late-stage statistical confidence. It means having a way to quickly engage with a handful of catalytic users who can expose issues before they become rework.

And it means rethinking the idea that all insight has to come from inside the building, routed through formal channels, scoped and sanctioned by process. That model has its place. But it’s not always what product needs when the clock is ticking and the bet is still being shaped.

There’s room for another layer. Lightweight, fast-turn, strategically focused insight—designed not to validate or generalize, but to illuminate.

When that kind of input arrives early, it sharpens product thinking. It de-risks bets. And ironically, it makes the eventual research deeper and more relevant—because the team is asking better questions from the start.

The challenge isn’t whether companies value insight. They do. The challenge is whether their systems allow it to show up where and when it’s most needed.

For product teams, especially, that might mean making space for insight before it looks like research.