tives and about our company’s products from them. Finally, it enables us to establish longer-lasting relationships outside the Observatory.

This is achievable by requiring each internal customer to commit some of his own workforce to participate in the field research. (We offer an introduction course to ethnography to allow that to happen.) We also discuss our findings more frequently with our internal customers. Instead of simply handing out a report at the end, we send the customer short observation extracts at regular intervals throughout the research project.

The takeaway: Share your user research methods with others. By empowering others to do field research, you convey the message that field research is normal, or even a must. You position yourself as the specialist to consult, while at the same time helping others to increase the quality of their decisions. Finally, it removes pressure from you in terms of work volume, as you delegate some fieldwork. However, there is a drawback: One loses some control over the quality of the field research.

4. Keep your outputs simple.

At the end of a project, we sit
on a mountain of ethnographic
insights, excited about shar-
ing them with the rest of the
company. Yet internal custom-
ers are not interested in the
details of our findings. They
want only short reports that
provide overviews, actionable
answers, and tools. We have
learned over time to really have
two types of outputs from our
research: a detailed report just
for ourselves and more simpli-
fied deliveries for our internal
customers. These deliveries
contain brief, pointed mes-
sages and actionable measures,
and use business language
and artifacts like value chains,
adoption curves, etc. They
are always backed up by rich,
vivid ethnographic insights.

7. Balance the project portfolio to provide immediate answers, but also anticipate demand. Creating the right balance in a project portfolio means finding equilibrium between extremes. Should we work on projects that tackle current issues or instead on projects more future-oriented or transformational? Should we work on product-related projects, on segments, or on more general topics (e.g., situation-related, like mobility)? Should these projects support our own research department or the operational units, and to what degree? Such balancing doesn’t take place in a vacuum. After all, we have to get approval from management on every single project we start; we have to make sure the project is focusing on something nobody else does in the company and that it has enough strategic relevance to achieve meaningful impact now and in the future.

8. Consolidate knowledge across projects in order to build continuity. We have to be careful as a research unit not to spend all our time rushing from project to project. It is crucial to aggregate knowledge and link findings from various studies in order to identify trends.

This can be done in several ways. First, we use the same methods across projects, and there are certain sets of data we try to systematically collect. Second, some projects focus specifically on consolidating knowledge. For instance, our longitudinal study serves as the glue between all the various themes we have to master and provides us with an overview and a profound understanding of the whole ecosystem of communication and entertainment