How Research Unlocks Opportunities You Can’t See Yet
How Research Unlocks Opportunities You Can’t See Yet
Some of the best growth opportunities are the ones you’re not actively looking for.
They show up in unusual places - like a customer workaround, or a comment that doesn’t match your messaging. They’re not always obvious, and they don’t always fit the brief.
Most research is designed to answer clear business questions: Will this product work? Should we go to market now? But research can do more than just validate ideas, it can help uncover completely new ones.
The most valuable research doesn’t just give you the answers you’re looking for. It helps you uncover better questions to ask in the first place.
Insight vs Opportunity-Finding
Let’s make a distinction: Insight helps you understand what’s true now. Opportunity-finding helps you spot what could be true next.
Too many teams stop at the former. But if you want to get ahead (or stay there) you need both.
Opportunity-finding research often means:
- Going broad before you go deep
- Making space for discovery before deciding what to validate
- Letting patterns emerge, rather than forcing your own logic onto the data
It’s not about being unfocused. It’s about being strategically open.
Where to look....
Where to look
Opportunities often live in the places your current lens doesn’t reach. Like:
- Anomalies: Behaviour that doesn’t fit your existing segments or logic. Don’t dismiss it. Explore it.
- Workarounds: Signs that people are making your product (or a competitor’s) work for them in unintended ways.
- Low-frequency but high-emotion use cases: Rare doesn’t mean irrelevant. Especially when the stakes are high.
- Ignored stakeholders: Who else influences the buying or usage process that you’re not paying attention to?
Rethinking how you explore
One of the fastest ways to unlock new opportunities is to shift how you run research. Consider:
- Mixed-method discovery sprints: Pair early-stage qual with exploratory quant. Let one method shape the questions for the next.
- Jobs-to-be-Done thinking: Move away from static personas and toward dynamic needs, contexts, and motivations.
- Co-creation sessions: Invite real users to imagine better futures with you. See what they bring to the table.
Making it useful
Of course, discovery is only valuable if it’s applied. Build a habit of capturing findings in ways that spark action. That means:
- Playbooks that live beyond the deck
- Design principles informed by real insight
- Share-back sessions that make stakeholders feel part of the process
The point of research isn’t just to know more. It’s to make better decisions. The kind you didn’t know you needed until the research showed you something new.
The best opportunities are rarely obvious. But they’re almost always discoverable.
