For a long time, I fell into a common trap that exists in the research world: I conflated specific research types with whether or not research was “strategic”. In my mind, only exploratory or generative research could be strategic. Anything evaluative, no matter the circumstances, simply wasn’t strategic.

This isn’t to say that all evaluative research falls into the category of strategic research. But it’s not as simple as saying generative = strategic and evaluative = tactical. So let’s start by looking at what we mean when we say “strategic research”.

When I refer to strategic research, I’m referring to research that has a tangible impact on the product direction, the company’s stated mission, or the practice of research itself, and that persists beyond the immediate product development cycle, whether that’s sprints or releases or some other arbitrary unit of measurement. It’s research that advances the company towards a long-term goal in a measurable way, whether the measurement is observed or self-reported.

So: easy enough to say that evaluative research can be strategic. But what does it actually look like?

Let’s take a project from my time at Dropbox, which remains one of the best examples of opportunistic strategic research I’ve seen in my career. It started as the kind of last-minute, hyper-tactical research request that drives researchers up the wall¹ and turned into a project which defined the company’s point of view on a crucial topic: pricing changes.

One of the researchers on my team was asked to do a series of rapid turnaround evaluative studies focused on concept and message testing for a pricing update. The request, as it was made, was for extremely tactical work: which message is clearest? How do people react to the new prices? How much churn should we expect when we raise prices?

Rather than taking the research request as written, the researcher identified it as an opportunity to build the company’s knowledge of how people reacted to pricing changes more generally. She incorporated questions not only about the specific pricing change, but about other pricing changes they had encountered, and was able to build a clear picture for Dropbox of how people think about subscription services and pricing while de-risking the very specific instance she had been asked to evaluate.

Let’s take a look at how we can reproduce this approach for other evaluative projects to turn them into hybrid tactical-strategic work. Ultimately, that’s the real goal here: to find ways to answer our immediate questions while building foundational knowledge or advancing our research practice.

The number one thing this researcher did was identify the deeper opportunity by asking what the larger question was. There’s a very simple way you can do this.

Ask yourself: what information would have prevented us from having to do this research?

If the answer to this question is anything besides very point-in-time, tactical information, like how usable a specific design is, you’ve got an opportunity for strategic research with your evaluative project. This is a chance to fill in some of those gaps and help your organization develop an informed point of view on key topics. Any time you’re being asked for something tactical, especially something last-minute, you should be thinking about the knowledge gaps that led to this need, and whether your project presents an opportunity to fill some of them.

Not every evaluative project needs to be strategic, but as researchers, we’re long past the point where a simplistic dichotomy helps us advance our practice or educate people outside of our field. Strategy is about finding the opportunity to advance our organizations towards a shared goal, not about a prescribed set of methods or a specific research phase.

[1] As I frequently tell stakeholders, only the CDC has actual research emergencies. Your last-minute request is just poor planning.