How to Get Founders to Listen

About the Talk

Research rarely fails because it was done badly. It fails because it reached a founder who had already decided. Ana Paula Barquet leads research at getolo, an insurtech provider working across several products and markets, and she walked us through three moments where the lens had to get wider, each one further from the individual user than the last.

• ●The user. Customers kept asking for an app. Instead of building it, the team asked what problem people were trying to solve, and found three: a quicker way into the account area, status updates, and a mobile-friendly experience. Most of it could be solved in the product they already had. Leadership got three options, not a verdict.
• ●The journey. Every team heard its own slice of the customer, so nobody saw the whole. Mapping the journey from lead to lost customer, picking 13 moments that matter and routing feedback into one programme turned isolated findings into insights that keep coming. The strongest ones sat between teams.
• ●The market. Taking pet insurance into Spain was never a usability question. It needed pet owners, competitors, trends and regulation in one picture, and that is where research starts informing decisions that cost real money.

What made founders listen, in Ana's words: their decision, not my method. Problems, not findings. Options, not conclusions. Connected evidence, not single sources. Continuous listening, not one-off projects. And as more of research gets automated, staying close to the decision is the part that stays ours.

The room

A Friday evening at 42 Berlin. In the interactive session everyone thought of a request that arrived as a solution, from a manager, a client or a lecturer, and told their neighbour what problem was really behind it and which question helped them get there.