Jill has been listening to customers and clients for over 20 years. She has worked for organizations like Etsy and Blue Apron, and has since started Field Notes Consulting, a research and strategic planning practice serving both public and private sectors. She is method-agnostic, harnesses full-stack research, and interrogates all data to get to the real data or the root cause.

While hard data and numbers are important, data alone does not equal insight. Making sense of the data often requires listening to customers, human-scale frameworks of things like journeys and experience mapping, and, of course, minimizing researchers’ biases. It’s often the outside-in perspective that brings it all together to give us insight that will highlight consequences and implications.

Jill is a champion of what she calls “interventions” and doing interventions across silos. She shares an example from her time at Blue Apron that beautifully illustrates how one research silo can lose direction without insight from other silos.

Some interventions Jill recommends include:

• Remember that everyone in the organization is on the same team and after the same goal

• Encourage observation

• Bring cross-functional teams together

• Fit KPIs and OKRs in the story of the user

Jill will be leading a session, “Inconvenient Insights: The Researcher’s Role is to Stay Curious,” and a workshop, “Holistic Insights: Collapsing Functional Silos for Maximum Impact” at the Advancing Research Conference March 27-29, 2023.

What you’ll learn from this episode:

• How Jill defines insight and why it won’t be uncovered from hard data alone

• How “interventions” across silos can help everyone in the organization win

• A taste of what Jill will cover in her talk and workshop at Advancing Research 2023

Quick Reference Guide

[00:00] Introduction of Jill

[01:50] Jill’s role at Advancing Research Conference March 27-29th, 2023

[02:27] Jill’s love-hate relationship with data

[07:25] How we get insights from data

[09:36] Lessons from Blue Apron

[14:13] How to perform or support interventions

[21:54] On interventions outside your area of expertise and considering the interconnectivity of the entire organization

[30:43] Looking back on information and library science school

[34:52] Jill’s book recommendation

[36:49] Jill’s session and workshop at the upcoming Advancing Research Conference in March