In a 1989 letter to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, Warren Buffett shared a lesson he learned over the course of his career that he’s stuck with ever since: After some mistakes, I learned to go into business only with people whom I like, trust, and admire.

As we launch into 2020, it’s becoming increasingly apparent that it’s an exciting time for marketers, researchers, and consumer insights teams. Technology and new philosophies are changing the way teams work—and making it that much easier for them to delight their customers and achieve better business outcomes.

These days, an increasing number of organizations are facing so-called wicked problems.

Agile research is transforming the way organizations large and small collect the insights and data they need to solve challenging problems and build transformative innovation.

That’s because agile approaches focus on earlier and more iterative research than traditional stage-gate methods—and give you more flexibility to adjust as you learn. With agile research, you can test something, find out more information—why people feel the way they do—revise your hypothesis, test again, and continue the process until you’ve arrived at a solution you’re comfortable with.

Video technology has transformed the way companies learn from consumers. If you haven’t gotten your team hooked on a regular cadence of video insights, there’s no better time than now to get started. In this blog, we’ll cover how the latest video technology is being used and provide some concrete examples of the results companies have achieved.

Getting the right product to market is a wicked problem. While you might know all of the characteristics that make a great product, delivering the right combination is never easy. In reality, success is more than a simple combination of features and benefits.  There is the human side to development, as people don’t always use products exactly as we intended.  In fact, they can react in unexpected ways to their sensory experience in context. So how do you solve these kinds of problems?

Johnsonville recently hooked agile qualitative technology into their In-home Usage Testing (IHUT) process, which enabled them to capture video experiences and engage in follow-ups with participants to delve deeper into how to deliver an optimal solution. And they got some surprising results.