Reinventing Research: Why the Next Era Won’t Look Like the Last
Two years into building Ideally, I can finally articulate something I felt long before I could describe: we’ve always known roughly where our compass was pointing, but the picture of the destination was a little hazy. We could sense the problem. We could sense the opportunity. But we didn’t yet have the language.
Now, with the product maturing and our customers stretching us in surprising ways, that picture has come into focus. And it’s far bigger than what we set out to build.
Not disrupting it. Not tweaking it. Not making it marginally faster or cheaper. Reinventing it.
“Disruption” is a word that belongs to a different era of technology, it’s adversarial. The small company picking a fight with the incumbent, that was never our story. The villain we chose isn’t a company; it’s a process. It’s the slow, disconnected, inaccessible research workflow that holds businesses back from acting with confidence. It needs a new paradigm.
And there’s a commercial reality to this reinvention. When insights move faster, companies find the right opportunities sooner. When research becomes widely accessible, teams tell clearer, more aligned stories about their customers.
Over the last year, speaking with more than 100 teams inside the 200+ companies using Ideally, one pain point kept surfacing: it’s still too hard to get the right insights to the right people at the right time. Insights teams are shrinking. Budgets are tightening. Yet the expectation for clarity, for customer feedback, for speed is only growing.
People told us about the “mental gymnastics” they go through trying to connect dots across reports, dashboards, and a desktop full of scattered data. One marketer described spending hours in Miro, dragging sticky notes from different studies to try to build a mosaic of truth buried inside their own organisation.
That’s not the work of a strategic insights leader.
Reinventing research means removing that layer of labour to crank the handle. It means creating a world where the data is already connected, where teams can ask questions at any altitude and get the clarity they need instantly. It means putting the power of research in the hands of anyone who needs to make a decision.
What I love about Figma is that it didn’t make designers obsolete, it made them central. It brought teams closer together around a single source of truth in real time. That is the shift we’re building for research.
It’s taken us 2 years to spot the opportunity and develop it. It’s happening. Our new feature set is the connective tissue underneath the foundation of our survey engine for a new way of working. AI can now stitch together what professionals would normally hold in their heads: context, patterns, contradictions, opportunities and more. You no longer need to “go back into the field” every time you need an answer. Much of the insight is already there from the survey data you’ve gathered through Ideally.
This is the start of a new standard. Research early and often, not as a phase, but as a layer. Not a bottleneck, but an opportunity to stack your insights. Research doesn’t have to be an occasion, but something your company is constantly powered by.
Two years in, we’re only getting started, but we know exactly what we’re running toward. And we’re inviting the entire industry to run with us.
What is it?
This is why our latest update at Ideally matters so much to us.
We’ve brought together how people behave, how categories move, and how ideas get tested all into one connected system. Every project now adds to your understanding instead of starting from scratch. You get more clarity, more context, and more confidence, earlier than ever.
It’s the clearest expression yet of what we believe research can be.
