Navigating Stakeholder Influence and Professional Growth in User Research

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Dave Hora is perpetual Employee of the Month at Dave's Research Company: as a consultant, he helps leaders run strategic product initiatives and teams build well-informed product processes.

In 2011, Dave was the first researcher at a mobile startup in San Francisco, then went on to work as the first research hire at five more companies including ResearchGate, PlanGrid, and Instacart. In 2020, he went independent and founded Dave's Research Company in Porto, Portugal.

Dave co-led and co-designed the Research Skills Framework during his time as a Research Ops Community board member. He runs a small mailing list about how we make good software, and each year he takes a short sabbatical for winemaking or sake brewing season.

In our conversation, we discuss:

* Why researchers must understand the broader workflows and strategic goals their work feeds into.

* How to “journey map” your research projects to identify patterns in decisions and outcomes.

* The tension between pet projects and strategic alignment—especially in ambiguous organizations.

* The importance of gaining visibility into upstream and downstream processes beyond the research itself.

* How researchers can navigate vague strategies like “10x growth” without losing their grounding.

Some takeaways:

* Research is only valuable in context. Dave reminds us that insights have little power unless they directly support the work a team is trying to do. Strategic research isn’t about delivering answers in isolation, it’s about enabling action and influencing the sequence of product decisions.

* Journey map your projects, not just your users. To grow as a researcher, reflect on your past projects and map the decisions, artifacts, and impacts they produced. Over time, you’ll start to see recurring patterns, what kinds of questions emerge at different phases, and how research is (or isn’t) used.

* Visibility is your first step to influence. If you’re stuck in a validation loop, start by asking what happens next. Join meetings outside your immediate research bubble. Observe how decisions are made, how documents evolve, and where your insights go. Influence begins with curiosity and presence.

* Without strategy, pet projects thrive. When companies lack a clear “what we are and aren’t doing,” well-intentioned ideas, often from leadership, can steamroll roadmaps. Researchers won’t always win these battles, but they can help clarify risks, expose assumptions, and steer ideas through a more thoughtful path to validation.

* Your role isn’t to fix the org, but to participate wisely. You don’t need to solve your company’s strategic alignment or broken processes. But you can bring awareness to trade-offs, highlight what’s at stake, and help others reflect. Influence is surfacing the right questions at the right time.

Where to find Dave:

* Website

* LinkedIn

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The views and opinions expressed by the guests on this podcast are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views, positions, or policies of the host, the podcast, or any affiliated organizations or sponsors.

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