As research evolves, the practice will hook into the organization in new ways.

We should, whenever possible, make our ideas visible and tangible. Here I will continue the effort to practice what I preach. Another concept we’ll build on today is that it always pays to start by making sense of things as they are now and their trajectories — the current state — before we make the next move.

We’ll take these two directives to heart while trying to make sense of research itself. To get a handle on our current state, we start by zooming out to the organizational context that research and product are a part of.

For those of us trying to make effective, humane, and valuable software-shaped things — whether we are researchers or not — there are three initial areas we need to be aware of: call them organization, product, and customer context.

First and most visible is the product we produce, or the portfolio of products thereof. Just as important as that product output is the current state of the customer context, the larger ecosystem that the product serves. Third, the ultimate arbiter of policy and product is the organization itself.

The connections shown here are important, too.

Between product and customer context is a link between two ever-changing slices of reality that [we hope will] couple, fit, and co-evolve, with value flowing in both directions. This whole and its parts is where we’re trained to focus our attention as functional research practitioners.

When research works, it provides an interpretive learning loop that establishes, augments, and refreshes the larger team’s understanding and supports effective decision-making. We select and highlight the critical factors of the product <> customer context situation and ensure they’re…