Research breakage
Borrowed from retail, where breakage is inventory whose value never reaches a customer. In research it is the gap between a recommendation being made and anything actually changing for the user.
- insights themselves do not change anything - they describe the problem and perhaps even provide ideas for how to solve it, but they do not actually fix it
- too often the researcher's work stops after describing what is wrong: the report is shared, heads nod in agreement, the project is closed, and the assumption is that meaningful change will follow
- when the process is working, researchers' recommendations transition from insights into specific fixes that improve the user experience
- this gap is where hope likes to lurk - we hope stakeholders will act, hope they will prioritize the right things, hope the evidence will be enough; if you are relying on hope, you are setting yourself up to be fooled
- breakage = when the value created through recommendations never reaches the user; somewhere between the readout and the release the recommendation gets lost, watered down, deprioritized or ignored
- in retail, broken inventory gets written off as a loss; in research, broken recommendations waste time, money and opportunity
Why it happens
- most breakage is not intentional - it is the byproduct of how work gets done under pressure; deadlines reward what is ready to go, not what is necessary to ship
- breakage thrives when no one measures adoption - teams may feel productive because features keep shipping, but users are still surprised when their problems remain unsolved
Measuring it
- tracking breakage shows where the value of recommendations leaks out of product delivery; without measuring it, those points of failure stay hidden
- when breakage is tracked and exposed, you can finally see whether the chain is intact all the way through to impact