Four habits that help insights leaders move beyond order-taking and shape business decisions.
An insights team can hit every deadline, produce excellent research, and still hear about the important decisions after they’ve been made. That should bother us.
Our industry spends a lot of time talking about earning a seat at the table. The usual advice involves better storytelling, stronger stakeholder relationships, and more executive visibility. These are all useful, but a beautifully presented finding has limited value when the business has already committed to a direction.
The best insights leaders make customer understanding part of how the company decides where to invest, what to build, and how to grow. They take responsibility for connecting evidence to action, and they build the capability to do that repeatedly.
Four habits make the difference.
1. They connect research to commercial outcomes
A research request often arrives as a deliverable: a survey, a concept test, a segmentation.
Strong insights leaders work backward to the decision. What is the business trying to accomplish? What choices are available? What would we do differently depending on the answer?
Consider a team asked to test messaging for a product launch. Before designing the study, the insights leader needs to understand whether the business is trying to attract a new customer segment, improve conversion, or justify a premium price. Each objective calls for different evidence. A preference score alone may tell us very little about whether the message will do its job.
This is where commercial relevance begins: in the brief.
It also continues after the presentation. The team should know what decision was made, how research influenced it, and what happened next. That creates a credible account of its contribution.
Fuel Cycle’s Cars.com customer story provides a concrete example. Community feedback surfaced concerns about vehicle-history transparency, informing a plan to include AutoCheck reports on private listings. The research connected a customer concern to a specific product action, and that is the kind of contribution worth documenting.
Research will rarely deserve sole credit for a revenue increase or a successful launch. Claiming otherwise weakens credibility. But insights leaders should be able to explain which assumption they tested, which investment they helped shape, or which customer problem the business addressed because of their work.
The business needs a clear connection between what the team learned and what changed.
2. They build standing capability
If every question requires a new recruiting effort, a new vendor briefing, and a new process, the business has to decide whether each answer is worth the setup cost.
That friction limits where research gets used. Smaller decisions proceed without evidence. Urgent decisions move ahead while the team is still preparing fieldwork.
The best insights leaders reduce that friction systematically. They establish reliable access to relevant audiences. They create repeatable approaches for recurring questions. They agree on quality standards, clarify who owns decisions, and make it easy for colleagues to bring the team into a problem early.
An insight community can provide an important foundation: an ongoing relationship with people the business needs to understand. Its value grows when it is connected to a research program with clear priorities and consistent practices.
The practical test is straightforward: when an important question arrives on Tuesday, what is already in place to help answer it?
This emphasis on capability also appears in BCG’s work on consumer intelligence, which calls for coordinated investment in data strategy, operating models, and talent to translate customer understanding into business impact.
Tools matter. So do the routines around them.
Automating a study helps the team complete that study faster. Building a dependable research capability makes evidence available across more of the company’s decisions.
3. They speak leadership’s language before being asked
Speaking leadership’s language requires understanding how the business works.
What drives growth? Where are margins under pressure? Which customers are leaving? What assumptions sit underneath the product roadmap? What does the company need to get right over the next two quarters?
An insights leader should have a point of view on those questions before a research request arrives.
That means participating in planning, reading business reviews, and spending time with the people accountable for results. It means learning enough about their constraints to recommend something they can actually use.
Suppose leadership is focused on retention. An insights team might see declining satisfaction among newer customers. A useful contribution connects that signal to the decision ahead:
“New customers are struggling to reach the first useful outcome. We should test a simpler onboarding experience before expanding acquisition spending. Here is the evidence, what remains uncertain, and how we can evaluate the change.”
That gives leadership something to act on. It also requires judgment. Researchers are trained to explain limitations, and those limitations matter. Leaders still need a recommendation. The job is to make the strength of the evidence, the tradeoffs, and the next step clear enough to support a decision.
Sometimes that means challenging the premise of the request. A stakeholder may ask which advertisement performs best when the evidence suggests the underlying offer needs work. Raising that issue early is part of being a business partner.
Influence grows when colleagues trust you to help frame the problem.
4. They build longitudinal knowledge
A company can have years of research and still struggle to answer a basic question: what have we learned about this customer over time?
Project archives preserve deliverables. Longitudinal knowledge preserves the connections between findings, customer behavior, decisions, and outcomes.
Building it takes deliberate work. Teams need to retain who participated, when the research happened, what was asked, and which business conditions shaped the response. They need consistent measures where comparisons matter, and clear records when methods or audiences change.
They also need to revisit conclusions. A finding from two years ago may still be useful, but its age and context should be visible.
Imagine a company investigating churn. Previous studies may contain evidence about onboarding, perceived value, service failures, and renewal expectations. Connecting those findings can help the team identify what it already knows and focus new research on the unresolved question.
Where appropriate and permitted, following the same customers over time adds another layer: the ability to understand how an individual’s expectations and experiences evolve.
This is also where AI can become more useful. Connected, well-documented evidence gives it a stronger basis for retrieval and synthesis. Researchers still need to check whether studies are comparable and whether a pattern holds up.
The leadership opportunity is substantial. A team that can explain how customer needs have changed, and what the company has already tried, brings context that a single new study cannot provide.
Make the contribution visible
These habits reinforce one another.
Commercial priorities help determine what to study. Standing capability makes timely research possible. Business fluency helps turn findings into recommendations. Longitudinal knowledge improves the starting point for the next decision.
This is the ambition behind the research capability we’re building at Fuel Cycle: helping organizations make customer understanding an ongoing part of running the business.
For insights leaders, a useful place to start is the next business review. Bring decisions your team helped improve, one recurring question you can make easier to answer, and one conclusion from past research that deserves another look.
That is how the role expands: through useful contributions, made consistently, while decisions are still open.
The strongest evidence of a seat at the table is that people involve you before they know what they want to ask.
