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Insights function & business

Building & leading the insights function

23 indexed claims · 14 guests · peaked 2026-Q1

Building & leading the insights function

Overview

Building and leading an insights function demands a different skill set than doing insights work. These conversations reveal a consistent throughline: the researchers and leaders who build durable functions are those who learn the business before they practice their craft, earn trust by getting their hands dirty in adjacent departments, and resist the temptation to retreat into methodological comfort. The dominant tensions run from centralization versus flexibility to structural maturity versus scrappy responsiveness — with a recurring, often unspoken undercurrent: even the most senior leaders are shadowed by self-doubt. The clearest consensus across these guests is that function-building is organizational work first, research work second.

From the corpus

  • A researcher should not take on a global insights leadership role without having personally worked in multiple markets; without that lived experience, the cultural nuances are genuinely invisible and no amount of secondary knowledge compensates. — Aarti Bhaskaran, Ep. 52 · cl-aarti-bhaskaran-016
  • In enterprise organizations with established ways of working, consensus building with skeptical stakeholders early in the chartering process is critical — resistance to a new centralized model dissipates when those stakeholders help define it. — Kylee Lessard, Ep. 46 · cl-kylee-lessard-005
  • Building a scalable research function has little to do with the research itself — it is almost entirely about understanding how the business operates, what stakeholders need, and how the function should interact with the organization. — Leena Doshi, Ep. 29 · cl-leena-doshi-011
  • When building an insights function from scratch, the most foundational first step is understanding where you sit in the market — without that picture, a brand operates in an echo chamber making decisions based on internal assumptions. — Leyla Doany, Ep. 11 · cl-leyla-doany-005
  • When building or rebuilding an enterprise insights function, the foundational recipe is: (1) listen and learn via stakeholder tour, (2) define and socialize a written charter, (3) demonstrate early wins to build momentum. — Kylee Lessard, Ep. 46 · cl-kylee-lessard-004
  • When building a strategic insights function from nothing in a long-established organization, saying yes far more often than no — to projects, to other departments' problems — is the path to earning a seat at the table. — Christopher Khoury, Ep. 47 · cl-christopher-khoury-003
  • Insights leaders should explicitly invite negative feedback at the start of every readout — courage to ask 'tell me why this was worthless' is what separates support functions that earn trust from those that don't. — Dr. Jeff Dahms, Ep. 10 · cl-jeff-dahms-016
  • CEOs are not meaningfully better, smarter, or harder-working than their employees; they leverage board relationships to negotiate outsized compensation, and the 500-to-one pay ratio is unjustified on merit. — Rand Fishkin, Ep. 19 · cl-rand-fishkin-005

Contributing guests

Episodes in Building & leading the insights function

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