Blog

Research Craft

Practical writing on interview synthesis, JTBD methodology, saturation evidence, and how product teams turn raw research into roadmap decisions — without the affinity diagram detour.

A research operations funnel diagram showing interviews as input and synthesis as the bottleneck step
Research Ops 10 min read

The Research Ops Bottleneck Everyone Ignores: Synthesis

Research teams optimize for recruiting, scheduling, and note-taking. Almost nobody has an operations layer for synthesis — the step between raw interview data and a product decision.

Philippe Boutros

A quote card design showing proper attribution with participant ID, timestamp, and job-to-be-done tag
Research Ops 8 min read

Quote Attribution in User Research: A Field Guide to Responsible Anonymization

Participant privacy and research transparency are in tension: the more you anonymize, the less a PM can contextualize the quote.

Philippe Boutros

A saturation curve graph showing diminishing returns on new insights after the 8th interview
Research Methods 11 min read

Interview Saturation: How to Know When to Stop — And Prove It to Your Stakeholders

The hardest question in qualitative research is: when have we heard enough? Intuition-based saturation is the norm, but it fails under scrutiny.

Philippe Boutros

A roadmap review document with highlighted user research quotes as evidence citations
Product Management 6 min read

How to Cite User Research in a Roadmap Review (Without Saying 'Users Said')

The weakest thing a PM can say in a roadmap review is "users said they want this." The strongest is a quote with a participant ID, a timestamp, and a job it maps to.

Philippe Boutros

A structured jobs-to-be-done framework diagram showing interview data mapped against job statements
JTBD 9 min read

How to Use Your JTBD Framework as a Synthesis Lens, Not Just a Strategy Document

Most product teams have a jobs-to-be-done framework sitting in Notion, used for strategy conversations and mostly ignored during user interviews.

Philippe Boutros

Post-it notes arranged in a messy affinity diagram cluster — illustrating why affinity diagrams fail product managers
Research Methods 7 min read

Why Affinity Diagrams Fail Product Managers (And What to Do Instead)

Affinity diagrams feel productive. You end a synthesis session with clean clusters, vivid post-it colors, a wall that looks like analysis happened. But ask the PM two days later what the clusters mean for the roadmap.

Philippe Boutros