Insight

Research

Custom research to help you make your toughest people decisions with confidence.

The answers are already in the field. We start with the decision you need to make. Then we gather the data to help you design the organization you're funding, staffing, or training next.

Research process

  • Practitioner interviews

    We interview leaders who do the work, across stages and industries, to learn how it actually gets done.

  • Custom datasets

    We anonymize the findings and turn them into patterns and benchmarks.

  • Actionable insights

    We model scenarios for your context and build a plan.

Previous studies

Marketing Team Design Study

Marketing leaders needed a clear way to design the team: which capabilities to place where, how to structure for performance, and how to resource the next stage of growth.

We held hundreds of hours of conversations with B2C and B2B marketing leaders at startups and at small, midsize, and enterprise businesses. We then turned those conversations into an anonymized, measurable dataset and a flexible blueprint that operators could filter to their context.

The study involved marketing leaders from Glossier, Meta, Marriott, Intel, McDonald's, Unilever, Bonobos, United Way, Groupon, Toyota, Johnson & Johnson, Grainger, and more.

Project features

  • Mapped how industry leaders place over 50 capabilities across the marketing team.
  • Built custom data filters that produced a precise blueprint for a new marketing organization.
  • Gave operators a way to assess their current team structure and optimize it to address performance issues.
  • Determined resourcing benchmarks so teams could plan for the next stage of growth.
  • Delivered proprietary data, insights, and conclusions tailored to industry context and growth stage.

Sample insight: 10 Reasons Marketing Leaders Use Contractors & Agencies