About

Dave's Research Co. was founded in Porto, in 2020.

I've spent most of my career trying to understand why good product teams don't make good moves. In 2010, I began building research programs into product and design teams in San Francisco.

I could produce research, at first, but I could not see how the work fit into a product context. A few years of research into research became The Researcher's Journey, and that meta-investigation culminated in the worldwide workshops and distributed data collection of the Research Skills Framework.

I came to find that great research does little on its own to change the course of product teams and their work: it is at times necessary, and never sufficient.

The interesting problems — and the ones that keep recurring — fall outside the scope of research itself. To work on the interesting things, I began to consult independently as Dave's Research Company. I work with a handful of clients each year, primarilyl through word of mouth, and leave a trail of what I am learning in a Monday newsletter called The Product Game.

My work pulls on an academic background of cognitive science and HCI, adult learning in Brazilian jiu-jitsu (currently at brown belt, training no-gi), wide-ranging reading, and the architect Christopher Alexander's structural approach to complexity.

For an independent consultant, the work is never guaranteed, but I cherish the tradeoff: flexibility. Each year I take time for a 4–6 week craft sabbatical like the wine harvest, sake season, or a very long walk.

Talk and Workshop Index:

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