Episode 5: How a Two-Person Team Delivers Insights in a Week

Research has a reputation problem. Someone briefs a study, it takes three months, and by the time the findings land, the decision has already moved on. The work was careful. It was also useless, because it arrived too late to change anything.

Nathan Livingston has built his team to beat that clock. He heads customer research at Bally's Interactive, an iGaming and sports betting business across Europe and the US, and his team is two people: himself and a senior research manager. Between them they run a daily satisfaction tracker, qualitative interviews, and panel surveys, and they turn a lot of it around in a week. On the fifth episode of Research Secrets, he walked through how a lean team moves that fast without pretending the speed is free.

Why speed beats perfection more often than you think

The instinct drummed into most researchers is to follow the methodology all the way. Full panel, weighted data, quotas in place, no shortcuts. Nathan was trained that way too, and he's let go of some of it on purpose.

"Sometimes perfect doesn't need to be."

Hear Nathan explain this in the episode → watch the full conversation.

Rigor still matters. But a complete answer three months late is often worth less than a partial answer this week. He's comfortable using 50% of the information to get further down the line, because that 50% moves the decision forward and opens up the next set of questions. You will never get 100% every time, so the useful skill is knowing when a directional answer is enough and saying so out loud.

The tools that make a week possible

Speed comes from the stack as much as the mindset. Nathan's team leans on tools built to return answers in hours or days rather than months.

For quick reads, they use OnePulse to reach mobile app users and panel members with short, sharp questions about a product, a piece of creative, or a current development. For continuous signal, a daily CSAT tracker in Medallia tells them how players are feeling and where things could improve. And for the slower, deeper work, they still run long-form surveys with panels and their CRM. The team matches the tool to the clock: some projects run for months because they need to, and some have to land within a week.

One tool is worth singling out. The team is testing AI-moderated qualitative interviews, where they write the discussion guide and an AI conducts the one-to-one conversation. That removes the biggest scheduling bottleneck in qualitative work.

"You don't have to book interviews in with an interviewer. As soon as you've recruited the person you want, you can have that conversation almost straight away."

Know the trade-off you're making

None of this is free, and Nathan doesn't pretend otherwise. A fast tool like OnePulse isn't a weighted panel with quotas, so it's open to criticism on representativeness. His answer is to be honest about what a given method can and can't tell you, rather than quietly presenting a quick read as if it were a definitive one.

That honesty starts before the research does. His team has a human conversation with the stakeholder first: what do you want to learn, and will this approach actually get you there? Sometimes the answer is that the quick study will tell you one thing but not another, and the stakeholder needs to decide whether that's enough. Naming the limit up front is what lets him move fast without misleading anyone.

Start with the objective, not the method

The reason a week is enough often comes down to scoping. Nathan starts every project with the objective, the hypothesis the research is meant to test, before anyone writes a single question. A tight objective is what keeps a one-week study from sprawling into a three-month one.

It also means knowing the thing you're researching. A commercial director once told him that if you don't know your product, you can't sell it or research it, and he still takes that seriously. When you understand the product and the customer, you can design a smaller, sharper study that answers the real question instead of a big survey that answers everything vaguely.

Deliver the story, not just the data

Fast insight only matters if it moves someone to act, so the last mile is delivery. Nathan doesn't save the big reveal for the final presentation. He pre-briefs a few stakeholders first, shows them what the data is saying, and lets them react. Often they point him to other information the business already has, which he folds in to make the final story stronger and better rounded.

By the time he presents, the findings already carry the knowledge of the people who will act on them, so nobody in the room is hearing them cold. That's how a week of work turns into a decision rather than a deck nobody opens.

For Nathan, speed is a discipline: a tight objective, the right tool for the clock, an honest account of the trade-off, and a story shaped with the people who need it. Get those four right, and two people really can deliver something worth acting on in a week.

Nathan goes deeper on agile research, storytelling, and keeping critical thinking alive in the age of AI in the full conversation. Watch the full episode on Research Secrets.

About the guest

Nathan Livingston heads customer research at Bally's Interactive. He was the fifth guest on Research Secrets, BlockSurvey's podcast about uncovering real user insights to build better products.