Meet our Head of Research & Strategy, Lauren
Lauren DeRaleau
When I first talked to Jonathan, our founder, about Glass, I said “I’m excited to hear what you guys are doing, but I want to be clear that I am not going back to supplier-side research.” It took me about a week to change my mind.
I’ve been at Glass for 9 months now and am excited every day to be building the research supplier, platform, and partner that I wish I’d had when I was client side.
Before joining Glass, I had the amazing experience of building and leading Insights teams at a few different start-ups/ growth phase companies. If you’ve ever wanted a crash course in all experiences of client-side research, I highly recommend being the first member of an Insights team. It means consuming everything possible about an organization—how decisions are made, where the biggest knowledge gaps are, where processes are strong vs. broken, who is research literate and who isn’t-- fast enough to have a confident point-of-view on what types of research will be most impactful.
And when you’re the founding member of an Insights team, the extra special part is that at the same time you’re doing all of the above, you’re also the one actually running all the work!
I was lucky enough to grow my teams in these experiences so that I wasn’t at it alone for too long. But one thing that always remained was the challenge of doing more with less, without risking the quality of the work.
D.I.Y. research became a mainstay of my research toolkit.
D.I.Y. meant that I could create the quality of research instrument, the customization of methodology, the back-end analysis approach that fit the need perfectly—and do it within budget. But...scaling an Insights team that can do that well, consistently, and across methodologies, is hard.
So while I love D.I.Y. research, it’s not entirely surprising to me that when I talk to other client-side Insights leaders, the use of D.I.Y. is often met with caveats, concerns, and hesitation. It is, when highly customizable, absolutely limited by the skillset of the individual who runs it. And it is, when highly templated or automated, absolutely limited to the exact specifications it was designed for.
I see the solution to that in (1) the marriage of tech with expert researchers. Not just having both, but really having the two work synergistically. And (2) leaving room to dial up or down the tech or the custom (human) component depending on the project.
Seeing the ability to offer that solution to the market captured my imagination and excitement. At Glass, we’re growing a killer Tech Team—but we’re not going to be a platform-first company. And we’ve also got a pretty amazing Research Team—but we’re not going to run research that we can’t provide a market advantage on through our tech. Within those constraints though, there are a lot of options on how good research gets done.
