Synthesizing Learnings

How to Create Knowledge from Research

One of my favorite questions to ask myself after an interview is “did I learn something from this person?”. Most good hires, in my experience, are able to bring learning rituals to the table and up-level you and your team’s knowledge practices. This was my experience with a recent PM interview my team did. The candidate had a simple but effective template for synthesizing learnings from user research / customer interviews.

Many product teams do research, but don’t take the critical steps of synthesizing and disseminating learnings. They either fail to convert information into knowledge, or that knowledge stays trapped within the pod and doesn’t help educate the broader product / engineering / design org.

And that’s why this template really resonated with me - it was a low-effort / high-leverage way to summarize research, synthesize learning, and prep action.

I created an example snapshot for a product team that’s building a new note-taking app.