1 min lesson
Use existing data before you recruit
Take this situation: "You have 48 hours to tell a PM whether a new agent-review flow is confusing before they ship it Friday. What's the most defensible plan?" Lead with your decision, then add the reason.
Step 1 of 2
Use existing data before you recruitthe fastest study is the one you don't run
- Logs and product analytics. Accept rates, revert rates, where agent runs stall, funnel drop-off. Often answers the “how widespread” question for free.
- Support tickets and forum/Discord threads. A pre-tagged corpus of real friction in users' own words; great for generating interview hypotheses.
- Prior studies and the research repo. Someone may have already answered part of this. Reusing it is speed, not laziness.
- Sales and CS notes. For enterprise questions, the field team has heard the objection a hundred times before you frame the study.
When given a research prompt, plan two versions out loud: the 48-hour version and the two-week version of the same question. “In 48 hours I'd pull the logs, read the last month of support tickets and run three hallway sessions with internal Cursor users. With two weeks I'd recruit six external power users and add a survey to size it.” This proves you can flex method to constraint, which is the whole Cursor thesis.
Every study you design should leave reusable parts behind: a screener template, a modular interview guide, a tagging scheme that feeds the repo. The first study is slow; the tenth is fast because the function compounds. Mentioning this signals you'll build the research system, not just consume time on one-off studies.