Transforming Insight Podcast

Episode 75: A practitioner’s approach to Insight products

Episode Summary

This week we’re continuing our focus on an Insight team’s products – the output seen by the rest of the organisation. And I’m joined by Clare Gough, an IMA associate who has led great Insight teams at SAB Miller, Daily Mail, Waitrose and Haleon.

Episode Notes

Clare and I shared a stage at Quirk’s London in May, and we were reflecting on the amount of disruption in the corporate Insight world at this moment. Reorganisations, budget freezes, headcount cuts, senior roles disrupted… we’re seeing it all.

And – spoiler alert for next week’s roundtable episode – I personally don’t think this period of change is going to end any time soon.

In this environment, it’s particularly important to reflect on our Insight team’s output, because it’s the output that you will usually be known for. It’s what will largely dictate other departments’ views of Insight itself and the role we could play.

Clare is a great advocate for ‘Insight productisation’; identifying our core outputs, structuring them, packaging them, branding them, using test and learn to see how they land, then developing a comm’s plan to encourage more stakeholders to engage with them. She has also always had KPIs in place to measure each Insight product’s success – usually its return on investment.

Topics Discussed

Insight teams and product optimisation (00:09)
Transforming Insight teams through productisation (08:50)
Product differentiation (15:19)
Strategic Insight management for impact (20:40)
The future of Insight teams (28:39)

Highlights

“Businesses are constantly having to anticipate change. Now they're having to think forward. They're having to react quickly, get on the front foot and navigate change, and COVID made that business as usual.” (05:14)
“Another part of my role was developer cap innovation, so we were quite specific on exactly what we were doing, what the products were and how we were taking best practice from design, research and various other things agile work to productize what we needed to deliver.” (14.51)
“So it was initially targeted at the board, but then that became the consistent knowledge base and fact pack for the rest of the business and it was a Halo product because the KPIs that had been identified within it were then the things that we tracked and we reported onto the business on a monthly basis.” (21.14)
“I think my other advice would be to embrace AI and use it to empower you. There is nothing more empowering than being able to do insight faster, quicker and enabled by tech.” (25.52)

Please listen to find out more!

This is episode 75 of the Transforming Insight podcast.

If you have the ambition to transform your Insight team and the role it plays in your organisation, please tune in to future episodes. Not only will we explore the 42 secrets of successful corporate Insight teams as outlined in the Transforming Insight book, we will also talk to senior corporate Insight leaders, delve into books that have inspired us, and discuss new best practice research carried out with the IMA’s corporate members.

You won’t want to miss this! So please subscribe - and thank you for listening.

About James Wycherley, the author of Transforming Insight

James Wycherley was Director of Customer Insight and Analytics at Barclays Bank from 2005 to 2015 when he became Chief Executive of the Insight Management Academy (IMA).

He published his first book, Transforming Insight, in 2020, and his second, The Insight Leader’s Playbook, in 2025, and he hosts the Insight forums and the Transforming Insight podcast.

An entertaining keynote speaker, he has presented over 50 times at Quirk’s events, a global record, and has provided thought leadership in the UK, USA, Europe, Canada, Australia, India and the Middle East.

The Insight Management Academy is the world’s leading authority on transforming corporate Insight teams, and its vision is to inspire and support every Insight leader to transform the impact of Insight in their organisation.

Resources:

If you would like more information on any of the ideas discussed in this episode of the Transforming Insight podcast, please visit www.insight-management.org

Disclaimer

The Transforming Insight podcast is published by the Insight Management Academy and produced by Zorbiant.