Episode #72: Abbas Jaffer on Using Qualitative Research to Guide Product Decisions

Qualitative research does more than collect opinions. It can uncover the context, workarounds, and meaning that explain why people behave as they do. In episode 72, Abbas Jaffer, a principal researcher at Circle, shows how those insights can guide product and business decisions.

What you'll learn

• How anthropology can widen the frame around product use

• What changes when research moves from academia into a technology company

• Why small qualitative samples can reveal valuable recurring patterns

• How interviews and participant observation surface context and friction

• How to present research clearly to time-constrained executives

Anthropology widens the research frame

Jaffer’s education moved through international studies, theological studies, and social anthropology. Across those fields, he developed an interest in cultural and political systems, religion, gender, and the ways people decide what matters in their lives. Anthropology gave him frameworks for examining how people arrange their lives and encounter technology.

That perspective helps product researchers look beyond whether someone can complete a task. Technology products can become part of how people make meaning in their lives. By keeping a broad aperture, researchers can ask where a product may be useful, whom it may serve, and how it fits within the rest of a person’s circumstances.

Jaffer uses a familiar description of anthropology: making the strange familiar and the familiar strange. Applied to technology, that means questioning interactions a product team may take for granted while also translating unfamiliar user behavior into terms the organization can understand.

Applied research works on a different clock

The move from academia to technology brought a major culture shock: timelines. Academic work may revisit one topic for years before publication. Inside a company, a researcher may have about a month to turn an unsettled business question into useful insight. That requires deliberate trade-offs about depth, participants, and the amount that can be learned in an hour or two rather than through extended fieldwork.

Academic research often aims to build knowledge and support rigorous causal arguments. Enterprise research starts with a business question or problem and asks what the company could do in the short, medium, and long term. The response may shape product, operations, customer service, or another part of the organization.

Jaffer initially examined the organization itself through an anthropological lens, including its formal and informal power structures. He then had to learn the language of sustainable business, company priorities, and operational targets. Connecting social-science practice to those needs made the research actionable rather than merely interesting.

Deep methods reveal what surveys miss

Jaffer favors in-depth interviewing and participant observation. Longer interviews make room to understand where a product fits into a person’s life. Research about retail investing, for example, can examine whether someone invests from a phone on a couch or from a separate tab at a work desk.

Participant observation goes further by having the researcher perform the activity alongside participants. In research with developers, building a lightweight application can create an embodied understanding of friction. A survey can report frustration, but attempting the work can help a researcher understand its texture and advocate for the user with greater specificity.

Deep qualitative work is particularly useful for discovering workarounds. Asking a direct, leading survey question about hacks is unlikely to reveal the full story. A back-and-forth conversation can expose what people do when a product falls short, why they do it, and whether that behavior points toward a feature the product should support.

Small samples can still show meaningful patterns

A common objection to qualitative research is that the participant count is too small. Jaffer answers with the concept of saturation. After a few conversations, researchers may begin hearing the same themes repeatedly. That repetition signals a pattern in experience, even though it is not the same kind of pattern as statistical significance in quantitative research.

Jaffer presents qualitative research as complementary to the quantitative work companies already do. The patterns belong to different categories, and bringing stakeholders along can help them experience saturation and understand the value of the qualitative evidence.

Jaffer also places current anxiety about AI within a longer history. Public reactions to the telephone, personal computer, electrification, and telegraph included recurring fears and moral concerns. The technology changes, but the cycle of anxiety, experimentation, selective adoption, and integration has precedents. He expects AI to become less of a headline over time and more of an embedded capability inside products that simply work well.

For executive audiences, Jaffer recommends three practices. First, be concise: lead with the few findings that matter, the researcher’s interpretation, and the proposed response. Keep detailed evidence ready for questions. Second, present in a live forum when possible so leaders can discuss the implications. Third, consider creative formats that interrupt the stream of routine documents, such as an exhibit, audio format, or another engaging deliverable.

His final leadership lesson is equally useful for research teams: become comfortable saying “I don’t know,” then identify who may know or how the team can find out. Listen to episode 72 for the full conversation on anthropology, research methods, AI, and executive storytelling.