Hey friends, 

Behzod here, writing to you from Seattle, where summer is just starting and already shaping up to be absolutely gorgeous. (I’ll happily go on record and say that Seattle summers are undefeated — between then 80 degree days, the dry heat, and the overwhelming options you have to enjoy nature, it’s hard to imagine a better place to be in July or August.)  

I’m home after almost back-to-back trips to Cyprus (lovely) and Pittsburgh (lovely in a very different way), where I got to join two different company off sites (as a speaker and participant, respectively). 

Cyprus

I found myself in Cyprus thanks to an invitation from the analytics team at Scorewarrior, a game development studio that’s responsible for Total Battle. The company holds an offsite twice each year and lets different departments nominate speakers to join them. So while I was there for the analytics team, I was speaking to the entire company (this was a new configuration for me). 

Thankfully, the team and event organizers made my participation incredibly easy. When they reached out, they had read my writing and proposed a topic they wanted me to speak about. After I had a call with them and agreed to join, they took care of travel planning and logistics, and provided a very detailed itinerary for me throughout my entire trip. (I don’t think I’ve ever seen a better run event from a speaker’s perspective, and I’m sad to say I’ve been on the organizing side of a handful.) 

The topic I spoke on was making the shift from being a service organization to a strategic partner, primarily oriented at the analytics team, but with a range of call outs that I hoped would be useful to other organizations as well. And, given that I was talking to the whole company, I did my best to speak to both sides — what I thought the analytics team should be doing AND how their partners could better engage. 

This talk was very fun to put together. While I often see talks as ways to share things I believe in/have felt true for me, this talk in particular felt like the opportunity to rehash a number of ideas that I’ve previously shared in Democratization is our Job (essay), The 4 Pillars of a VOC Practice (talk), Me-as-a-Service (talk), a talk I’ve given to the CashApp team, and a number of private workshops that I’ve done. Also, I had to sprinkle some pace layers in there. 

The core idea was that analytics teams (like researchers) live at the layer of activities and spend their time arguing over methods and rigor, rather than living at the layer of decisions and arguing over impact. 

I think this is a common problem, mostly because of how many of us are taught to be methods-first and decision-last in our approaches, thinking about how we can do what we’re asked rather than stopping to think about whether those things are worth doing in the first place. 

My favorite way to frame this is by thinking of organizational decision-making like wheel of fortune, where different people and teams contribute different letters, and you need to take stock of what letters you have on the board and at what point you’re comfortable guessing, before you acknowledge how many more letters you need and build a plan to get there. 

If you’re interested, I’m giving an abridged version to the Notion Research team this week, and then will share a longer write up about the talk. 

I’m glad to say the talk went over well, and the highest praise I got came from another one of the guests who likened the shifts I was suggesting to “aikido moves” in that they were small tweaks that would have high impact by refocusing and redirecting people’s energy. Honestly, that compliment made the entire trip worth it. 

On the less delightful side, I had miserable jet lag the entire trip, often waking up at 4am (part of the challenge was I left Seattle on Tuesday around noon and got back Sunday the same time, with 30 hours of travel each way…). In the spirit of making lemonade out of lemons, I went for a walk each morning where I was rewarded with beautiful sunrises and an endless supply of cats. 

You can see more photos from these walks on Glass.

While I would have loved the extra hours of sleep, if I have to have jet lag, I hope it’s always this serene. 

Pittsburgh

Now, Pittsburgh was quite a differently-shaped trip. I’m currently in my fifth week of a 12 week residency with The Browser Company, supporting their insights (research + data science) team. As a part of this residency, I joined the company during their quarterly offsite, which included time at the Warhol Museum and an evening at Fallingwater.

The Browser Company is fully remote (though they have an office in Brooklyn that I have worked out of), so they come together a few times a year for team face time, planning conversations, and general bonding. 

As someone who is a big fan of intentional time together, I loved this model and appreciated the level of intention that went into how we spent time together as a group. 

I’ll share more about my work with Browser in the coming weeks, but one of the things that I made which I’m proud of was a version of Tinder based on conversations we’re having around who we’re building for (i.e. “swipe right if this is our ICP”). This was a fun way to use AI to build an experience that would force people to engage with a set of ideas in a constrained way and led to valuable conversations. 

While I don’t think I’ve done a great job throughout my career of creative research approaches (at least compared to some of my mentors and friends), I was proud at how well this worked to stimulate the conversations I wanted to have. It was also a reminder of the power of play and what is possible when you get people to look at things from a different perspective. 

Outliers 2026

The last thing I wanted to flag is Outliers 2026, Outset’s first ever research extravaganza that will be taking place in San Francisco at the end of September.

Yours truly will be emceeing, as well as facilitating a number of conversations throughout the day. I’m grateful to the Outset team for inviting me to collaborate on the event and I’m really looking forward to the speakers we have lined up because they are the kind of people I regularly turn to for advice and learn from.

Thanks for making it this far. I hope your summer is also off to a great start. Until next time.

Cheers,
Behzod