Research teams often get measured on speed. How quickly can you turn around a study? Can you deliver insights in two weeks instead of four? The pressure is constant, and the message is clear: faster is better.
But faster isn’t always better. Sometimes faster is just… faster.
The problem with optimizing for speed is that it treats all research as equivalent. It assumes every question deserves the same urgency and every timeline is equally arbitrary. It frames delivery speed as the metric of success regardless of whether those insights actually land when they’re needed.
I’d rather optimize for timeliness. And timeliness is not the same thing as speed.
Timeliness means delivering the right insights at the right time relative to the decisions they need to inform. Sometimes that’s fast — a quick evaluative study to help a team choose between two design directions before they commit to building. Sometimes it’s slower — a foundational research effort that needs to run for months to surface patterns that will shape strategy.
Both can be timely. Both can be late. It depends entirely on alignment with product, design, and engineering timelines.
When speed is the goal, researchers may cut corners to hit arbitrary deadlines. They may compress timelines that should be longer and scramble to deliver insights that end up sitting unused because they arrived before anyone was ready to act on them—notwithstanding their quality issues. Or they deliver too late because they misjudged what “fast” needed to mean in context.
When timeliness is the goal, the conversation shifts. Instead of “how quickly can you get this done,” it becomes “when do you actually need this information to make your decision?”
That question forces clarity about dependencies, milestones, and what’s truly blocking progress versus what’s just feeling urgent.
It also creates space for researchers to push back when timelines don’t make sense. If a decision isn’t happening for six weeks, cramming a study into two weeks doesn’t make it more timely. It just makes it rushed. If a strategic question requires depth, doing it fast and shallow doesn’t serve anyone.
The goal isn’t to deliver research quickly. The goal is to deliver research when it matters, with enough rigor to be useful and enough lead time to inform decisions. Some studies can happen in a week. Some need three months. Both are fine as long as product, research, and design timelines are aligned.
Stop optimizing for speed. Start optimizing for timeliness.
jordan beck, phd 