Insight Debt: The Hidden Cost in Market Research
As researchers building tech, it’s impossible for us not to see the parallels between Insight Debt and Tech Debt.
In software, Tech Debt happens when quick fixes and short-term decisions pile up, making future development slower and more complex.
Insight Debt is the research equivalent.
The thing about Insight Debt is that it doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t show up as a red flag on a dashboard or a crisis in a budget meeting. It accumulates quietly in forgotten folders, redundant research, slow decisions, and overworked teams running in circles instead of moving forward.
Most companies don’t mean to bury insights in decks that no one reads. Or structure every research project from scratch, even when the questions are the same.Or rely on researchers to be human search engines instead of actual researchers.
But it happens.
Because research isn’t built to scale, it’s built to answer a question in the moment. And when every project is a one-off, the weight of past work doesn’t compound.
Where Insight Debt Accumulates
It’s easy to think of Insight Debt as just a storage problem, something that better curation can fix.
It’s not.
We see Insight Debt building up across three layers:
- Process Debt: When research is reinvented every time instead of adapted from past work
- Design Debt: When methodologies don’t build on each other, making learnings non-transferable.
- Outcome Debt: When findings aren’t structured for reuse, leading to repeat work and wasted effort.
You see it when surveys are rewritten instead of optimized. When similar studies are run by different teams, without realizing an overlap. When the question “What do we already know about X?” sparks more Teams messages than it answers.
Why It Matters
The obvious cost of Insight Debt is wasted effort. But the bigger cost? Slower decision-making. Because when research isn’t accessible or agile, decision-making slows down.
And slow decisions aren’t just inefficient—they’re expensive.
- A product team waits weeks for research that was already done last year.
- A marketing team re-runs a survey for information that was available in a research conducted by CX.
- A researcher spends more time synthesizing past work than conducting new research.
- An agency is hired to design an end to end research when a design could have been re-used and fielded immediately
These are all situations we’ve been through. And while this is happening, decisions pile up. And when decisions pile up, momentum dies.
If you’ve been nodding along, you’re probably waiting for the “5 steps to solve Insight Debt” section.
There isn’t one.
Not because Insight Debt isn’t fixable—it is.
But because the fix isn’t one big thing. It’s a hundred small shifts. Unique to your Team’s ways of working. It is…
- Stopping for a second before starting a study to ask: Have we already done this?
- Deliberately Designing research so it’s useful beyond just this moment.
- Making insights easier to find than to recreate.
- Letting researchers research—not act as search engines.
It’s not about building a perfect system. There isn't one.
Because just like good tech architecture, this is all about creating an elegant framework and making continuous improvements. It’s about reducing friction and making research something that compounds.
And the best time to start?
Probably now. Because the debt is already there. And it’s not getting smaller on its own.
Where Tools Like InsightGig Fit In
This is the part where we could say, “That’s why we built InsightGig.”
But that’s not the point.
The point is: Research should feel lighter.
And right now, it doesn’t.
So if there’s a way to:
- Make past insights instantly searchable instead of buried in folders…
- Automate the annoying parts (tagging, categorization, synthesis)…
- Let researchers focus on new questions, not retrieving old answers…
- Reuse insight artefacts…
- Optimize design decisions and make them extendable for the future…
…then maybe that’s worth doing.
Because research should be an accelerator. And Insight Debt? That’s just dead weight dragging you down.
Small Changes Help Reduce Insight Debt
No one wakes up thinking, "Let’s create Insight Debt!" But it happens anyway.
We often complain about how much grunt work there is, how research is ignored, how insights get lost, and how little time we have to actually “insight”.
But how often do we step back and change it?
When we feel too busy just doing what we do daily, when we feel we don’t have time to fix the way we work, we are adding to the Debt.
The good news? You don’t need to overhaul everything overnight. Just start by making one small change, a shift that automates one step to make your process easier, that makes research easier to find, easier to reuse, and easier to scale and you’re already on the right track.
That’s all it needs. That one step back; that one tiny shift.
What’s the one thing you’d change today to start reducing Insight Debt?
At InsightGig, we’re building a tool stack that helps insight teams eliminate silos and unify their processes to reduce insight debt.
