A fundamental question often arises when product leaders design their research org chart: Should you centralize your researchers onto one core team or designate them across disciplines?
Trick question: There is no one right answer.
Ultimately, the best team structure is the one that allows everyone to leverage both deep product expertise and a broad organizational perspective.
For that, you need to focus on building systems for centralized research.
Centralized vs Decentralized Research Teams: What’s the Difference?
In a centralized research team model, the researchers operate as an internal agency. They field requests from different product, marketing, and leadership teams, and they act as the central hub for all research activities. They also establish and promote standardized research methodologies and processes across the company.
Decentralized research teams embed researchers within individual product teams or business units. The integrated researcher focuses exclusively on their assigned product area. Product teams often define research priorities tailored to their specific roadmap. Since the research expertise is distributed across the organization, researchers also develop deep knowledge of their domains.
Both models have their pros and cons.
Think about it: A product manager lives and breathes their product day in and day out. Same as product designers.
For researchers to be effective, they need to be able to engage with these product experts on their level. Researchers may struggle to ask the most pertinent questions without a fundamental understanding of the product. Embedding within a product team allows them to build that expertise and engage more deeply with their audience.
Centralized research teams, however, are not tied to a single roadmap and often have a broader perspective of the business. For example, the team might research a core product feature; next, they might investigate a new support process; then, they might untangle the cause of suddenly low NPS scores.
This broader remit gives centralized research teams a unique vantage point. They can see patterns and identify opportunities that might be missed when research is too focused on individual product silos.
A Centralized View of Research
Regardless of the org structure you choose, a centralized view of research is the key to building better products.
This means all research knowledge is collected, organized, and made accessible in one central location for everyone across the organization.
This centralized view helps you drive winning business decisions regardless of your research team’s structure. It focuses less on the people and more on collaborating and sharing knowledge across the board.
“Think about the culture of your organization, almost like a research project, and then think about how you want to influence it and where you can inject yourself into the existing culture,” said Tira Schwartz during Building a Culture Where Research Will Thrive.
So, how can you achieve a centralized view of research? With a research repository that promotes a strong culture of collaboration!
How Research Repositories Unify Research Efforts
A robust research repository operates as the central nervous system for all your research knowledge, whether you have a centralized or decentralized research team structure.
Adopting an AI-powered research repository, such as Marvin, can function as a customer knowledge base accessible across the entire organization. Anyone in your team can search, access, and learn from the collective research data.
In centralized teams, a repository prevents the central research team from becoming a knowledge silo. Features like file tags and labels within Marvin ensure that the broader organization can quickly discover and leverage the work of the central research team.
In decentralized teams, a repository connects distributed research efforts, prevents knowledge fragmentation, and fosters customer learning. It becomes the unifying platform for a decentralized research ecosystem.
Whether you choose a centralized or decentralized research model, repositories facilitate seamless research pipelines. From sales calls and support tickets to customer surveys and usability tests, you can upload, store, and analyze any research file.
Even better, stakeholders can discover important insights on their own so they can make user-centric, research-backed decisions.
We recently published The 2025 State of Research Repositories industry report, if you want to dive deeper on the topic.
Or jump over here for a glimpse at the benefits of a centralized research repository.
Centralized View of Research: The Key to Your Success
Centralized vs. decentralized teams? Don’t get too caught up in the debate.
Remember that the most critical factor isn’t the team structure — it’s achieving a centralized view of research with a searchable, dynamic repository and a collaborative culture.
With these two pillars, you can unlock data-driven decisions and user-centric products. Focus on building a centralized research system to drive impact, no matter what your org chart looks like.
