How to Communicate Research Findings to Executives

You’re on a conference call with the team, presenting your research findings. After you talk through the PowerPoint, you pause for questions. It’s silent, except for the product manager’s dog, who just started barking at the Amazon delivery guy before she hit “mute.” The executives thank you for your efforts and ask you to email the presentation.

You can already picture it getting filed in a “2025 Research Reports” folder, where it will collect virtual dust like an old treadmill in the garage.

What went wrong? 

Oftentimes, UX researchers get excited about insights, while executives get excited about outcomes.

Insights surface trends in user behavior and explain the motivation behind them. This helps designers and developers make key changes to products. Outcomes, on the other hand, are the business impact of those changes. They tie back to things like revenue and growth.

For your research to be used, you have to communicate the value of your insights in business terms that executives will understand. 

Read on to learn how. 

Know Your Audience

To start, think about who is receiving your insights. Is it a vice president or an R&D leader? Is a manager who works at the company’s UK office? Figure out which leaders will be receiving your findings and get an understanding of the metrics and goals they lose sleep over. 

Is there a way to link your findings back to them?

“If you can convey not just the value of what you're doing, but also the insights to a broad audience in your organization, that not only uplevels your organization, but it uplevels your career,” says Lauren Nitta, Director of Pricing & Strategic Operations at Netwrix. (Learn more about Lauren's best practices in "Using AI & Market Research to Turn Insights into Strategic Gold.")

Speak Their Language

One of the biggest hurdles for UX researchers is getting buy-in from key stakeholders. It can be hard to make the case if you only speak users and executives only speak business. 

To translate from your language to theirs, use “if / then” statements. If we make this change for the user, then we’ll achieve this outcome for the business. 

Let’s say there’s been a decline in trial to paid conversions and stakeholders don’t know why. You find people are dropping off due to too many open-ended questions in the intake process. You could frame your recommendation as, “If we use pre-populated, drop-down answers, then we could reduce friction and increase paid conversions, which is a key growth metric.”

Business acumen will earn credibility and keep research in the conversation.

Start with the End Goal in Mind

You should treat every research project like a business investment. To get in that mindset, determine the business outcomes you want to achieve at the beginning.

That’s the approach Happening’s Strategic Research Manager Rebecca Costa de Oliveira always takes. From the start, she encourages researchers to define leading and lagging indicators that they can track for impact.

After the project is over, she holds post-mortem meetings to document how insights were implemented across the org. This makes it easier for her team to demonstrate their work’s value and tie it back to business objectives.

“You need to be aligned with your leadership and your goals: your career goals, your KPIs, your OKRs,” Rebecca says. “Don’t do research just for the sake of it. Otherwise, it’s just effort.” 

Share the Headlines

Some recent studies state that executives attend between 12 to 17 meetings every week. That’s roughly 53% more than the average worker. They simply don’t have time to sit through a long PowerPoint presentation or read a 10-page PDF report.

To make an impact, share your findings in a scannable format, like an e-newsletter.

Make sure to include:

• Compelling headlines
• Brief blurbs that summarize findings
• Links to supporting data or assets

This gives stakeholders the ability to quickly grasp the most important points, with the option to dig deeper on their terms. Our friends at Twilio see an 80% open rate on their internal newsletter. Because of the way they're rethinking research, the entire organization can stay engaged with user feedback.

Use Tangible Evidence

Before spending resources on a recommendation, stakeholders want to understand the scale of the problem. Anticipate that you may get pushback on whether this issue just impacts a few individuals or the majority of your customers. 

The best way to answer that question?

Leverage Marvin’s AI research assistant to surface top product issues, based on user surveys. Then, display it as a pie chart so executives can see how this issue stacks up against others. In addition, consider making a highlight reel of clips from user interviews where they echo the same concern.

“Being able to create highlight reels and clips so easily has made research engagement go up because PM's are not just being asked to read this five page report,” says Kate Pazoles, a research leader at Twilio. “[Instead], it's like, ‘Hey, here's a two-minute video clip with seven different users talking about how they struggle with this problem space.”

Use Storytelling and Humor (Where Appropriate)

Executives are people, too. If they’re listening to a presentation or reading an email that makes them laugh, it stands out. Humor also has numerous benefits when it comes to communication, including increased message memorability and engagement, according to Yale research. 

How can humor fit into your findings? 

Let’s say a company’s robot vacuum has a high return rate on Amazon. Customer reviews include videos of the vacuum endlessly bumping into the same wall. The research team could share a highlight reel of these clips with executives to illustrate the problem, while playing U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.”

Messages you watch are also more memorable than messages you read — 95% vs. 10%. 

Provide Clear Next Steps

Actionable insights ensure that research doesn’t sit unused. They should actively drive decision-making, collaboration, and business impact.

For example, you might recommend a firmware update for the vacuum sensor. The first step could be an internal meeting with engineering to scope out what it would take to fix it. Then, you could compare that cost against the profit loss from returns for that issue last year.

The true value of research is in mitigating risk and enabling better, faster decisions, not in producing reports. If you can give executives insights that help them make business decisions with confidence, you’ll earn their attention — and their trust.

Want to learn even more about gaining stakeholder trust? Check out "Proving the Strategic Value of UX Research," your essential handbook for making research more visible, measurable, and valuable across your business.