Floors set the baseline. Ceilings align the moonshots. A framework for planning successful research.

How do you lead a Research team? Since joining Wiz, I’ve moved into a role leading a small part of our Research Organization.

Wiz has obviously been a success, and Research has always held a core role. Leadership has valued it accordingly. There is no micro-focus on measuring and managing for Return on Investment. In my team, Risk Research, we have diverse stakeholders and impact, spanning Product, Engineering, customer-facing, and (yes) marketing.

However, despite the latitude we have for research that might be high-risk or long-horizon, it’s useful to have rules of thumb to guide us. In talking to other industry research teams, candidates, and colleagues, one shorthand I keep falling back on is “Floors & Ceilings”.

The basic idea is simply: in planning research, we should set a Floor and Ceiling goal.

Floors

The floor will often be an internal presentation, documentation, a blog post, or a proof-of-concept tool. It’s the baseline value we get from our work. This ensures that even if we aren’t fully successful with our research, the work isn’t entirely wasted.

This isn’t just a way for leadership to squeeze out value. Setting a floor ensures freedom to experiment and psychological safety for researchers. You can go down a rabbit hole safely, knowing how to de-risk the creative work. Researchers often get trapped in a search for absolute truth, and anything less than success feels like failure. But research is a risky endeavor. The right balance should have you “failing” often. The floor compensates for that.

It sets a foundation that future research can build on. It ensures that “failures” compound.

Ceilings

The ceiling might be a Tier 1 conference talk, a new Product SKU, or protecting X% of the industry. Setting a ceiling is an opportunity for strategic alignment. It ensures moonshots get aligned to company, team, and individual goals.

For the researcher, it empowers and encourages them to dream big and take big swings. Research can have legs, not just get cut off as soon as it hits a value threshold. Without a ceiling, good research gets shipped too early.

Together

Setting the right floor and ceiling sets you up for success. Hitting the floor needs to be achievable with high-confidence. The ceiling should be plausible, but sufficiently audacious.

If a project’s floor is “learn something” and the ceiling is “twitter thread,” that’s more hobby than professional Research. Setting floor and ceiling to “blog post” means you’re probably snacking on low-risk, low-reward work.

The floor also formalizes the stages of research. It offers an opportunity to stop-loss a project and recoup salvage value. If we’re able to meet the floor, we should have a good understanding of the viability of reaching the ceiling. It’s a chance for the researcher to advocate for a go/no-go on further investment.

Interested in more internals of Industry Research? Check out my coworker Amitai Cohen’s brilliant collection of essays at Rhythms of Research.