How to Use the Pyramid Principle to Write Research Reports
Use the Pyramid Principle to make your research insights stick (and get acted on)
Hi, I’m Nikki. I run Drop In Research, where I help teams stop launching “meh” and start shipping what customers really need. I write about the conversations that change a roadmap, the questions that shake loose real insight, and the moves that get leadership leaning in. Bring me to your team.
Paid subscribers get the power tools: the UXR Tools Bundle with a full year of four top platforms free, plus all my Substack content, and a bangin’ Slack community where you can ask questions 24/7. Subscribe if you want your work to create change people can feel.
If you’ve ever spent weeks on a research report only to have stakeholders skim it, misinterpret it, or worse, ignore it entirely, you’re not alone.
No matter how great your research is, if you don’t communicate it well, it won’t have an impact.
This realization hit me early in my career when I spent three weeks crafting a beautifully detailed 30-page research report. I presented it to the product team with excitement, only to hear:
“Can you summarize the key takeaways in a few sentences?”
“So… what do you actually want us to do with this?”
“I didn’t have time to go through everything, can we just chat?”
I was crushed. All that effort, and they weren’t even reading it. That’s when I realized I was structuring my reports the wrong way.
Fast forward to today, and I structure every single research report using The Pyramid Principle and it has changed everything.
Now, my reports don’t just get read. They drive real product decisions.
If your reports keep landing with a dull thud, it’s rarely the research and it’s usually the structure. Paid subscribers get the full Pyramid Principle system I use to write reports stakeholders can skim in two minutes. Inside the paywalled section, I share:
my exact “first sentence” formulas (by study type)
a copy/paste report skeleton with headings you can reuse every time
a simple way to choose 2–4 “key arguments” without dumping your whole findings list
examples of weak vs strong insight statements, rewritten into stakeholder-ready language
how I package evidence so it reads like a case, not a data dump
the “action plan” block that stops the “so what?” question before it shows up
a finished example you can mirror for your next report
Exclusively for paid subscribers
