The Tech Stack Is Changing. Build Your Career Stack.

In my last piece for the Greenbook Executive Insights expert channel, I wrote about a pattern I saw across two years (and nearly 90 episodes) of MRII Insights & Innovators podcast conversations: the value frontier for insights is moving.

That raises an obvious next question. If the work is changing, how should the people doing it change with it?

We’ve been asking our guests some version of that question for the past two years. What advice would you give someone entering the profession? What should people in the middle of their careers be doing differently? Which skills will matter most five or ten years from now?

Given MRII’s focus on training and professional development, I tend to pay particular attention when the conversation turns in that direction.

So I went back through many of those answers. There was plenty of advice about AI, data and technology, as you would expect. But what interested me more was how often our guests talked about everything that needs to surround those technical capabilities.

We hear a lot these days about the changing tech stack for insights. Which AI tools should we use? Which platforms and technologies belong in our workflows? What should we automate, and what should remain in human hands?

Those are important questions. But listening back across these conversations made me think there’s another stack we should be paying just as much attention to: Our career stack.

Research expertise is part of it. So are data and AI fluency. But our guests kept adding other things: curiosity, communication, business understanding, critical thinking, influence, leadership and the ability to keep learning as the work changes.

And like a tech stack, it’s dynamic. You keep building it throughout your career as you change roles and responsibilities, and as the demands of your organization and stakeholders evolve -- which they are doing at a rapid pace, right now.

The Craft Is Still the Starting Point

Pam Forbus, Chief Insights & Analytics Officer at Mondelez, gave some of the most straightforward advice we heard for people starting their careers: first, get very good at your job. Learn the functional and technical skills you need and demonstrate that you can perform.

She calls that “table stakes.”

But she immediately adds, “Go outside your job description.”

That seems worth emphasizing. Amid all the discussion about durable skills, human skills and AI, I sometimes worry that we can give younger professionals the impression that methodology and research fundamentals somehow matter less.

They don’t.

Dr. Marcus Cunha, Director of the University of Georgia’s Master of Marketing Research program, made that point in our conversation about research education. With everything from YouTube videos to bite-sized training now readily available, his advice was to be thoughtful about the quality of the source and not substitute shortcuts for a real methodological foundation.

So yes, learn the craft. But don’t assume mastering the craft will be enough for the rest of your career.

Become a Continuous Learner

When we asked Steve Schlesinger, Executive Chairman of Sago, what he wished he had understood earlier in his career, Steve’s answer was refreshingly simple: Be a continuous learner.

That advice could have been given 20 years ago. I think it means something a little different today.

Christian Niederauer, who leads global insights capabilities and programs at Colgate-Palmolive, talks about staying curious and agile because the business environment is changing so quickly. His advice is to keep learning, experiment with new methods and technologies, and get better at turning complex information into a story people can understand and use.

That matters just as much for someone 15 or 20 years into a career as it does for someone starting out.

Experience is enormously valuable. But it can also tempt us to rely too heavily on what has worked before. Continuous learning means being willing to add something new even when what you already know has served you pretty well.

Learn the Technology. But Don’t Outsource Your Thinking to It

I didn’t hear our guests telling younger researchers that technical skills will become unnecessary because AI will do the work.

Quite the opposite.

Bryan Orme, CEO of Sawtooth Software, encourages people entering analytics to become comfortable with tools such as Python or R, data visualization and AI. But he pairs that advice with something equally important: develop your writing and public-speaking skills.

His analogy for AI is a useful one. Treat it like an exceptionally capable assistant. Use it. Learn from it. Let it make you more productive. But don’t simply turn over the work without checking, questioning and thinking for yourself.

That combination is important. The future insights professional may need to be more technically capable and a better communicator, not one or the other.

Oksana Sobol, Vice President of Insights and Decision Intelligence at Clorox, makes a similar point. She sees an advantage for early-career professionals who develop hands-on data skills, but puts those alongside understanding the consumer and learning how to influence. Her wonderfully direct advice is that if you are in insights, “you are an influencer now.”

Learn How the Business Works

By mid-career, being able to execute good research should be assumed. The question becomes whether you understand the context in which that research is being used.

Nick Graham, who has led insights on the client side at Mondelez and PepsiCo and now advises insights organizations, puts it very simply: develop curiosity about how the business makes money.

That may sound obvious. I’m not sure it always is. Many professionals in our field do not think about that, listen to earnings calls, or learn how different leaders across the business think and speak.

Kalinda Mehta, Chief Market and Enterprise Intelligence Officer at Unilever, takes that a step further. Her advice to mid-career professionals is to get out of the insights lane and spend time with marketing, product, creative, finance and technology. Understand what actually blocks activation. She calls relationships a “superpower,” because influence depends on trust and credibility as much as it does on the quality of the insight.

At some point, another methodology may add less to your effectiveness than understanding how the business works, what different functions need, and how decisions actually get made.

Oksana Sobol takes the idea one step further: the most influential researchers put as much thought into landing the right growth idea or business decision with stakeholders as they do into conducting the research itself.

That is something people can start learning well before they have “leader” in their title.

Leadership is Changing Too

Pam Forbus made another observation that I suspect will resonate with a lot of people in our profession. Insights professionals often believe that if the work is excellent, the work will speak for itself.

It doesn’t always.

As careers advance, she says, the questions being asked increasingly become: Is this person a leader? Is the work valued and used? Can this person influence the organization? And many of those conversations are taking place when you aren’t in the room.

Oksana also argues that our definition of leadership is changing. Flatter organizations need fewer layers of people whose principal responsibility is managing other people. Leadership increasingly means setting a clear outcome and bringing together whatever resources are needed—people, data, technology and now AI—to get there. In that sense, she believes every role in insights and analytics is being asked to demonstrate some form of leadership.

Michelle Froah, Global Chief Marketing & Innovation Officer at ETS, adds general-management skills, cross-functional collaboration and resilience to what she calls the durable skills people need as they advance. Her phrase for the mindset is one I particularly like: “live life on a startup curve.” Stay curious, be willing to pivot and treat setbacks as opportunities to learn.

You Have to Own More of Your Development

Organizations clearly have a role to play in developing people. So do universities, professional associations, mentors, peers, training programs and yes, podcasts.

But Oksana makes the point that in flatter, faster-moving organizations, employers can provide opportunities and guidance while much of the responsibility for navigating a career increasingly rests with the individual.

As Executive Director of MRII, I obviously have a strong interest in that.

Training has always mattered in our profession. What strikes me after these conversations is how much broader the development challenge has become.

Early in a career, the emphasis may be research fundamentals, technical proficiency and learning how to learn. As people progress, communication, business acumen, critical thinking and influence become more important. Later still, leadership, collaboration and the ability to navigate an organization matter enormously.

And at every stage, we now have to keep up with technologies and capabilities that may not even have existed a few years earlier.

There is not one set of skills that can “future-proof” an insights career.

A better goal may be to keep building your career stack so that you can adapt as the profession changes. The technologies will keep changing. So will the skills we need to use them well.

Learn the craft. Keep adding to it. Stay curious about what comes next.  Understand the business, and what makes the different leaders in the business tick so you can speak their language.  Be bold about making a recommendation rather than merely reporting “what the data say.”

And don’t assume you’re ever finished.