Why Your R&D Team Needs a Passport: Seeing Global Solutions Firsthand is Your Competitive Advantage
- Eric Boromisa
- May 25
- 4 min read
Reading Time: ~7 minutes
Audience: Heads of R&D, VPs of Product, CTOs, Innovation Leads
There’s a dangerous illusion in product development: that you can innovate in isolation.
Many R&D teams are filled with brilliant, highly credentialed minds. But no amount of whiteboarding, customer interviews, or competitive analysis decks can substitute for something deceptively simple: going out into the world and seeing how people solve the same problem elsewhere.
In a globally competitive economy, knowing what your competitors are doing isn’t enough. You need to know how customers are solving the problem — with or without you — and why those local solutions work. And the only way to gain that understanding is by being there in person.
Innovation Is Contextual — And So Are Your Blind Spots
Too many product teams design for the imagined universal user. But “universal” is often shorthand for “what we know in our market.”
Consider a U.S.-based team building a payments solution for small businesses. They obsess over their UX flows, compliance rules, and integrations. But they’ve never visited Latin America, where WhatsApp-based invoicing and QR code payments dominate. Or China, where super-app ecosystems make the very concept of a standalone payment app seem obsolete.
Seeing this in action isn’t just intellectually interesting — it reveals your blind spots. It shakes the team's assumptions. It introduces edge cases and alternative solutions that force better product decisions.
Innovation thrives on contrast. Without seeing how other regions solve the same problem, you’re designing inside a vacuum.
The ROI of Leaving the Building
Many executives balk at the idea of sending engineers or researchers across the globe. “Can’t we just Zoom with a few people?” “Let’s look at competitors’ websites.” “Isn’t that what the market research team is for?”
Here’s what that thinking misses:
What people say vs. what they do: In interviews, customers explain their behavior. In person, you observe it. You see the workarounds, the friction, the hacks they’ve created. You notice when someone keeps two phones because your app is incompatible with their personal device.
Local constraints = Innovation seeds: Many of the most successful global products — like MPesa or Alipay — emerged in response to infrastructural constraints. Seeing those constraints firsthand can spark entirely new product ideas.
Cross-pollination unlocks strategic pivots: Your next feature may not come from your category at all — but from how people solve similar workflow issues in adjacent industries or regions. A field trip to Jakarta might inspire your U.S. team to rethink onboarding entirely.
Team alignment accelerates decision-making: It’s one thing to read a report. It’s another to watch your competitor’s demo at a trade fair, use it on a local network, and debrief with your colleagues over dinner. That visceral, shared experience drives faster, more confident product decisions.
Real Examples of Global Exposure Driving Better Strategy
A mobility startup in Europe sent its R&D team to Lagos and São Paulo. They came back not with a single new feature idea — but with an entirely new pricing model that better accommodated volatile fuel prices and informal payments.
A medtech company saw a local Brazilian clinic using expired diagnostic strips paired with a homemade dilution kit. Appalled at first, the team realized the clinic’s frugality wasn’t negligence — it was necessity. The insight led to a new “ultra-low-resource” version of their product, now driving NGO partnerships globally.
An agtech firm that visited Southeast Asia scrapped a year-long internal machine learning initiative once they realized farmers were relying on peer-to-peer SMS groups, not sensors. They pivoted to build SMS-compatible tools with low-power modes, boosting adoption by 3x.
How to Build This Into Your Product Strategy
Here’s how to operationalize global exposure for your R&D and product teams — without blowing your budget:
1. Make Field Research Non-Negotiable
Just like usability testing and customer interviews are part of the sprint process, geographic immersion should be a recurring part of your product lifecycle. Tie it to roadmap planning, not just “special projects.”
2. Pick Markets Based on Contrast
Send teams to places where the infrastructure, consumer behavior, or competitors differ fundamentally from your home market. Avoid markets that are too similar — the goal isn’t incremental insight, it’s paradigm shift.
3. Pair Engineers with Strategists
Sending only researchers or PMs risks losing the technical nuance. Sending only engineers may miss the business model implications. Send small, mixed teams that include someone responsible for turning observations into decisions.
4. Design for Absorption
Field visits are only as good as what the team brings back. Create a ritual for sharing insights: video journals, “What surprised me most” sessions, or reverse demos where the team replicates a competitor’s onboarding flow from memory.
5. Measure Strategic Impact
Track how these trips influence product direction. Did they result in a roadmap pivot? A new feature? A better pricing model? The more you tie the investment to visible outcomes, the more support you'll have to scale the practice.
Don’t Outsource Understanding
It’s tempting to delegate this kind of work to local agencies, partners, or even AI tools. But something powerful happens when your own team walks the streets, uses the products, rides the bus, listens to customers in context.
It’s not just about discovery — it’s about humility. It reminds your team that innovation is often happening without you. That you're not the smartest room, just one of many. That a good idea in Berlin might be old news in Bangalore.
You cannot engineer that awareness into a Slack update or a slide deck. It only comes from presence.
Final Thought
Your product team is already spending hundreds of hours in Jira, Figma, and Notion. Imagine if 1% of that time — and 5% of the budget — went to walking in your customers’ shoes in a different city.
It’s one of the lowest-cost, highest-impact ways to sharpen your strategy, inspire your team, and de-risk your roadmap.
So book the ticket. Walk the street. Watch the competition up close.
Because the biggest risk in product development isn’t making the wrong decision — it’s making the right decision for the wrong market.
Explore more insights:
Need help planning a strategic field research initiative?
Contact us at Numbers & Letters Advisory — we design research that builds alignment, not just insight.
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