Customer insight teams often ask for a greater seat at the table. They want more influence over decisions, stronger stakeholder engagement and a bigger role in setting organisational priorities.
Yet many are still stuck in a reactive cycle, responding to requests rather than shaping the agenda.
The most successful insight functions break out of this pattern. They develop agency.
Before going further, it's worth acknowledging an important reality. Most insight teams work within constraints. Priorities are often set elsewhere. Resources are limited. Stakeholders don't always engage. Teams are judged by how quickly they answer requests rather than how effectively they shape decisions.
Agency does not mean having complete control. Very few teams do.
It means increasing your ability to influence decisions, priorities and conversations within the constraints you operate in.
By agency, I mean the ability to influence what gets prioritised, what gets discussed and, ultimately, the direction of the insight function itself. It's the difference between simply responding to business questions and helping shape some of the questions being asked, while bringing greater clarity to which questions matter most.
The good news is that agency is not dependent on organisational structure, budget or seniority. While it can't be built overnight, it can be developed deliberately over time.
The most influential insight teams are valued not because they generate more research, but because they help organisations make better commercial decisions.
In my experience, teams that steadily build agency tend to focus on three things:
Aligning their work to commercial priorities.
Building strong relationships with key stakeholders.
Developing the discipline and confidence to prioritise.
The question, of course, is how.
Not all stakeholders have the same influence over organisational priorities, nor do they have the same relationship with insight.
The first step is to identify the individuals and teams that are most critical to organisational success and assess the strength of your current relationships with them.
This creates clarity about where time, effort and attention should be invested.
Importantly, this doesn't require a complex stakeholder management framework. Even a simple assessment of stakeholder influence, interest and relationship strength can help decide where to focus limited time and resources.
Stakeholder relationships should never be left entirely to chance.
Whether you lead a large insight function or operate as a sole practitioner, there should be clear accountability for maintaining relationships with key decision-makers.
The most influential teams treat stakeholder engagement as a core responsibility, not something that only happens when a project is underway.
In practice, this may be as simple as assigning ownership of key stakeholder relationships or ensuring regular check-ins take place. The goal is not more meetings. The goal is stronger connections to the people shaping business priorities.
Agency is built through continuous conversations.
Create regular opportunities to understand stakeholders' objectives, challenges and priorities. Equally importantly, use these interactions to prove how insight is already contributing to business outcomes.
This doesn't need to be resource intensive. A 30-minute monthly conversation with a key stakeholder can often reveal upcoming decisions, emerging risks or strategic opportunities long before a formal request arrives.
Done consistently, these conversations help shape priorities before they become formal requests and ensure the insight agenda stays closely aligned with business needs.
Over time, they also increase the likelihood that insight is brought into discussions earlier, when influence is often greatest.
Many insight teams create significant value but do a poor job of documenting it.
Keep a record of where insight has influenced decisions, reduced risk, driven growth, improved customer experience or created operational efficiencies.
This can be surprisingly simple. A shared log of decisions influenced, actions taken and outcomes seen is often enough to start building a meaningful evidence base.
In organisations where stakeholders can see a clear connection between insight activity and business outcomes, insight teams are far more likely to be viewed as strategic partners rather than service providers.
Agency grows when stakeholders can clearly see the value insight creates.
One-off success stories are not enough.
The most influential insight teams create regular channels that reinforce the value they generate, whether through stakeholder updates, internal content, presentations or strategic reviews.
Visibility matters.
People are far more likely to involve insight in future strategic decisions when they are consistently reminded of its contribution to earlier ones.
The goal is not self-promotion. It is helping stakeholders understand how insight contributes to organisational goals and commercial outcomes.
These activities are often viewed as "nice-to-have" additions to the day job. In reality, they are the work that creates agency. They strengthen stakeholder relationships, increase commercial relevance and create the foundations for effective prioritisation.
Agency creates leverage. It enables insight teams to move beyond responding to every request and focus more energy on the work that delivers the greatest commercial value.
Of course, prioritisation is rarely about saying "no" outright. More often, it is about creating visibility of trade-offs. When a new request arrives, effective teams can explain which existing activities will be delayed, displaced or deprioritised as a result.
These conversations become much easier when priorities have already been discussed and agreed with stakeholders.
Once a clear strategy and agreed set of priorities exist, teams can have far more constructive conversations about new requests, competing demands and resource allocation.
The purpose of an insight strategy is not simply to define what the team will do. It is to create permission to make conscious choices about what the team will not do.
Too often insight leaders wait for agency to arrive through a new executive sponsor, organisational redesign or operating model.
Agency is built much more gradually.
It appears from consistently aligning insight with commercial priorities, investing in stakeholder relationships and demonstrating value over time.
The most influential insight teams are not those that simply answer the most questions. They answer important questions well, while also helping the organisation focus on the questions that matter most.
Agency is rarely granted in a single moment, and it is never absolute. Most insight teams will not suddenly become the primary driver of organisational priorities.
But they can steadily increase their influence by becoming more connected to commercial decisions, more deliberate about stakeholder relationships and more disciplined about showing value.
Over time, these small shifts accumulate.