About us
We’re a small firm that specializes in user research, competitive analysis, and product strategy. We’re based in the Baltimore/Washington D.C. area and serve clients across the US and around the world.
Enigma Bureau Founder & Principal
Adam Richardson
Adam is an award-winning researcher and strategist who strives to improve people's lives by making things work better.
His career has spanned physical product design, experience and service design, and working with companies and organizations across a wide range of industries and geographies.
He started being a user researcher at 10 years old, interviewing friends of family about their car needs and designing cars for them. Since those precocious beginnings he’s interviewed hundreds of engineers, scientists, IT admins, healthcare providers, financial advisors, and more.
Most of his career has been in design and innovation consulting, including 10 years in leadership roles at the global consultancy frog design, building up the strategy and user research capabilities there. After frog, he went in-house to work on new product development and customer experience innovation at a fintech firm in Silicon Valley.
He started Enigma Bureau to allow him to focus on the bringing insights and clarity to the early stages of a new product and business opportunity that result in better lives for customers.
His writing has appeared in Harvard Business Review and many other publications, and his book Innovation X was published in 2010 (buy on Amazon). He’s spoken at conferences and led workshops around the world, and taught and lectured at multiple universities in the US and Europe.
He earned his BFA in Industrial Design from the California College of the Arts (and was named in the top 100 alumni of the school’s first century), and his MA in Humanities from the University of Chicago, where he crafted a custom degree in design research, before formalized degrees in the topics existed.
What we believe
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Behind every technology problem is a business problem. And behind every business problem is a human problem.
Getting customer feedback on a tech innovation is often what clients come to us for. But behind that always lies a business model problem - commoditization, shifting channels, disruptive competitors. And to understand all that requires an understanding of people inside and out. Above all, why they should care - customers, purchase influencers, sales and marketing and other business stakeholders, engineering teams. We try to understand the whole picture and connect the dots.
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Customer research by itself is insufficient.
Most of what we do here at Enigma Bureau is customer research, but only following customers’ desires can lead you astray. Customer feedback must be put in the context of what your competition is doing, macro social and economic trends, what your brand story is, what technologies and capabilities you possess (or can partner/build/buy), and what sales and channel capabilities you have. Connecting the dots tells you where the real opportunities lie.
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Design and marketing should be allies, not competitors
Too often, design and marketing teams are at odds, or at best working in silos, which is counterproductive as today the line between products, services and marketing is almost completely blurred. These disciplines share many similar goals of understanding customers’ needs and how to create a differentiated, valued offering. We've worked closely with marketers and designers for years, helping build bridges and create mutually beneficial solutions.
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Editing and execution are more important than having more ideas.
If there's one thing we've learned working with companies, especially established ones in complex industries, it's that they more often suffer from a surplus of ideas, not a deficit. Conventional wisdom is that you need more ideas. Experience has shown us that can lead to “shiny object syndrome”. Focusing on nailing a small number of ideas and then iterating (or pivoting) is more successful than firehosing new ideas into the organization.