Smart users are your biggest research risk.

Not the uninformed ones. Not the disengaged ones. The ones who are senior, articulate, and always have an answer.

Those people are trained to give solutions. It is a professional reflex. Ask them about a problem and they skip straight to the fix. Executives from consulting and finance are the worst for this. They are paid to always have an answer.

The job of research is to get underneath that. "I want ice cream" is not a need. "I am overheated and need relief" is. One opens one solution. The other opens twenty.

This gets harder when the person speaking is a VP with a 30-minute slot and strong opinions. Analytics will not protect you either. The same bias that shapes the interview shapes how you interpret the data.

Next time a senior stakeholder hands you a solution in a research session, ask one question: "What would that solve for you?" Then wait.