You don't need billions of dollars to research well. You need to build a habit of actually doing research at every point in product development, from building a new feature, to after you launch your product into the market.

Your product doesn't exist in a vacuum. Research is how you connect what you're building with the rest of the world.

• Eat the dog food. When Facebook launched on Android, the experience was awful. Most developers preferred to use iOS, and the resulting Android experience was so bad that chief product officer Chris Cox forced parts of his team to switch to Android phones. Get your product team to live through the problem firsthand.
• Start from an empty state. Part of the reason why the Apple team chose the name "iPod" was because it didn't describe what the iPod actually did. The iPod itself was an empty state that wasn't limited to one function, but could constantly evolve over time.
• Help the competition. In 2014, Elon Musk open-sourced all of Tesla's patents. He wrote on the company blog: "We believe that Tesla, other companies making electric cars, and the world would all benefit from a common, rapidly-evolving technology platform." Look at what the competition is doing constantly, and learn from them.