There are many research activities that can happen prior to developing a feature.
In this example, we were thinking about a feature for our product that had many contemporaries out in the wild. Known as a 'bookmarklet', this mini-javascript-app-in-a-bookmark is commonly provided by scrapbooking, 'read-later' and blogging websites.
Similar to those, we wanted a way for our users to save a web page to our app. Therefore it made sense for us to research how others had implemented this solution and learn from their successes and failures.