Straight line from Research to Strategy

So it turns out I love customer research.

UX research is good too - but getting to chat with people who might use our product, or people who have nebulous problems they need solving? chef's kiss

I love the teasing out of frustrations... like, what's going on behind the thing that's pissing you off? What have you seen in your career that has you draw that conclusion? What's your gut telling you about that issue?

And THEN adding all that to a mix and pulling out all the insights. In a beautiful way.

Which is why I lost my proverbial over Dovetail and have had a user-crush on them ever since.

I even declared this publicly too (hah, who does that?).

(Relatedly, I love data viz and shoe horn it into my leisure activities because why not.)

Dovetail actually made me want to schedule customer interviews. Me (socially anxious) wanting to talk with critics of our product. So that I could fill in our graphs.

Talk about cart before the horse... but then actually the arrangement working better for everyone.

So the images above give a glimpse at what we were finding in our interviews. We did 2 kinds of interview: customer research and UX. Long story short and many insights later, we used the insights gained in these interviews in 2 main places:

• Feature design and troubleshooting

• Marketing content

That's it: straight from the horses' mouths to our to-dos.

If we heard enough people ask for features or bemoan an experience, we put it into our day-to-day planning.

If we heard people mention problems and nebulous concepts we used those to make marketing videos.

It really was that simple - and there's something super magical in that simplicity.

Now in other orgs I know this wouldn't be the way things are done (and probably for good reason). I'm sure there's lots of sense in putting more time and space between a UX issue and a coder (for bug fixes) or verbatim wonderings from potential customers into expert-informed content videos (for marketing). I'm sure people will argue there's a layer of strategy that needs to be applied so that we're not creating too much work for ourselves... after all, people just want faster horses, right?

But in a 4 person team, where myself and our Product Designer were also our product support and product marketing team, and where we were operating in the (frankly) wildly fire-hose-esque marketing landscape that we do, there simply wasn't time.

At the time that was hectic. And stressful. And burnout-inducing. And fought tooth and nail with my need to put out high quality, highly validated work.

Looking back on it now I can see that - wow- we made a hell of a batch of lemonade with those lemons.

Also in the images above are some screenshots of the marketing strategy I co-designed with the team.

Our Product Strategist guided my through some quantitative research practice, and we both did our own research into marketing mechanics and metrics.

Then, our product designer and I out the hours into our interviews.

I then combined the qualitative insights with the mechanics to create our strategy: what to talk about, when and who would create the content.

I also (of course) sourced the equipment and set up needed, because I like to play with tech toys :)

Using my subject matter knowledge I wrote the interview prompt scripts, scheduled the interviews and filmed the footage. I then passed this on to our gorgeous product designer to cut into social-ready formats.

The result? Unfortunately the product funding was pulled before we could launch. My team fired from under me. Without notice. I left the org as a result. It got a little nasty.

But, what I take with me from that experience is my ability to translate qualitative and quantitative insights into actionable product and marketing wok plans, workable by a leanest of lean teams.

And a love for Dovetail.