Research & Discovery

Role: Customer Interviews - Data Analysis - Presentation

Research and discovery is the secret to any great product or offering. It is not flashy and it can be really diffiult to directly correlate to dollars and cents, but if you truly listen to, and understand, your customers they will tell you what to build.

I have had the opportunity to participate in a wide range of research and discovery projects throughout the course of my career:

• Customer journey mapping
• Persona creation
• Creating a core set of "Jobs to Be Done"
• Continuous discovery

I have also been coached by The Silicon Valley Product Group and Teresa Torres on best methods for continuous discovery in an Agile environment.

Jobs to Be Done Methodology

Challenge:

In one of my previous jobs we were faced with a very familiar challenge: the software had become a "feature factory". It was built on years and years of sales-driven features that were good for closing deals, but not so good when it came to product bloat.

As a result, the software did a lot of things but had lost its focus. There was no cohesion and it was really difficult for users to find what they were looking for.

Our Director of UX, Lead Researcher and I spun up a research project, using the Jobs to Be Done methodology, to bring clarity to what the employer-based software should be prioritizing (in the design and future planning).

Result:

We partnered with our Customer Success team to find a wide variety of external candidates while leveraging our internal relationships to set up interviews with those stakeholders as well.

After over 30 hours of interviews, we then spent another 15 hours, each, analyzing and comparing our qualitative findings with our in-app, quantitative data, looking for confirmations and/or discrepancies before extracting key quotes and themes.

We used Mirro to sort our findings into 15-20 themes supported by key quotes. From there, we had conversations with our Product and Engineering partners about which themes were most important for the business to solve right now.

We nailed down 5 themes and framed them using the Jobs to Be Done methodology: "When [situation], I want to [motivation], so that I can [outcome]." We presented and pitched to leadership and ensured that, going forward, all work being planned should be improving upon at least one of the jobs our users were hiring us for.