AMA: Audible Former Senior Director, Head of Product Marketing, Jameelah Calhoun on Market Research

Thanks for this awesome question! The great news is that there are many pathways and many skillsets that can lead to a successful career in product marketing. In my case, I started my career as a financial analyst and consultant. These skills have been invaluable for me as product marketing requires you to quickly understand large customer data sets and distill insights as well as being able to think strategically about short term and long term market trends. As I've gone deeper into product management and marketing, this fundamental training has still served me well. This is all to say focus on the transferable skills that you want to develop in your career trajectory to get into product marketing or that you want to demonstrate in your interviews for a product marketing role. For product marketing, here's what I emphasize: * Customer empathy and insights * Synthesizing data into action steps * Communication and influencing * Project management * Building business cases Additionally, product marketers thrive on enthusiasm for products, ideas and communication. Come to your interviews prepared with ideas on how you would change their product and why. Conduct your own mini-market research exercise by asking friends and family who use the product for input. The interview is the first opportunity to put your product marketing hat on and show what you are can do. Good luck!

It's important to take an iterative approach to customer research that spans the product development cycle. No single research study can anticipate and answer every potential customer challenge or angle, so it is important to build iteration into your plans. I follow 4 main stages of research: 1) finding opportunities, 2) evaluating concepts, 3) UX Research and Usability, and 4) market acceptance research. Throughout each step, it is important to constantly revisit the core question - which is are we solving a real customer problem? Second, it is important to understand what product decisions and customer behaviors would make or break your launch. Priortize getting high fidelity signals on those items. 1) Finding product opportunities should be a consistent stream of research. These can be composed of win/loss interviews, NPS surveys, customer service calls, and ongoing customer interviews. The goal here is to surface pain points and identify any emerging dimensions customers may be using to evaluate your company relative to competition 2) Once an opportunity is identified, I move to the concept validation. In this phase, the focus is on testing basic concept ideas and how customers value that feature. Surveys can provide quick signals on receptivity. After you feel you have a receptive audience, I move to focus groups to help prioritize features and understand high level requirements. These groups also can help inform how much of an irritant the defined customer problem is and what is their motivation to change behavior. 3) UXR is where you get even more in depth into the customer acceptance criteria for the new feature. You will get more clear signals about the actual likelihood that the concept you've developed can be usable by customers and ultimately solve a problem for them. 4) Lastly, it's time to put the boat in the water. Market acceptance research and testing involves having a small group of customers test drive your feature. It is important to observe critical KPIs on behaviors and downstream results, but also to incorporate qualitative interviews into this phase as well. 

Your leadership will be focused on the ROI of the budget and time spent developing personas. The most salient metric for these exercises will be customer acquisition costs. I would look at trends in customer acquisition costs over time, across segments, and across channels. This helps illuminate where there are pockets of inefficiency. On the qualitative side, it can also be valuable to gather sentiment from your customer-facing teams (i.e. sales and customer service) on how the lack of personalization and clarity of their target segments has increased complexity for their roles. Lastly, it can be helpful to pilot personas after a small study. At the beginning, you may try developing just one or two personas for a very clear target and adapt your marketing and scripts accordingly as an a/b test. This can yield some initial data to support the value that a broader, more rigorous exercise would bring to your organization. 

I focus on creating a collaborative environment with market research, user research, and analytics teams as they provide critical inputs for product marketing to function. PMM owns defining the research objectives and the business questions, while the research and analytics teams are the subject matter experts on defining the specific methodologies and taking the lead on execution. There is of course input throughout from PMM, but we leverage the expertise of our research teams to ensure we get high quality results from our efforts. 

Thanks for asking this question. The exercise of defining your competitive set is a critical, but at times under-emphasized aspect of conducting research. There are three primary modes for competitive research: 1) optimization, 2) growth and 3) exploration. 1) Optimization is the most narrow mode. This is meant to identify how you are positioned relative to direct competitors, who are in the same industry and product family as your company. This is where your win/loss interviews become important. 2) Growth mode is where you would look at direct and indirect competitors, who may share an industry, but are in a different product family or vice versa. The goal here is to understand how to expand your addressable market and seek product adjacencies. 3) Lastly exploration mode is the widest lens. Here I focus on the customer jobs to be done. Anything that enables the customer to achieve that job (the substitutes) can be informative on customer barriers to entry for the most difficult prospects to acquire and provide a source of ideas for exploration of new business verticals. These substitutes may be in the informal economy (such as borrowing from a friend or hitchhiking) depending on the industry that you are in. All of these are important. Depending on where your company is in its growth cycle it may need a different balance of each. For example, very mature companies may focus on exploration and growth mode, while new entrants may focus primarily on optimization and growth.

Segmentations and personas both have a role to play in informing product strategy and targeting for marketing. Defining segments is more of quantitative exercise with a primary goal of optimizing your business and operating model. Typically, I couple an external prospect survey with internal data on how existing customers interact with your product. You're looking for attributes that are correlated with customer outcomes and behaviors. Some key dimensions for segmentation include purchase behaviors, customer barriers to entry (i.e. switching costs), demographics, and jobs to be done. Note that most companies will have multiple segmentations to drive different business decisions, such as retention segmentations identifying high attrition risk segments versus market segmentations which are focus on prioritizing who is your addressable market. Defining personas tends to be more of qualitative exercise leveraging focus groups and customer interviews. In this case, some of the important dimensions can include lifestyle, attitudes, and motivations that humanizes the segment(s) you are trying to reach. These help inform marketing messaging, creative, and tone that ensures your company can connect with real human beings versus statistics.

Customer insights are the bedrock of any product marketing function. There are 4 key steps when planning research: 1) knowing your objectives, 2) establishing your hypotheses, 3) discerning which methodology will deliver the right inputs to drive your decisions, and 4) articulating the 'so what'. 1) Establish your top 2 learning objectives for the exercise. It may be helpful to gather input from key stakeholders on how this study may inform their function. For example, you may be looking to determine the dimensions on which a customer segment evaluates product quality and the segment's willingness to pay. You are likely to find out more than 2 insights while executing research, but it is important to focus your questions and methods on solving a couple of larger objectives. 2) Synthesize any existing relevant customer research, external papers, and internal customer behavior analysis that can help you establish a baseline on what is understood about your research question today. Use this information to write out your hypotheses. This is an important check to ensure that your selected methodology can actually prove or disprove your hypothesis. 3) There are many market research tools that product marketers can leverage, ranging from qualitative to quantitative. I have used everything from large sample quantitative surveys to simply having conversations with friends and family. In general, I find that quantitative methodologies like surveys are great for establishing systematic drivers of purchase behavior and customer use cases. Qualitative studies like focus groups provide insight into nuanced elements such as customers' emotional connection to products or their reaction to the tone of messaging or testing new concepts. Once you pick a method, it's time to execute. 4) Articulate your findings with the following: 1) consumer insight, 2) how it changes product or GTM strategy decisions, and 3) further questions that have been raised. It is not a bad outcome to surface new customer questions or dimensions coming out of the research. It usually means you are heading down the right path to uncover something really compelling.