AMA: Cortex Head of Product Marketing, Lauren Craigie on Market Research

If you’re collecting product usage data I would look for the sticky parts and the untouched parts of the platform that your data shows should be valuable. Where do people dwell—is it because that part of the platform is hard to understand or because they get the most value from it? What’s missing from their daily workflows? Why? Look at your support tickets as well. Where are people getting stuck or losing speed? Is there an education gap or a product gap? I would also consider a customer CAB or ...Read More

Re: templates. Feel free to reach out on LinkedIn and I’ll share what templates I’ve used in the past for ICP and personas. Re: Synthesizing approach: I try to keep the majority of collection activities very public to the founders and team leads as I go. I don’t want my final synthesis to feel like a surprise to anyone-just a neatly packaged version of the conversations we’ve been having about new insights all along the way. Examples: I have a zapier connection to Typeform where I collect NPS an ...Read More

For gut checks on messaging, or for unguided surveys like pains and gains I do it myself via SurveyMonkey or Wynter. $600-$1200 will get you 50-100 answers from folks that meet your target market (you can choose qualifiers like industry, title, seniority, location but each will shrink the size of your pool). The thing I love most about these tools is 1) you can ask a qualifying question to eliminate anyone who’s never even heard of your category, or doesn’t do the work you aim to improve, for ex ...Read More

One way to do this is to lean into surveys—where you won’t have direct contact with your audience. But even then you’ll need to strip questions down to very specific structures. If you look up System Usability Survey for example, you’ll find specific guidelines for framing and repeating questions to better under customer user experience. Wynter also provides precise templates for jobs to be done and value surveys. However, this is also why win/loss and jobs to be done vendors are so useful (and ...Read More

I have an answer to this, but also a caution! Caution: Everyone likes to have a slide in their analyst briefing decks that shows all the adjacent markets you’ll eventually conquer. (We have one too so no shade). But I would caution that there’s a difference between building a narrative that gives prospects (and partners and investors) faith that you have a vision—and focusing too quickly on “could be” use cases too early. It takes a really, really mature sales and marketing motion to start solut ...Read More

Oh I love that you have a UX team that does a lot of this work! TLDR your UX team is building for what your ICP expects to see in product. You (the PMM) are building the ICP that they’re building for. Here’s how I’ve worked alongside that group in the past, but I’m sure it could be different fro everyone. Collaboration here is key. In my experience the UX team is usually thrilled to know someone else cares about this work :) UX research-led (I attend or listen to calls): Jobs, pains, gains Jobs ...Read More

I love mixing a short term win with long term gain. For example, maybe I’m writing a blog or prepping a presentation—I’ll ask for budget to do a quick industry or customer survey to create some good punch points. That’s a short term win. But I’ll add questions into the survey that I know I won’t have time to fully absorb for months when I can do a much broader analysis. Then I’ll update the ICP, help the SDRs with new sequences, reconsider my content roadmap.. etc. For the analyst firms—I think ...Read More