AMA: Dovetail Product Marketing Lead, Alissa Lydon on Market Research

Out of all of the frameworks I've tried, I think "jobs to be done" is my favorite. But in reality, I often end up riffing on it to build out a framework that is structured like the following: Use case name (aka primary job to be done) Persona(s) concerned with this JTBD Pain points in trying to accomplish this job Business impact of not getting this job done The value prop of our solution in solving this pain The differentiated features and services the solution provides to support the value pro ...Read More

First understand the appetite level for research across the organization. If a lack of customer or market understanding is preventing the business from achieving key goals (closing more deals, delivering better products, etc.), and you can make that connection, then you might have an easier time unlocking the resources. If there are smaller pockets of need, or it's not a large enough problem across the business, then you might have to start with some scrappier tactics to prove the value. No matt ...Read More

As someone immersed in this problem space for the past six months, the struggle of collecting and synthesizing large and disparate data sets is very real, but there are some promising developments. When trained correctly, generative AI can help uncover key themes in different data types. From summarizing calls and documents to pulling out emergent themes in larger data sets, some exciting new technologies can help make sense of various data sets quicker than any human can. Full disclosure - Dove ...Read More

I've already shared some ways that you can be scrappy with research, but one more thing I will add here is that even without some of these low-cost programs product marketing still has access to a mountain data that they can mine for insights. Sales and success are talking to customers every day, product are running their own research programs, support is sitting on a mountain of customer feedback via tickets, and the list goes on! If you don't have the budget or bandwidth to do your own researc ...Read More

UX research should be viewed as a valuable partner to product marketing. They are often researchers by training and can offer guidance on leveraging best practices to ensure that research data is high-quality. Just like any stakeholder, product marketing should strive to build a connection with this team and partner early and often. It's not that different from building relationships with product or GTM. Work with UX research to understand their goals, clearly share product marketing's key metri ...Read More

If you have a large enough prospect/customer base, you can do some scrappy research yourself. Set up a quick survey, incentivize folks to complete it, and just like that you've created your own version of trend data. You can use a similar approach to do qualitative interviews with target personas and drill into more substantial topics. The best part? You can use those outputs not just as data to help inform things like product strategy, messaging, and other things, but they also make for great m ...Read More

I think a two-step approach is best here. First, you need to make sure that people know these insights exist. That means meeting them where they are and creating rituals to share and consume insights. It might be during quarterly planning with the product team, or monthly enablements with the GTM teams, for example. At Dovetail, we do this as a company every month. We call it our "Customer Showcase." It is meant to be a rallying point for everyone to dig deep into what our customers think about ...Read More