AMA: Matterport Vice President Marketing, Ali (Wiezbowski) Jayson on Market Research

It always starts with the business objective, and then moves into user needs. What I find is that happy, satisfied customers most often move the business forward. So, I like to start with a long-arch view of what we are trying to achieve, quickly followed by what we hope our users will say / feel when using our product. If we can align on those two objectives and the time horizon, then market research is usually a great tool to help us work backward and figure out what steps it will take for us to create that experiecne for the customer. 

Nothing beats sitting with a customer and actually listening to them. I can't reinforce enough the importance of this. As companies grow, its easy to lean on reports / reporting to tell you "what the customer thinks & feels". But there is so much nuance in how people communicate -- and as humans, we're all naturally atuned to these signals. So as a baseline, I encourage all my teams to participate in live listening sessions, focus groups, sales pitches, etc at least 1x every quarter to keep their ear to the ground and stay close to the customer. Of course, the above doesn't scale and we all have lots of things we need to do with our time. So I'm very interested in a few types of data to inform qual & quant: * Platforms like Suzy & Feedback Loop have been incredbily valuable tools for my team & product management teams that I've worked with recently. Suzy's Dynamic segmentation tool not only lets you complete a segmentation exercise, refresh it regularaly, and then gives you a mechanism to get feedback from those segments within 48 hours. It saves my team and my product teams tons of time, and ensures that our products & external communications are user-insight driven and optimized throughout the entire process of getting ready to go to market. I like to think of these platforms as Qualitative at Scale. * For Quantitative, I've used a lot of survey platforms but I have to say my favorite quantitative mechanism is actual behavioral data. Product Analytics, Web Engagement, Media Engagement, Customer Support Inquiries, etc. Humans don't always do what they say / think, and I think actual behavioral data is the best to assess what customers are actually most intrguied by or interested in. I require my teams to be keeping their ears close to these sources to pick up important themes. When you're listening and watching across these different platforms, PMMs can usually start picking up on important themes to pass back either to product or creative teams to improve the end to end customer experience.

It's a healthy balance of both. We do smaller, qualitative user feedback sessions mostly internally -- especially with customers who are in beta programs for our new features. But broader market research initiatives that require greater scale, we often bring on great partners like Forrester, YouGov, Suzy, and other survey/analytics tools to get us the level of responses we need. 

Absolutely worth the effort! A great example of where extensive qual and focus group research really was worth it was when we launched Uber Pro. In initial product strategy discussions, the internal team was exclusively looking at financial upside or discounts as rewards. But what we learned through qualitative research was (a) that they really wanted to feel appreciated for all their hard work and (b) their primary motivation for the hard work was providing for their families. After unlocking both insights, those two became critical to the product, program, and marketing design behind the initiave. Post launch, we saw two main outcomes: 1. Drivers were initially skeptical but then much more receptive to the program because we showed we were supporting what they cared about most -- their family -- and wanted was in their best interest. 2. If you take a look at the press that we got as part of the result, you can see that helping them provide for their family via access to free college programs became one of the 2 main messages that was picked up. 3. The press showing our support of drivers & their families ended up having a positive master brand impact with multiple audiences. I really attribute the 3 outcomes above to doing extensive research as we wouldn't have landed at that strategy without it. 

In my view, the goal is to 1. help define the objectives of the research based on business & user needs 2. support research as they execute the research plan to ensure the research methodology & questions deliver on the objectives 3. Once research is complete, help narrow and refine how to apply the findings. I can't emphasize this one enough. We live in a world where data is everywhere. Most reports I see come back with 20+ pages of insights, and as a PMM, you're looking at results from multiple different sources. One of the most important things a PMM can do is help the business and PM narrow in on which insights are more critical to action.

Absolutely! There is a ton of incredibly important data & insights in what you're probably already doing related to your product: * Web - Look where people are spending their time, dropping off, what is getting the most clicks * Ads - Same as above. Target multiple groups with multiple creative, and see what drives the most engagement. * Customer Support - Your users are telling you what they need help with. * Product Analytics -- Retention & Happy Customers - Identify your most engaged, and happy customers, and do look back analysis. Where did they come from? How are they using your product? What can you learn about their demo and psychographics? * Product Analytics -- Churn - Same as above. Identify cohorts of users who are churning, and do a look back analysis. Are there patterns in their behavior, source, demographics, etc between them and what becomes a predictor of churn? If you're looking for research & insights about your category, not necessarily your own product, I think Google Consumer Surveys can be a very effective but low cost way to get started.

I absolutely love working with UXR teams. And I completely understand the reason for the question. The truth is, yes it can be confusing. Fundamentally, I do think they share a macro goal -- which is to understand humans, their motivations, etc. But the ways in which we evaluate these can be slightly different. The best UXR teams I've worked with can also present different UI/UX/Product Design experiences and gauge a customers response to that design. In my experience, thats an incredibly valuable speciality, but also different from Product Marketing. Product Marketing is meant to spread across channels and think about human motivations - anticipate their neeeds & behaviors, but UI/UX design is not a speciality that I've seen from most PMMs. So UXR teams can provide incredible insight to PM & PMM, and PMM can help connect the dots with other trends / insights they're seeing across other channels. This makes UXR and PMM a critical alliance and in my view, a very complimentary one in the pursuit of building amazing, customer centric and beloved products.