AMA: Shopify Senior Product Marketing Lead, Robin Fontaine on Market Research

This depends on the magnitude of the launch, the goal of the research, and the budget available. For a large business-critical launch, you may have more than one phase of research. You might do a phase 1 a year out from launch, validating the product's appeal in the intended market. You might need a phase of pricing research 4 to 6 months from the launch. And I also recommend a phase of message testing research 2 to 3 months from the launch.

Even if accessing quantitative data is a challenge, you can almost always find a way to get great qualitative data by setting up interviews with customers or prospects. You can do these over video chat. Here's a process you can follow: * Write a research brief that includes goals, target audience you want to interview, whether you will pay the subjects, how you'll recruit them, and the timeline for your research. * Create a discussion guide for the interviews. This is like a script our outline you'll follow in the interviews, and includes the questions you'll ask, any visuals you might want to show, or instructions for the subject to walk through a prototype and give feedback. It's important that each interview is conducted in the same way with the same words to get clear findings, so follow your script! * Recruit your participants. If you're looking to talk to a segment of your existing customers, get an email list and send out invitations, ideally including calendly link or similar appointment scheduling tool. If you're looking for prospects you may need to get creative and find people in your network, or even through social media. * Conduct the interviews. Record them if possible, because sharing excerpts from those videos to support key findings can be very powerful. Be sure to ask permission from the subject to record! * Reflect on what you heard, review the videos, and summarize your findings. Share with your team.

There are a few approaches I have found helpful here. 1. A good ol' SWOT analysis may be what you need. This is a pretty common framework where you list strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats for your own product, and a competitor's. Placing the two side by side can illuminate areas where your team should focus. 2. Sometimes a feature comparison table is helpful if you need a more granular view of how you stack up against a competitor at the feature level. Here you can use a spreadsheet or table. List all the features you offer or are considering, and features your competitors offer in the left side column. Then add your company or product at the top of the next column, and add your competitors across the top. Then go through each feature and mark which product or company offers it. When you're done you'll have a very granular map of where your product is strong, and where you may be missing features that competitors have. 3. Gather and analyze data from internal teams. Leverage your support, community, and social teams to see if they can provide data on how often a particular feature is requested. If you have a sales team, find out if they can query their CRM tool for keywords related to the feature(s) you want to consider. Bonus points if your sales team can help you associate the potential revenue lost due to a lack of a particular feature.

Product Marketers should be able to support of execute fully on a few types of research. What role they play in the research will depend on whether or not they have dedicated researchers at their company, or budget to hire an agency. * Surveys: PMMs should be able to author, send, and analyze the results of surveys. Key skills are: writing good questions that will not unwittingly bias the answers, and data analysis of the answers (though many are using Chat GPT to help with summarizing takeaways). * Interviews: Also known as Qualitative Research, 1:1 interviews with customers is an important skill for PMMs. 5 to 10 interviews can go a long way toward answering key questions about product market fit, pricing, prioritizing features on your roadmap, and more.