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

There are a few approaches I have found helpful here. 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. 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 ...Read More

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'l ...Read More

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). ...Read More