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Surachita Bose

AMA: Twilio Head of Industry Product Marketing: Enterprise & Public Sector, Surachita Bose on Competitive Market Research

September 21, 2023 @ 10:00AM PT

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Surachita Bose

Fmr Senior Director of Product Marketing · Iterable

Hi all, my name is Surachita Bose. 👋

💼 Job: Senior Director of Product Marketing, Iterable. Formerly, Twilio, Uber, Intuit PMM

📍 Location: San Francisco, CA

🍦 Favorite ice cream flavor: Honey Lavender from Salt and Straw

  1. What are your favorite platforms/vendors for facilitating customer research?

    Quickly, accurately, reliably (particularly for smaller organizations and PMM teams)

    Surachita Bose
    Surachita Bose

    Iterable Fmr Senior Director of Product Marketing | Formerly Uber, Twilio, Intuit, Gates Foundation • 2y

    There are a gazillion tools (free ones if you’re budget-constrained) out there. The choice of tool is a function of what you’re looking to accomplish. But nothing beats sitting with the customer and listening to them. Some of the tools and platforms I keep going back to: User Testing, Loop 11, Userlytics: UserTesting has been a very easy and useful tool for my teams for audience recruitment, message testing, usability testing, and even generating live video-based customer narratives. As they say ...Read More

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  2. We don't have a Voice of Customer program. 1. How do you get buy-in and 2. What does an MVP of a VOC program look like?

    Surachita Bose
    Surachita Bose

    Iterable Fmr Senior Director of Product Marketing | Formerly Uber, Twilio, Intuit, Gates Foundation • 2y

    Love this question and I’m often surprised by how underutilized customer research is within companies. The issue is that research takes time which explains why a lot of companies shy away from it. But the right intel can accelerate your business multiple orders of magnitude by informing - priority product bets, competitive differentiation, geo expansion, pricing strategies, strategic narratives, validating personas (and so much more)! First, tie the research hypotheses to defined P0 business pri ...Read More

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  3. How do you decide whether to engage an outside research vendor vs. doing scrappy research yourself?

    Surachita Bose
    Surachita Bose

    Iterable Fmr Senior Director of Product Marketing | Formerly Uber, Twilio, Intuit, Gates Foundation • 2y

    My bias is towards conducting in-house research first to establish the foundations and get crisp on the business subjective, research questions, target personas … what we need to learn, who are we targeting, and why. I’ve found that you can get a reasonable distance with a structured approach to customer research and the process can be a good gauge for formulating the research agenda before you bring in an agency and/or purchase industry reports. Your output is only as good as the clear framing ...Read More

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  4. What are some helpful advice, insights, and tips you can share for effective communication to multiple stakeholders (in different departments) on findings after market research is done?

    Surachita Bose
    Surachita Bose

    Iterable Fmr Senior Director of Product Marketing | Formerly Uber, Twilio, Intuit, Gates Foundation • 2y

    Ah the cross-functional socialization challenge! I've answered this in another section but adding my two cents here again just given how critical this is for value casting. Socialize: Schedule time (e.g. quarterly cadence) for “Lunch and learn” sessions that anyone across the org can join to hear directly from customers/prospects (ideally) or for a shareout by PMMs. This could serve as a beta version of a future ‘Customer Advisory Board’.  Synthesize! Not everything you learn will be of value. D ...Read More

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