AMA: Unity Vice President Product Marketing, Jon Rooney on Market Research

If there's only an ad-hoc process in place, put in something programmatic that's simple and straightforward so customers and partner teams can understand and follow. If your company has a Customer Success team responsible for activation, usage, renewals, etc, I'd start there with periodic customer surveys/interviews (quarterly would be great) that gather both quantitative and qualitative feedback consistently so you can track changes over time. Partner with Product Management, Sales Engineers, C ...Read More

Having skilled, experience market researchers in-house (whether in PMM or not) certainly makes it easy to take on more projects yourself. No matter how good outside firms are, they'll never be as deep as your team is on company strategy, product portfolio or brand identity. So, all things being equal, it's generally best to bring in a consultant or outside firm for research projects where objectivity and neutrality are particularly helpful. Exploratory brand, messaging, use case and pricing inte ...Read More

For Primary Research on a tight budget, surveys via any number of free online tools are super common and can provide at least directional insights, though you may have to clear legal/privacy issues and you'll definitely have to be thoughtful about how you structure your survey (i.e. a small number of the most strategic questions) for maximum impact. Customer and prospect interviews provide higher fidelity insights since your subjects will be more engaged and you can blend exploratory with direct ...Read More

If you have budget, definitely go with a specialty firm whose expertise is paneling the right mix of enterprise decision makers who may or may not be current customers and offer representation across geographies, firm size and other key designations. In most cases, interviewees associated with these firms are compensated and the specialty firm will manage everything from payments to anonymity (if required) to ensuring employees of public companies don't disclose insider information. If budgets a ...Read More

User Experience research is an important double-click into overall market opportunity analysis, going deeper into a detailed examination of how a given persona/role completes certain tasks or solves certain issues around use cases that have been identified as being most important. Basically, once you've identified (or at least hypothesized) "we want to help a certain group of people do certain things faster/easier/cheaper/better," UX research uncovers and lays out exactly how those folks do thin ...Read More

The rise of UX research as a practice over the past 10+ years has unfortunately created it's share of organizational overlap, friction and feudal rivalries (leading to wasteful, demoralizing outcomes like different teams at the same company having completely different persona profiles that don't cohere at all) but it doesn't have to be that way. Just as, if defined poorly, PMM can seem to blur into roles like PM or Growth/Demand Gen, the same happens all the time with UX teams. The most natural ...Read More