How do you drive culture change with market research?

Market research is the most powerful tool for influencing product. I recommend applying your marketing skills to your internal stakeholders in the same way you use them for your externally-facing initiatives. If you have some great market insights in hand, consider these steps:1. Understand your internal target audience: Why does product and design consider themselves as the consumer? Where are the largest differences between our internal teams and the actual customer? How do internal teams best ...Read More

To me, it's about creating a customer-centric culture, not just a "market research" culture. "Market research" is a bit of a stigmatized term - most of it is considered not valuable, not actionable, and an expensive "nice-to-have". I'd encourage you to re-orient around building a habit of listening and talking to customers - often. What I try to do, very tactically is:  1/ help make the case for "discovery" in roadmaps as an official line item. Make sure formal product development time accounts ...Read More

Quick answer: Data. Bring them snippets of real customer conversations or data points that they haven't seen from customer interviews, surveys, CSAT, NPS, customer service feedback - you name it. This will show the value of talking to customers, and will leave them wanting more.  To be even more influential, if your product or design team isn’t listening - make sure your exec team is. Get an executive sponsor who wants to champion the “voice of the customer” - and leverage their position to prom ...Read More

I'd say lead the way. Use a traditional PMM responsibility like refreshing your buyer personas as a reason to kick off a joint research project and pull in your partners from the product and design team. Set up customer interviews. Get outdoors and do a workshop. Have some fun with it. Bribe them with candy and fizzy drinks :o) If you can't get buy-in for that, go talk to customers yourself and present a read-out of what you learned.  Get with the sales and client services team and use them as a ...Read More

It is important for all functions across the company to build empathy for users. Regardless of your segment, small advisory boards are helpful for this, and can be set up to feature 10-20 key customers who meet quarterly (or more or less often) to review roadmaps and provide feedback on either new initiatives or existing products. The key here is getting leadership buy-in across the exec team, as they will likely be the main headlines to actually get key customers to attend these sessions. Depen ...Read More

One of the best things you can do as a product marketer is provide market research value back to your PM team and your execs. You should be following the analysts that cover your market and reading every report they publish. Ideally you are summarizing those articles for your PM team, highlighting key stats, predictions, trends, and competitive insights you find. Your PMs usually can't read the reports themselves as they won't have logins but you can produce summaries. Gartner has even started t ...Read More

One thing I'd add to Mary's response is what I think is the hardest part of your question: identifying the questions that matter most to the business. Getting and using data is critical, but it will fall on deaf ears and undermine your credibility if you aren't getting the right data at the right time for the right decision-makers. How do you identify what data to go get? Look for one of the following: Internal disagreements: Are members of the Product team regularly having a philosophical argum ...Read More

While I agree with Mary's answer ("data") and the other great points that have been added here, I would caution against taking the exact same approach you would to influencing product as you would to influencing culture. If data were sufficient to change culture, the world would look dramatically different.  Culture is theoretically owned in people, HR, operations, and exec leadership. It's an intangible and can be attached to personality. That's a different audience and perspective than a group ...Read More

This is concerning to hear. Unless you have the next Henry Ford on your design team, this mentality will ultimately lead to a poor product-market fit. That’s not saying that your design team should not have a voice at all – they may have a solid product vision and if they are market experts, then they will have an equally strong understanding of the market’s needs. But that understanding doesn’t just randomly come to them. It is carefully honed by having a close pulse on the customer. For instan ...Read More