What's the best way to partner with product on market research to help with gathering insights and buy-in?

Here are the top areas I focus on to partner with product on market research and gathering intel:

Alignment:

• Align Goals: Ensure both teams understand what questions need to be answered and what outcomes are expected.

• Define Success Metrics: Agree on what success looks like for both teams, whether it's obtaining specific insights, validating hypotheses, or developing actionable strategies.

Collaboration:

• Joint Research Plan: Develop a research plan together, outlining the methodologies, target audience, and timeline. This plan should integrate both market and product perspectives.

• Regular Meetings: Schedule regular check-ins to discuss progress, challenges, and findings. This keeps both teams engaged and aligned.

Share:

• Shared Expertise: Utilize the product team's deep knowledge of the product and the market team's understanding of customer needs and market trends. This combination can lead to more comprehensive insights.

• Data Sharing: Share data and insights openly. Market teams can provide customer feedback, competitive analysis, and market trends, while product teams can share user data, feature usage, and technical feasibility.

Co-chair surveys & instrumentation:

• Surveys and Interviews: Collaborate on creating surveys, interview guides, and other research instruments to ensure they capture relevant information for both teams.

• User Testing: Work together on user testing sessions, where market research can observe and gather qualitative data while product teams can focus on usability and functionality.

Joint analysis sessions:

• Joint Analysis Sessions: Conduct analysis sessions together to interpret data. Different perspectives can lead to more nuanced insights and a deeper understanding of the findings.

• Actionable Insights: Focus on synthesizing findings into actionable insights that can inform product development and marketing strategies.

Targeting/Tailored Comms:

• Tailored Communication: Tailor communication of research findings to the needs of different stakeholders. Ensure that insights are presented in a way that highlights their relevance to both product development and market positioning.

• Storytelling: Use storytelling techniques to make the data more compelling and easier to understand. Highlight the implications for both product and marketing strategies.

There are a ton of great tools out there to help with the aforementioned. Some of my favorites include: loom, prodpad, typeform/survey monkey, clozd, notion, fullstory - to name a few.

At LinkedIn, PMM leads regular Customer Advisory Boards of about 10-15 customers. Each meeting of the CAB is designed to gather feedback across our key segments. We usually do these in person once or twice a quarter. Every CAB has a theme that we know is highly relevant for our customers as well as our Product team's roadmap and our business strategy overall. We invite Product Mgrs to every one of these sessions so they can help drive the conversation with customers, ask our customers some top-of-mind questions, and hear customers discuss their goals, needs, challenges and ideas in their own words.

Another way to partner with PM on Market Research is to invite Product to review or help shape your research brief. Let's say you're doing a large focus group or survey to understand customer needs or purchase habits. Start with a brief that outlines the objectives and structure of the research initiative. Invite PM to contribute their feedback to the brief. Once you move from the brief to questionnaire, or from the brief to writing an interview guide, invite PM to contribute or give feedback on that asset as well.

Finally, ensure PM decision-makers are an audience for your final research "readout" where you share your findings and, MOST IMPORTANTLY, your product roadmap recommendations. The readout is usually written but I find it's best to schedule a live Q&A or "jam" where PMM, Product, etc can all go over the doc together and discuss its findings and implications in person (or over Teams/Zoom).