AMA: Amplitude Former VP of Product Marketing, John Hurley on Market Research

What I love about product design teams is how differently they think and create. They tend to be really amazing at information design. PMM can create strong foundations – let's say user personas – and UX researchers and designers might totally reimagine how to display personas relative to their own projects. That can open up a new world of thinking for PMM – and more practically become an asset used by PMM for a variety of work (onboarding new hires, design new creative takes on messaging, channels and campaigns). Those nuanced new panes of perspective can help PMM explore new ideas, keep their work and the outputs to buyers fresh and innovative. 

Align on needs and get buy-in on the program from key stakeholders upfront, otherwise, you will just be reactive and the expectations will be that every request is handled and every asset is up to date. By setting a strategy upfront, defining the set of deliverables and the cadence at which they'll be updated, and creating rules of engagement and set venues / channels for to communicate with teams, you can create a scalable system. For larger orgs, you may have to create SLAs between your team and sales and product. Specifically with competitive, I really believe you need to define ourselves based on problems you solve and value you provide, not your competition. But also equip teams to stand out from competition and win against them. Competitive can become a crutch for not having confidence in your own message and story. Some of the most impactful interactions I've seen between a vendor and buyer is when the vendor says, "I don't work for that company. I work here, I know we do this really well, and I think I understand your problem and how we solve it." That's refreshing to hear versus bashing the competition.

Ensure verticalization aligns well with core competencies, market perception, ability to deliver and differentiation. If you do not clearly understand the definition of the target vertical, the trends in that vertical’s consumer or enterprise user market as well as the size of the opportunity, it will cause internal and ultimately market confusion that hinders speed and success. Assuming that you've determined this is an attractive vertical to pursue, here is a list to consider at the onset of prioritizing verticals and viability of entrance: - Current capabilities (such as how capable you to serve industry clients). - The resources you have to invest (such as skills, channels, ecosystem partners). - Market objectives (“to achieve X% market share,” for example, or “to be in the top three” in a given market). - The type of offering(s) (whether they are fundamentally “horizontal” in nature or developed from the outset for a specific industry process or issue). - Position in an ecosystem (owning and driving one or contributing; optimize or transform)). - Existing position in the industry (route to market, current client expansion, competitor dynamics, industry connections and relationships, including influencers, etc.).

PMM can bring the perspective from beyond the user. What are the markets, influencers, our executives, analysts, and competitors saying. If PMM is the subject matter expert – if they have a mind map for all the places where knowledge lives inside and outside the organization, then PMM again is the hub enabling a team of researchers. An example I recently had was for a maturity model. An internal research was tasked to create a maturity model for our customers. I knew of several other maturity models create by industry experts (some good, some lame) – and had a few customer journey models that we'd been experimenting with for various campaigns and customer pitches. That got her started, and then when she had a solid first version she came back to our team for feedback. Once she got to a final version, we then brought that to other teams to use it for customer success and onboarding, turned it into a thought leadership campaign, worked with community teams to share it with users, and shared to analysts that had create those originals thanking them for their contribution. Hub. Spoke. Flywheel. :)

Used on its own, market research is a reasonable tool for getting gaining and sharing knowledge on customers, markets, and competitors. What market research won't do is tell you if you have the right solution. For that, you need to run experiments to test if there's a good fit between the problem and solution. Experiments provide you with the data you need to shape the solution. Here is what the best teams do: - Capture granular behavioral data that describes the complex relationship spanning the customer journey - Embrace deep qualitative and quantitative research and analysis methods - Task cross-functional teams including designers, developers, and product managers with learning about customers and their needs, aligning their goals around customer loyalty - Understand how individual and connected behaviors directly impact key metrics around engagement, retention, and customer value. And leverage that information to determine the right metrics to track and work to influence. - Use that data to personalize and customize the product experience to suit the specific needs of specific groups of users - Learn as fast as they ship, and ship as fast as they learn - Close the feedback loop by immediately implementing changes and measuring their impact in as little as hours

Here is the competitive intelligence mission statement I've used for several years (repeat from previous post but will add more detail). “Define ourselves based on problems we solve and value we provide, not your competition. But also equip ourselves to stand out from competition and win against them.” Sales: Equip teams with knowledge and tools to win against the competition. Product: Equip teams insight into competitive product sets so we can build better, differentiated product. Marketing: Deep knowledge of competitive brand, message, and product so we can raise above with best in class product marketing and demand campaigns. Executive: Provide regular updates on competitive landscape to inform strategy For the most part, all vendor comparisons do is create confusion. If buyers have 3 conversations, they come away more confused. Shift the focus to ‘If we can show that we can do X for you, would that be valuable? And we’re great to work with, proven by our customer base and success.’ I often see buyers that see vendor comparisons as a big turn off. You also are going to be wrong a lot of the time. Your intel from a company’s website probably wasnt accurate to start with and it has changed. Vendor comparisons frequently slow down sales cycles.

I like to create what I call an Opportunity Assessment. Here is the general table of content for the presentation: - Problem Hypothesis - Target Market - Market Opportunity - Business Metrics / Revenue Strategy - Competitive Landscape - Our Differentiated Solution - Basic Solution Requirements - Go-to-Market Overview (Timing and Concept) If it's an existing market, include - Competitive Feature Comparison - SWOT Analysis for top competitor Looks like the formatting is a bit off, but attached you can find the template. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/17WP6mzinluezqh1AF0HMcOFe_ucL7LDApQQJG1HZlno/edit?usp=sharing Opportunity Assessment 

It's about grounding the organization in an understanding of the market opportunity, ecosystem, mindset, external factors impacting potential buyers. There's so many flavors with different goals...Market Sizing (whats the market attractiveness), Pricing research (how do we maximize business value), Buyer research (how can we connect to buyer behaviors and motives), etc. But there are also always on programs – Voice of Customer programs feed into personas, product strategy. Competitive intelligence program research feeds into enablement. Industry research feeds into positioning, new product lines, PR, and influencer marketing. Ultimately you want product marketing to be the subject market expert on the industry, customer, competitors – the hub. And doing market research, even if it's informal, is critical to becoming the trusted experts for the organization. 

I feel your pain! - Templates - Prioritize with execs what will drive impact + Set expectations internal - Google alerts One other thing to think about...How can you use market research for multiple purposes...so much internal content that gets created can be tweaked and shifted by 20% to become external content that feeds into demand gen efforts or can help influence influencers. It also becomes internal enablement – helps onboard employees, ramp sales, train GTM teams for launches. That can help you justify more time on research.