AMA: Retool Head of Product Marketing, Kevin Garcia on Market Research

I like to break this down into: product research, messaging research, GTM research. Product research is research you do to inform the product the team builds. This almost always manifests in alpha and beta testing, but it can also be a specific research project you tackle. Messaging research is research you do to inform how you talk about the product. It can be as simple as showing a few customers your landing page to as complex as testing different audiences with messaging options and ad variants. GTM research is research you do to ensure you make money/grow because of the product. It can be interviews to learn how/where your audience goes to find products like yours or can be market research to help lock in the final pricing plans/structure you’ll launch with. Honestly, it depends on the launch. But the higher the stakes, the more you should consider the above.

Make it jointly owned. Your team will (almost certainly) not grow as fast as sales, success, support, etc. Even talented PMMs struggle to keep these things relevant and useful for every season of the company’s journey. So rather than boil the ocean, make it everyone’s responsibility. If your best competitive and market positioning is in the sales onboarding guide, sales managers and VPs have an incentive to keep it accurate for new hires. Plus new hires can comment on/correct things over time. If you have personas, consider jointly owning them with the product team. Product teams have to defend their prioritization rationale every day. If you can build personas together, they will align product updates to personas and make it much more likely everyone speaks the same language.

100%. It’s a great option when you either 1) don’t have a direction and need to narrow your field of view or 2) you have very similar finalists for messaging and are hoping to choose a winner. Note that surveys rarely have crystal clear results. You’ll still need some amount of qualitative or other insights to help you make a final choice.

I think competitors are important, but developing your own unique perspective of who you are, what makes you different, and who you serve is 10-100x more important. A short-ish anecdote: I used to work at AdRoll, which helps small businesses advertise on Google, Facebook, and everywhere else (e.g. Bing, Forbes, etc). Advertising is one of the most competitive markets ever, with Google and Facebook on an endless conquest for power. And yet, AdRoll was able to reach hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. How? They had a unique perspective: some small businesses don’t care where the ads show up, they care about making money. They had differentiation: strip back advanced features on FB/Google that scare off solo entrepreneurs and make it dead simple to advertise. And they had an audience: small business owners who want to advertise but need it to be fast, cheap, and effective. It gets tricky because what constitutes a competitor can vary a ton. At Retool (low code app builder) we focus on a developer audience, so our biggest competitor is someone coding an app from scratch using React or Angular or Vue. If we were trying to solve for every audience in the world, our competitors would include spreadsheets, docs, wiki tools, and so many other types of software. Most software is composed of UIs and databases, so if you’re targeting too broadly everyone is your competitor. When I conduct competitive analysis, I try to keep this in mind. If we’re winning, are we winning our audience? Are they choosing us because of what we think makes us different or something else? If we’re losing, are we losing our audience or an audience we don’t actually serve well? In order to have a really useful competitive analysis, you need to have an audience in mind.

I like Typeform (super simple for users, works for my use case right now) for surveys where I have pointed questions on a research topic, and also work with other teams to run evergreen G2 campaigns and NPS surveys which I think give you an ongoing thread of general feedback. Extracting value depends a lot on what you're working with. For example, a 1-question free text survey that 10 users complete can help you get a TON of qualitative insights but not as much quantitative you can pull from there due to the small sample size. I like to think about that up front! If you have a small audience and are trying to understand broad topics, focus on the qualitative information you can extract. If you have a large audience and a very specific topic (e.g. pick which messaging resonates the most with you), focus on what the group in aggregate is telling you. In terms of extracting value, go into it curious and with no expectations. Letting the survey data tell you its own story will help you actually pull the right insights instead of trying to force it into a story that you were hoping works. That works against what user research is meant to do—it's meant to get you out of your head and into the users!

I think market research (and all research, really) needs to be right-sized to the problem that you’re trying to solve. If you’re doing market research to name a tiny feature, that’s very different from analyzing the market to change your pricing model—so your investment into the research should look different, too! For scrappy research: there’s no greater friend than Google. Seriously! I like aggregators—tools that bring together a lot of insights for you at once—because they help you cut out a ton of research time. Things like Google, G2, Gong, SEMrush, and “state of” reports. But keep in mind this is all research someone did for their business and their audience. No guarantees everything holds true for your business. For mission critical research: I like to combine 3rd (someone else did it) and 1st party (we did it) research. Given the importance, I’d want to talk to analysts, investors, and experts in the space. I’d like to get demos of companies/competitors that know more than we do. I’d also want to do some of my own research—either independent (like ad testing, buying audiences to send surveys, etc) or with a partner who knows a lot about that space (e.g. partner with a consulting firm in fintech if I am trying to learn more about fintech).

I think every PMM benefits from talking to customers. In some cases, it helps polish what you already know. In others—like in my case—you’re marketing to an audience you do not belong to, and talking to customers helps you see the world in a way you normally wouldn’t. I’ll speak to my preferences, but please note that this is specific to someone who markets a technical product to developers without necessarily being one myself. I think it’s important for me to never stop learning how developers think, so every quarter I assign myself OKRs that force me to stay connected to customers. In any given quarter, I assign myself a few case studies (that require customer interviews), I listen to 6-12 sales calls, and try to include at least some research (beta testing, user interviews, surveys) requirements into the product launch(es) I’m working on. In short, I do both continuous and campaign-based customer research because I think it makes me a better PMM. On tools: I love a good interview, and they’re great when you have a problem that requires exploration. Depending on your area of interest, a few interviews might give you all the signal you need. If it still feels fuzzy, it can help to explore quantitative insights. My current insights stack includes: Segment, HubSpot, Google Analytics, SEMrush, FullStory, Gong, Intercom, NPS scores, Typeform surveys, and custom Retool dashboards. On using insights: Insights inform marketing/CX in two ways: directly and indirectly. Sometimes, your user research helps you prioritize which feature to launch, which messaging to choose, how to position against a competitor, or what to charge—that’s direct impact. But research compounds, and over time you uncover patterns or trends that would have been impossible to spot without all the puzzle pieces coming together. This is an indirect—but game changing—way that user research impacts marketing strategy over time.

Most teams are protective of their clients for a reason. Perhaps they're worried about promises made to the client. Maybe they have a really important sales conversation coming up. Maybe the customer just experienced leadership changes and the account team is trying to win the new leader over. In my experience, building context and clear communication are critical to eventually having open access to all customers. Get informed on the customer before making sweeping asks. What can you learn from your CRM or internal notes or dashboards that can help your peers feel like you are not just coming into this situation cold. Doing the work will also help you have better intuition as to which customers are off the table. You also need to communicate your ask clearly. Saying "can you connect me to the VP at XYZ company" is not helpful. Clearly stating that you have researched their account, have a specific ask (e.g. "I want to connect with them for 30 min about X add-on and their purchase decision"), and a specific value add for your peer (e.g. "connecting with XYZ will ensure we create a landing page that helps us set better expectations with buyers like this in the future") will almost always net you a better experience. You are giving them a chance to be part of the solution and not just a gatekeeper. If you can set these expectations early and meet them often, eventually (I've found) the teams start to bring the walls down.