Research Case Study

Identifying Opportunities to attract Enterprise Customers

Summary

Our company needed an understanding of our enterprise customers’ pain points to align our product roadmap to serve them and ensure continued business growth.

My role was Lead Researcher. I aligned stakeholders on project goals, defined a research strategy to get there, and executed that strategy to build a foundational understanding of our enterprise customers and identify critical opportunities to support them. Along the way, I defined criteria to help us prioritize product roadmap opportunities.

This process included:

• Kickoff workshop to scope the project

• Interactive research sessions with internal customer-facing teams

• Attending customer business reviews

• Customer Interviews

• Opportunity workshop for additional data collection with internal customer-facing teams

• Opportunity Prioritization workshop with Product Management

• Socializing findings through presentations and an interactive card game

Challenge

When Duo Security was acquired by Cisco, we knew Cisco’s sale engine would rapidly accelerate our adoption by enterprise customers. We knew this increase in enterprise sales would highlight gaps in our product features and business processes.

We needed to establish an understanding of our enterprise customers and their pain points in order to build a product and the businesses processes to better support them.

Process

Scope the project

This was a very broad area of opportunity, so the first step for research was to come together with design, data science, and product management in a workshop to define the scope of this project. 

We kicked off the workshop presenting previous customer research related to enterprises we had conducted to-date. 

As we stepped through the research, we prompted our internal workshop participants to document questions they had. We mapped those questions to a matrix with axes of certainty and risk. This process allowed us to identify the questions with the highest level of uncertainty and risk for our business.

Analyzing the questions led the group to define the scope of the project to be an exploration of deployment of the product with enterprise customers. It was deemed the riskiest phase with the highest level of uncertainty. This was the first step of an enterprise customer’s journey with us, and if there were issues launching the product, there would not be opportunities for upsell or renewal.

I aligned with product management on the the objective of this research:

• Document a foundational understanding of the enterprise customer

• Identify and define opportunities for product roadmap prioritization

• Identify and define opportunities within business operations for improvement to support the enterprise customer

Research Strategy

Based on our objective, I built out a research plan. The plan was to first conduct interactive research sessions with internal employees who frequently interfaced with customers regarding their experience with our product. This included sales, customer success managers and engineers to document internal knowledge and stories. This would lay the foundation of pain points and assumptions we would need to explore with customer research sessions.

Throughout the project, we would meet bi-weekly with Advisory Stakeholders to share what we were learning along the way. We defined a group of stakeholders who would be interested in our work and offer perspectives from different vantage points across the organization.

These meetings acted as a feedback loop, and through them we sharpened our research questions and learned of additional resources to investigate. I wrote more about this overall strategy here.

Internal Research Sessions

Our customer facing teams were globally distributed. We conducted the sessions remotely and leveraged Mural, a digital post-it note tool, to interactively build out the story of the customer’s journey and pain points from the internal participants’ point of view.

Equally important in this session was that participants became aware of our project goal so they could raise awareness of the project across the organization and put us in touch with other sources of information.

Once I and a designer synthesized the internal interviews, we formed a holistic view of our internal knowledge and assumptions. This allowed me to frame our research discussion guide for customers. We also gained a working journey map we could use to explore the customer experience. 

As we closed out our internal stakeholder interviews, we had the opportunity to conduct a Retrospective on a recent enterprise customer deployment. This was an excellent opportunity to document the end-to-end customer experience of deployment, pain points encountered in our customer and business processes, and identify opportunities to take action in the future.

Primary Customer Research

Our company conducted Business Reviews where Customer Success representatives would sit down with customers to review what was going well, current pain points, and opportunities for us to better meet their needs. This was a necessary ritual at a SaaS company where customers frequently had the option of whether or not they would renew with us. The data from these sessions was very useful to add to our understanding of enterprise customer pain points. 

Simultaneously, I led 10 customer interviews. These customers were recruited by me from our existing customer base, with help from our relationships with Customer Success and Product. From these sessions, a design partner and I analyzed the data and prepared a session to conduct group synthesis with other designers. 

Opportunity Workshop with Internal Teams

From our synthesized findings, I and 3 other designers prepared a report to present back to internal teams in an Opportunity Workshop. Each finding had a key insight, supporting customer stories, and a call to action.

We designed the workshop to interface with representatives from Sales, Customer Success, Engineering, Product Management and Product Design. This workshop served to:

• Disseminate findings with teams from across the organization

• Capture participants’ questions and allow them to provide input on the strategic impact of the findings for their respective parts of the business

• Build a strategy to socialize the findings among their various groups

Outcome

Prioritization of Opportunities with Product Management

In the Opportunity Workshop, recurring themes had appeared in the discussion. Synthesizing data from this workshop allowed me to create key criteria to evaluate opportunities for the product roadmap. I built out a report to review findings and input with Product Management to prioritize and scope opportunities.

Myself, the lead designer, and two product managers scored, ranked and planned product roadmap work based on the Opportunity Workshop findings. This work was incorporated into the next iteration of the product, discussed in this case study outlining how I helped teams define and measure success in a Beta program.

Socializing findings

We presented and socialized this work in many ways, but a stand out experience was when myself and the lead designer for the project presented at an internal conference called the Duo Tech Summit.

For this presentation, we created an interactive card game to help internalize the findings. I built out the game mechanics for us to play test, illustrate and build during a Hack Day. The game was modeled after the deck building game Sushi Go and illustrated by one of our talented designers. Thank you to Laura Cole for her amazing illustrations!