Beyond the Bot: A Foundational Study to Redefine Our Product's Future

Project Overview

  • My Role: Lead Researcher & Strategist

  • Timeline: 4 Weeks

  • Methods: Foundational Research, In-Depth Interviews, Jobs-to-be-Done, "Scrappy" Max-Diff Analysis

  • Collaborators: Product Manager, Designer, Product Leadership Team

The Challenge

The business was facing a critical strategic challenge: customer retention was a problem because our core product, a chatbot widget, was seeing declining engagement. Market trends indicated that buyers were becoming less willing to interact with chatbots, creating an existential risk for our product. The leadership team knew we needed to innovate and expand the widget's value beyond chat, but lacked a clear, user-backed direction on what problems to solve next for marketers.

My Approach

I designed and led a foundational research study to uncover the unmet needs of marketers and identify new opportunities for our product. My approach was focused on understanding the full context of their work, not just their use of our tool.

1. Strategic Recruiting to See the Whole Picture To ensure our innovation would both increase retention and drive new growth, I recruited a mix of 11 participants: 6 current customers (to understand their evolving needs) and 5 non-customers who used competitor products (to understand market gaps and opportunities).

2. Uncovering Priorities with a "Scrappy Max-Diff" During our in-depth interviews, I went beyond standard questions. I employed a "Scrappy Max-Diff" exercise—a quick but powerful method to force-rank user preferences. I presented marketers with 17 different types of content and marketing channels and had them identify which they believed were most and least likely to engage buyers. This provided a clear, quantitative ranking of what marketers truly value, which beautifully complemented the qualitative "why" from our interviews.

3. Mapping the Workflow to Find the Gaps I synthesized the qualitative findings in Miro, creating detailed journey maps of how marketers update their websites. By mapping each participant's process, I was able to visually identify common pain points and patterns, highlighting clear opportunities where our widget could intervene and add value.

The Impact

This foundational research provided the strategic clarity the company needed to move forward.

  • Fueled a 3-Day Innovation Design Sprint: My research was not a static report; it was the primary fuel for a multi-day design sprint with the Product Manager, Designer, and Engineering Leads. The user flows, pain points, and ranked priorities I presented formed the foundation of their brainstorming sessions.

  • Provided a Clear, Prioritized Direction: The Max-Diff analysis delivered a clear, data-backed hierarchy of what marketers believe buyers want to engage with. This cut through internal debate and allowed the team to focus on solutions that aligned with the highest-ranked user needs.

  • Directly Informed the Q2 Roadmap: The concepts generated during the design sprint, all of which were rooted in my research findings, were used to build the Q2 product roadmap, creating a clear plan for innovating the widget beyond its original chat function.

Reflection

This study successfully identified the core problems marketers face when trying to engage buyers on their websites. It gave us a much-needed, user-centric direction for product expansion. The clear next step, which I recommended to the team, is to take the most promising solutions from the design sprint and move into a new phase of research focused on concept validation and usability testing with our target users.