From Buyer Journey to Product Investment: How Product Marketing and UX Testing Shape Product Growth

Pooja Dey at UXDX EMEA. Video: https://youtu.be/XoggQm6kgRc

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

The hungry caterpillar and the shape of this talk

[00:00:09] Yay! I'm a mother of a four-year-old, and his favorite book is The Hungry Caterpillar. If you're a parent or an uncle or an aunt, you probably know this book. It's an image from the same book. And if you don't know about the book, that's okay. It's basically about a hungry caterpillar who has an insatiable hunger and goes out enjoying all the beautiful fruits, plants, et cetera.

[00:00:39] The story isn't about abundance alone, though. It's also about stages and development. And when the caterpillar realizes, "I've explored everything, I'm ready to refine from here," he goes into a cocoon, goes through a massive refinement, and comes out transformed as a beautiful butterfly. This is true also for our own personal and professional experiences, where we're exposed to a variety of different contexts, information, insights, data. And as experts, the business expects us to refine that and come out of that transformation with success for business, customers, and colleagues.

[00:01:21] Over the next 20 minutes, I'm going to walk you through, from understanding constraints to some key frameworks. I will show you how we applied them through two case studies in Sage. And finally, what were the outcomes of those cross-collaboration, constraint-driven projects.

Divergent thinking, the box of constraints, convergent thinking

[00:01:43] Starting with constraints itself, it's based on human-centered design thinking, which was touched on a lot yesterday. Any constraint format would have three key areas. The first one is the divergent thinking, where all the creative freedom is given to you to go and explore. So you can build context, you can generate ideas. And that's not just you, but all the cross-functional members who come together as a squad to solve the business problem. So there's a variety of different context coming in and you share with each other.

[00:02:19] The other end is convergent thinking. This is where you have processed, made sense of all the context, of all the perspectives based on those insights. At this point you have clarified you're going to progress with three or four or five key important points to define the objectives of the business problem you're solving and how you want to progress. Team members know what their roles and responsibilities are and what success looks like. So this is the phase of clarity and momentum.

[00:02:54] In the middle is the box of constraints, where your soft skills really come in handy. You're talking about interpersonal skills here. You're talking about influence. You're talking about understanding the other person's perspective. You're talking about how you want to leverage data to drive some of the discussions, and you could apply a whole lot of logic here. Decision tree making. You could look at the designs, the principles, models that your business understands, to explain the logic with which you're going to progress.

[00:03:26] And when you have that clarity, you're able to move forward. You're able to get the focus, to get the momentum, to give you the speed that you need to start hashing out and finally move into the impact. So it's really important that you go from divergent thinking to convergent thinking quickly, so you're not caught up just building too much insight, or you don't go into action without getting all the right context. Moving between modes is super critical.

Case study one: improve future win rate

[00:03:54] Let's talk about the first business challenge. The challenge I was given was: improve future win rate. Quite vague, was my reaction to my manager. What win rate? What's the future? How do you define the timeline? Et cetera. So let's build context here together.

[00:04:12] If you look at the white circles, the first one is the market trend. We had enough market trends insights to tell us there was a specific customer segment that was growing exponentially. They suddenly had more propensity to pay. They were mirroring the same pain points of our ideal customer profile. So we wanted to tap in and see if there is an opportunity for Sage to go and sell into this segment specifically.

[00:04:44] We also had internal data to tell us we were not doing well. While this segment is not our core, they were showing up in our marketing and sales cycles, and we only won a few deals, and most of them were falling through. So we wanted to figure out what's going on.

[00:05:02] The trade-offs. It's very exciting to follow a new opportunity of customer segment and create pipeline. But is there a risk of cannibalizing our existing customer base? Are we going to distract ourselves from what we're known for, from what we're really good at? So there was this important element to understand the commercial setback and commercial investments required if we do want to progress with this segment.

[00:05:31] And there were four of us in this room, because generally the business felt it was a product proposition misfit. So we had me from product marketing, we had UX, we had product, and we had professional services. Professional services, for those who don't know: when we're selling into enterprise or medium segment, there is a team called the implementation team that comes in after we sell our software, and they help migrate the data of our customers from their old software to our new software. It's not straightforward. It's a pain. It could take three to six months. It's quite expensive, sometimes the same value as the cost of the subscription. And there's a lot of time commitment and resource commitment from our key personas and customers. So it's a difficult one, but quite critical.

[00:06:27] And we were all thinking, wow, this is amazing, because business doesn't know this segment at all, and they're trusting us, who are also not experts, to go and find out and make recommendations to Sage leadership on how we should progress with it. I saw that as a golden growth opportunity, and so did my colleagues.

Divergent thinking: market research, pipeline and value

[00:06:47] So we decided to structure the win. The first one was the divergent thinking. We obviously wanted to go and understand the market, so I commissioned market research. That's one of the things I do too, in partnership with UX and product. With those inputs, we went in and I think we interviewed about 250 companies who are out there sitting in that segment, to understand their pain points, validate what we were hearing in the market, get first hand insights.

[00:07:16] We also looked at our pipeline, our existing pipeline. I was curious: why are they showing up in our sales cycle? We don't market to them. We're not known as a brand for that segment. So are our marketing folks doing some goof up here? It's a great opportunity to go and wrestle some muscle with them. Turns out, if you're burning the marketing dollars and someone is showing up in your sales cycle, you better sell.

[00:07:45] Audience: Laughter.

[00:07:46] Pooja: That was the instruction that came. So I chose my battle and we went with that insight.

[00:07:50] And the value: we wanted to understand the value. Is there value for our customers if they do subscribe to our product, considering it wasn't designed for them? Also, the value to our own business if we go and invest in product, in marketing, in training our sales reps to sell in a new way to the segment. What is the cost? Are there any margins and profits that we will make? So we wanted to engage with our finance and commercial teams to get those insights.

The box of constraints: too much insight, and product pushback

[00:08:20] Then came in the box of constraints. This is where you can see the emojis there. We went from super excited, lots of "you got this," to, okay, we have too much insight. Everything looks important. Everything is an aha moment about this customer base. What do we do? Which one do we prioritize?

[00:08:41] As a group we agreed we need to probably map all the pain points that we've identified with what is the investment we'll need to make against it. So if we pushed a product enhancement to support that gap, what time would it take? What is the trade-off? Is that a distraction? What's the money we're talking about, head count, et cetera?

[00:09:07] And most of it, actually, the pain points were at least seven or eight major product enhancements we would have to do to tailor it to this segment. And product pushed back, obviously. No, we're not going to do this. What is the business case, that this base is growing exponentially and they have eight pain points that we should solve? What's the market opportunity? So it was quite hard to justify.

[00:09:34] And I know the audience has asked in previous sessions, how do you prioritize, or how do you talk with your different stakeholders, especially the loudest? In this case it was the product team. For me, I think there was an agreement. Going back to the hypothesis, improving future win rate: no one has told us by how much and how far, how long. So let's pick our battles. Let's go with the smallest path, with the easiest path, with the least amount of friction.

[00:10:07] So we turned to our dear professional services team. Hey, data also tells us 30% of the deals that we lost were because of the professional services implementation costs. These smaller companies in the lower segment, they love our product, but they don't have the maturity to go through the complex implementation process. So if we can take that 30% of the pain point away, we can win more deals. And that could give us enough ground to understand what product investments we really need to prioritize, and give us the business case.

[00:10:43] Professional services wasn't very happy, but they knew that the proposition that they have is not great, especially in the world of AI where we're talking about speed, we're talking about cost efficiencies. So they were already looking at remodeling their proposition, and this project was a great guinea pig for them to test. So this was a win-win.

[00:11:06] And then finally, once we agreed that we were going to improve not the product but the implementation proposition, we were able to move fairly quickly. We had our convergent thinking, where we had our UX team align the onboarding journey to what the implementation would look like. We also went and worked with our sales leaders and account executives on training them on this improved proposition for implementation, and pitched that where necessary based on the discovery they do. So there were again happier moments. We were moving to happy days again.

Results and annual impact of the win rate project

[00:11:43] Results. This project itself took about six months to get into that agreement of implementation. Developing that took another six months. So we're already a year in. Once the proposition was live, I'm talking about from there, the first quarter: we were able to expand our pipeline more, because the sales team was qualifying more deals from this segment very easily. And not just that, these were simpler prospects and customers, so we were able to close deals faster. This is a great operating model. This is very high cost efficiency. Each sales rep selling more than they did before. And we're winning more deals.

[00:12:26] So that was quarter one a year later. By now I've already moved to a different role. My UX teams are already bugged with other projects, similar challenges. So it's really important to follow through. Stay obsessed with things that matter, where you've spent your time. Six months working on a project, you should know what the results look like, not just your part of the contribution, but overall.

[00:12:49] So, annual impact. How things show up in the annual report. We had a 13% improvement in the win rate against that segment. Our annual report said, "Our proposition is designed to meet a bigger customer base." That's huge for our investors. Who did that? Four key stakeholders that came together, including the UX team.

[00:13:14] We also were able to create some colleague success, because the implementation team was now selling very effectively to this new market in a new way. They were able to open 20 roles, and colleagues from customer success, from sales and other departments moved into this role and found growth opportunities. And I'm very passionate about colleague success, so this was a big personal win for me.

Case study two: the two-factor authentication rollout

[00:13:42] Now we'll move on to our next challenge: two-factor authentication rollout. I knew nothing about 2FA compliance governance until I was thrown into this project. I was quite sad.

[00:13:54] Let's start with the context. It was a board mandate. The board, somewhere in the nebulous, I have no access to them, had passed on this message through leadership that, hey, we need to make sure all our customers sign on in a highly secured way through 2FA. So that was a simple direction coming from our leaders.

[00:14:20] Second, there is no metric. For someone who always worries about improving win rate, winning more market share, winning more units and customers, I was very confused. Why am I being told to do this project? I was updating my CV every night thinking, I'm being put into projects which are not core to the business. I knew that maybe I am not important to the team, so they've given me all these extra projects and they're setting me up for failure.

[00:14:52] But that wasn't just me. I also had customer success coming in grumpy. They're like, we have enough unhappy customers. Why are we doing this? We're going to get more calls saying, we can't log in, we have to submit our taxes, what's going on? And then we had our UX team that had designed a beautiful 2FA journey, but no product manager was taking and embedding it into their products. So there was a lot of unhappy people thrown into the room to go and solve a problem we weren't exactly trained to solve for. There was a lot of disruption, internal turbulence, unhappy people coming together, no motivation. And we knew that this is disruptive for our customers as well, because we're going to force them to sign in a certain way that they may not be used to.

[00:15:40] To tell you the scale of the project: it wasn't just the problem of how do I do it, but I had to do it for 40 different products. Each had their own way of signing in, because Sage is great at acquiring other businesses, so every software, every product we have has a different journey. We had millions of users. How many customers are we talking about that are going to call us today if they can't sign on? 28 different locations, different jurisdictions, different accounting cycles, because we work for accounting software. And we were given a timeline of six months. What? Is it supposed to be that simple? Why can't I figure it out?

Unpacking the 2FA use cases and building the constraints

[00:16:18] But we still tried. Let's start with the grumpy folks in the room, which was our customer success team, because they had a lot of emotions, rage, and they wanted to tell us, look, we're going to have so many customers call us because they're going to be upset. So my job there was to help them quantify it. Unpack this for us. How many customers call you in a day? What are the top reasons? Which products? Which regions? And why do you think they're going to call us? Because 2FA isn't an unknown phenomenon. Other products that we integrate with have already done it. So what's the problem?

[00:16:57] Turns out, we have desktop products. So with a single ID, five people are logging in. This is a disruption for an accounting firm. Now they have to subscribe and pay for five licenses. Oops. Okay. We also had trial products which would be forced into 2FA, which already has a clunky journey of seven, eight steps, and now we're going to add five more. So our competitor is going to win at a trial stage, guys. So we were starting to unpack all these use cases of what is going to be impacted, why are colleagues upset about this, and the risks we're putting ahead for the business and customers.

[00:17:38] We also looked at the customer service thresholds. Typically, how many calls do they get in a day? Turns out, if your customers are unhappy they call you, our NPS goes down, and because that goes down our bonus is impacted. So that impacts my salary. Excellent.

[00:17:57] Anyway, we used all of those insights to build our constraints. We filtered down five different use cases and realized that these were enough to keep us going, that would match the threshold requirements. We also worked with our security team that was developing this 2FA and asked them, hey, could you have a red button that we could just press to pause 2FA on that day for that product, if we do hit the threshold? Can we create some kind of system? They did, which was great.

[00:18:30] Now, suddenly, we all had enough confidence, on the back of data, the thresholds, the red button, that this is under control. I think we can manage this. So again, with a little bit of positive emotions, we progressed into convergent thinking, which is a brilliant mapped 2FA journey. If you ask my UX colleagues, they might say it was a compromise. There were more words in that journey than they wanted, but customer success was happy: fewer calls. There was enough information in that journey, in those pop-ups, to get people to do the right thing. And that compromise worked for us. There was also an enablement with our customer success, key account managers, and our PR team, to let them know, in case we have upset customers, what's our risk mitigation plan.

2FA results, and four takeaways

[00:19:20] So with all that, here are the results. This took us nine months. At the end of the nine months, in the first quarter, we rolled out 2FA for our key eight products, and we were able to deliver what we were asked to do as a starting point. So that's success for a lot of us, and then we moved on to other projects. But here's why we need to obsess. Nine months of my life, that's when I delivered my first baby, so I really wanted to know what happened with this project.

[00:19:49] So we move on to the annual impact. We looked at our annual report, that talks about all two million users were now secured. Fines and penalties that the business was able to safeguard itself from, exposure and risk. I learned to appreciate more about governance. I had the opportunity to work with the board and write board papers and present to them about the logic, and they were actually really a compassionate team. So there was a lot of learning personally for me that I was able to then add to my professional and career goals.

[00:20:29] Finally, we have four key things that I want to give away at the end of the session today. The first is aligning around constraints. Constraints are a good way of how we want to work and refine our thoughts. That's what great teams do.

[00:20:43] Second is, product work isn't just roadmap. It's brutal prioritization. It's competitive realities that they work with. So I have a lot of respect for that team. And I sit in that organization, and so did most of the stakeholders that I worked with.

[00:21:01] The third is, balance exploration with prioritization. So it's really important to move from divergent thinking to convergent thinking. You have to have a good balance and pace, without which it's going to be difficult and you're going to get stuck.

[00:21:17] And finally, be obsessed with the outcomes, not just your contribution. "My task is done, I can move on happily." No. My task is done, I want to know what happens now. How does the project evolve? How does it show up in the annual report? Because even your small contribution has a really great impact, and sometimes we miss that story.

[00:21:40] So, going back to the hungry caterpillar, who went through all those challenges, that exploration, that massive transformation, that processing, and came out as a beautiful butterfly. And with that, I conclude my presentation.

Q&A

[00:21:59] Host: Thank you so much, Pooja. Thank you. That was lovely. That's a beautiful story and a beautiful ending there. We have a couple of questions from the audience already, so I guess I will just go straight in. Any insights into how organizations, when selling in, can balance the reality of what the product can do with the need to generate new leads, so we don't end up over-promising and leaving the production team to deal with this? That's a very big question.

[00:22:29] Pooja: Yeah, look, I'm not a product manager so I can't speak on their behalf, but we do a lot of force ranking. So I'm sometimes between sales and product, and sales say we can't sell, product gap, we don't have this reporting, we don't have this template, competitors doing better. So I do a forced ranking, which is, okay, I don't just hear the sales team, I actually go into Salesforce, into our CRM, and then look at which deals did we lose against that reason, why, what was the value of the deal. And that starts dictating how we're going to draw some of these discussions with product.

[00:23:07] Host: Right.

[00:23:07] Pooja: So instead of going with a list of 20 different ad hoc stuff, I go with five instead, and then from there they take those five and then come back and say, two will be delivered in six months, or those three, we need to go and do some more interviews. But that's the process we've got.

[00:23:24] Host: Thank you very much. What if cooperation is low, though?

[00:23:27] Audience: Laughter.

[00:23:29] Pooja: What if co-

[00:23:29] Host: Cooperation is low. I would assume cooperation across all the calls.

[00:23:35] Pooja: That's okay. I mean, we're still in the same room, we're still one team, and you have to figure a path out. And you have to ask yourself, why is the cooperation low? Is it from your end? Is it from their end? Are they not hearing you through? So again, applying logic could be a good way, using data could be a good way, and getting to know them. Whatever works. And ultimately, I don't think it's personal. It's not about why didn't they take my idea. It's okay, sometimes the best idea could be coming from someone you don't like.

[00:24:09] Host: And you have to accept that.

[00:24:10] Pooja: You have to accept it, yeah.

[00:24:13] Host: You had six months for the 2FA implementation, but you mentioned nine months at the end. So how did you handle the extended timeline with the delay?

[00:24:21] Pooja: Yeah. Because we were keeping our board members updated on the progress we were making, we had our opportunity to help them understand the complexity of the situation. They just knew governance. We unpacked for them the number of products, the complex use cases, the customer success call thresholds, and with that context they were happy to extend it in a way that we can kick off the project without compromising the starting point. Once it was started, we were in motion. So the board was quite supportive once they understood how we were operating and there was a lot of logic.

[00:25:04] Host: So basically they were informed in advance and regularly, so they were always in the loop.

[00:25:08] Pooja: I still don't know how they picked up six months. They could have said three months and we would still go back and say, it's not going to happen, it's going to take so much time. The goal was to get things going and get the customer success and the security team aligned, which was a big win. And then it was just about timeline management.

[00:25:29] Host: Right. Thank you. Was there a point in the divergence stage where you felt you could challenge the why? This is referring to the case studies.

[00:25:39] Pooja: The 2FA?

[00:25:41] Host: Yes.

[00:25:41] Pooja: Why? Challenge the why?

[00:25:44] Host: Why are we doing 2FA? Is that the question, I guess.

[00:25:50] Host: Or, or why are we doing it this way?

[00:25:53] Pooja: No, we were just so deep into it. We were moving forward.

[00:25:56] Host: "Are we doing it," not "why are we doing it in a certain way." That's what I understand from the question, I guess.

[00:26:02] Host: Why are we doing it in this way?

[00:26:04] Pooja: Yeah.

[00:26:05] Pooja: That was the only way we could figure out, so we went with it. We couldn't find a better way of solving the problem. So with all the insights we got, that was the only path we could find.

[00:26:17] Host: Right. And still on the 2FA topic, there's a question here that is asking for advice for young product people on how to embrace less interesting topics.

[00:26:30] Pooja: Oh, yeah.

[00:26:31] Host: Something less exciting, like the 2FA topic.

[00:26:33] Pooja: Yeah. We engaged with — we made a list. Okay, how many products does Sage actually have? Because sometimes that's even overwhelming. So we made a list and we identified 40 products. These are the product managers globally, regionally. And we started doing like an internal campaign with the leaders of those regions, the sales leaders even, and the product leaders. And we engaged with them to tell them, look, this is the use case, this is the complexity we found, we have to do this 2FA rollout. It's a board mandate. I'm not saying it, the board is. You can raise it with them. But for now, this is our plan, this is how we want to do it. Can you explain, do you have any problems, yes or no? "Yes, we have this in the journey and this stage and this is the version of that product in this region, blah blah blah blah."

[00:27:22] Pooja: So we would make a log of that and we used that as a way of saying, let's say product X in region France will go live first with 2FA. Low risk, low priority region, same journey. So let's test it out. So we were partnering with the product team in that way. But we were talking about layering people's opinions, and that was how we layered it. Okay, France, fine. What about the other regions, high priority? And we used various product manager feedback to work on that partnership.

[00:27:56] Host: I guess it's really important to highlight your priority, how critical it is for a certain market, what the risks involved are, and that's how you understand how you bring value to your work.

[00:28:05] Pooja: Yeah.

[00:28:08] Host: Any suggestions on how to bring all your team up to that vision of the impact of your work? I guess it's connected.

[00:28:16] Pooja: This is only when I'm looking back. When I was thrown in the project, I had like a sad face. Why am I doing 2FA? The only outcome I was thinking was updating my CV. But now that I have learned and look back, I think there's a positive outcome. It really depends on how you want to show up. And just assume you're going to come out successful, and internalize your version of what success looks like, personally, professionally, because that's not the business goal. Business doesn't care about your promotion. But if you can find your opportunity to find a mentor, or to learn about a new department, or think of a powerful story like, "ooh, governance, interesting, tell me more." So I think it's painting that picture, but it comes with experience, which is why I'm here to share that with you, so you hop on more quickly.

[00:29:08] Host: You've lived it, and lived to tell the story.

[00:29:11] Pooja: I've suffered it, yes.

[00:29:13] Host: So I think we have time for one last question. How do you tackle problems where data is not within the company? So more for market research, how do you validate the data?

[00:29:25] Pooja: You have to trust the data that comes from the market, which is not internal. There's a variety of different sources we engage with.

[00:29:34] Host: Is there anything specific you look at in the sources in evaluating the reliability of information?

[00:29:41] Pooja: We always know data is not perfect, but you have to work with what you have. It's the same problem with every organization, but we would have three, four different sources and we try to triage that. And then even validate with quantitative and qualitative information in market research. So you actually do interviews yourself, but a lot of data comes from proven platforms like D&B or IDC, coupled with some interviews. So that's how it works. And it's then not my insight, it's the industry insight. That's how we leverage internal discussions.

[00:30:21] Host: Thank you very much. I really appreciate you taking the time and sharing your knowledge with us today. Thank you, and see you later. Let's give her a round of applause.

[00:30:33] Pooja: Thank you so much.