A customer maturity framework to help a new product team strategize

April 2023 – July 2023

🔍 Background

I joined a new product team as their first researcher in mid-2023. The team initially wanted me to focus on security product initiatives considering I was also supporting the Security Operation product line. I suspected there were some more fundamental issues research could help with, so I decided to do a research scoping discussion with the product director and centered our discussion around the question “What keeps you up at night?“. This framing allowed us to identify a foundational topic we should investigate first.

We then conducted two interviews followed by a workshop with 8 customers, which led to a customer maturity framework. This framework mapped customers to different phases of their maturity with device inventory and associated pain points.

🗻 Process

After meeting with the product director and getting a sense of “What keeps you up at night?”, I organized a workshop with a small group – the PM director, one designer, and the design manager, to map the topics that we could investigate based on a matrix where

  • X = Importance, topics that have a large impact on customers and product success.
  • Y = Risks, things that we know little about.

I added another layer to consider if any of these topics would impact our upcoming product releases. This exercise helped me understand to focus on understanding customers’ challenges with their device inventory.

We first conducted two interviews during which I found some customers to be at different maturity levels of their device inventory. I proposed an initial draft of the customer maturity framework based on primary data and some secondary research data. This framework got the team excited, as they found it to be a useful artifact and framework to think about their strategy.

The high-level view of the framework. Different colors represent customers from different industry segments.

One month later, I discovered our PMs will be hosting a customer advisory event. I thought it was a great opportunity to validate and expand on the framework. I proposed and led a workshop with 8 customers, which helped us collect more detailed challenges customers faced at different maturity levels. This final framework as an artifact is now shared and used across the product team.

Customers identified where they are at in the device inventory journey and their pain points.

Our learnings also helped us prioritize some new features to introduce in the upcoming releases.

🔭 Impact

  • Created a customer maturity framework that is shared across the product team for strategizing and product design.
  • Discovered new customer needs, which were prioritized as new features to introduce in the upcoming product release.
  • Established research as a trusting partner. The product director in one meeting said:

“My biggest takeaway is that we need to talk to David every day”

✍️ Lessons Learned

  • For qualitative research, when we can’t get to the magic 5 or close to the saturation point, early research learnings with a limited number of participants can still be used to form hypotheses; but remember to validate the findings with more participants.
  • To establish research as a trusting partner, framing what research can do is important! Think like a PM and try to empathize with your stakeholders’ top pain points.
  • A framework as a research artifact is a strong communication tool that can help the cross-functional team align.