Product Pioneer Colab

Client

Workpath Product Organisation

My Role

UX Researcher

Credits

UX Team Lead
Chief Product Officer
Product Managers
Marketing Team
Sales Team
Partners Team
Legal Team

Timeline

January 2022-
November 2022

Tools

Miro
HubSpot
Google Forms
Zoom

Skills

Stakeholder management
A/B testing
Content editing
Workshop facilitation
Event management

The brief

Rebrand the company user research recruitment program, and create a more collaborative approach for the exchange of ideas between program participants and the Workpath Product Team. Numeric target: grow the pool of participants to 50 members in 90 days.

“

The problem is…

Our Product Managers, who do not have direct contact with our customers, need easy access to users so that they can quickly plan user interviews and testing to make more informed product development decisions. However they do not have a pool of participants to reach out to, which frustrates them and slows the development process.

“

  • The status quo

    First things first, I wanted to understand what was currently being done to recruit users for product research, what tools were being used, and what kind of materials had already been circulated on the user recruitment topic. I was advised that a program had already been set up earlier in 2021 and gained some traction at the beginning with a handful of signups, but after some time passed, and with the changing of ownership of the program’s development, its purpose became a bit dormant. Some promotional material was created, a sign up form, and an excel sheet was being used to record a list of those interested. Aside from this, it was apparent that user research was being done often with the same well-known users to some of the product team, and otherwise user interviews were conducted ad-hoc through connections from the customer success team. These were then uploaded to Condens, though not always in a structured or consistent format.

  • The feeling in the camp

    Considering this initiative was aimed at supporting Product Management, it was important to speak with the various Product teams also and get a sense of how they felt about our user research efforts. The general consensus was that we do not have enough direct connections with our key personas, and more continuous discovery sessions with customers was needed.

  • The popular opinion

    Out of curiosity, I wanted to understand how other companies were recruiting users and getting insights to inform their own product decisions. After speaking with some UX professionals in my network, it was apparent that the struggle to get user feedback was not only ours. Some mentioned using incentives, but it was clear that having a pool of consistent research participants was common practice.

The rebranding proposals

After reviewing the original program’s materials and having a better grasp on what was currently in place, we decided to rebrand the research recruitment program. The idea was to spark more activity and engagement in the hopes of attracting more signups, and excitement for collaboration amongst our customers. In consulting with various teams at Workpath, and taking inspiration from other similar programs, my next steps were to make suggestions for an updated program title and mission, get internal and external feedback on the proposals, later promote updated the rebrand externally, and revise the program format for receiving actionable product feedback.

The feedback

After some brainstorming, presenting ideas to the CPO, and reducing the ideas to two differing proposals, I went in pursuit of feedback. Through conducting some A/B testing via Usability Hub, and some reachouts via Slack to both internal and external communities, the most popular brand revision was so-called ‘The Workpath Loop’.

However, in further deep discussion with the CEO, and through other discussions with colleagues on the reasoning behind their decision, it was thought that the ‘Workpath Product Pioneers Club’ would more clearly communicate the program mission. This would later be changed to ‘Workpath Product Pioneers Colab’ to foster a sense of collaboration, rather than exclusivity.

The revised signup form would allow participants to select their preferred frequency of contact, on their preferred research topics. The data was collected with their permission and we now used Hubspot as recommended by the Marketing team to maintain one source of truth. Hubspot was also used to send out professional email templates whenever we wanted to alert many program members at once about upcoming research topics or events.

The latest model

The shiny new artefacts

With the program now rebranded, it was time to get the word out. This stage required plenty of support from the Marketing, Legal, Partners, Customer Experience, and Sales teams so that we could compile new promotional materials and messaging formats, share the rebrand publicly via social media and the company website and Workpath public events, and let our own customers know via regular touchpoints with Customer Success or via the product newsletter how they can get involved. Ultimately our goal with the program was to receive more feedback to further develop our product, to strengthen our relationship with customers, and to offer a space for peer engagement and learning.

The first program event

In collaboration with one of our Product Managers, we scheduled our first PPC branded event to discuss the topic of alignment across teams. This event brought 6 PPC members together for a workshop and engaging discussion led by the UX Research team. The event focussed on the challenges they faced in alignment at work, and offered the chance to exchange on similar or varying problems they faced and possible solutions to those. This approach also gave the Product Manager direct insights on common pain points across customers.

The second event

For our second event, we launched a new series called “Product Features & Faces”, the goal of which was to give Product Managers the chance to become more visible to users and build closer relationships with customers, and to give users a sneak peek into a developing idea for a product feature before others. 10 PPC members who joined were given access to a prototype and asked to complete a task using the prototype in real time. Afterwards we split into breakout sessions to hear initial thoughts on the feature idea and how they could imagine using it, or not.

The Learnings

About the growth

Growing the program from 10 to 50 members in 90 days was unfortunately not realistic, a point which was mirrored in discussions with other UX Research professionals. Due to GDPR constraints, we were at times blocked from larger email reachouts to recruit. However, when writing this, the program now has 50+ members since its inception and after a thorough clean up to ensure there are only members who wish to actively participate in research. In fact, the pool growth has been escalating more quickly since program hosted events and reachouts to offer usability testing and feature Beta testing. It seems that often when some customers would attend or take part, they would pass the word on about the research and wanted their colleagues to be involved too.

About the offerings

In trying different messaging to our research pool, we discovered that incentives were not particularly successful in attempts to pique the members’ interest to take part in research. Members were simply more interested to be part of research when it was something they could either relate to, or could contribute their experience to. We decided to create a calendar of monthly events, in agreement with the Product Managers, after the success of the first ‘Product Features & Faces’ pilot event, so that we could build up consistency with the program and show the value of being a part of it. Communication was key to the success of such events such as reminders, thank you notes, and information on what to expect.