How we fostered a continuous research culture in a B2B Enterprise SaaS company

Let's face it. In Enterprise SaaS companies, product decision-making can be messy.

Product and design teams more often than not face the following challenges:

It is hard to be data-driven. Due to the nature of mid-to-enterprise B2B business’s scale, most of the quantitative, data-driven practices like A/B testing are out of the picture.
Getting first-hand customer feedback is not a default. The company is typically running a sales-led deal pipeline, and/or has set up a customer success team to provide continuous services for each account. This means sales and customer success teams are naturally talking to the customers every day, but the product and design teams have to set up extra tools and processes to get first-hand customer feedback.
Insights and suggestions coming from everywhere but with no consistency. Customer feedback shared in the organization is usually anecdotal, and it comes from anyone who has talked to customers, i.e. sales team, the C-suit, customer success team, etc. However, most often, these insights hold completely different customer contexts and perspectives from each other, and rarely any of them is through the product lens.

One solution to the challenges mentioned above is to establish a continuous research culture in the company.

In this case study article, we will show you how we diagnosed and implemented continuous research in a B2B Enterprise SaaS company.

Let's begin.

The initial state: no structure, no process, no impact

This B2B Enterprise SaaS company is a global scale-up, with remote teams located across the world. It is a classic sales-led business setup, with sales/GTM plus customer success teams working with customers ensuring the product solution is working with the Enterprise customer's specific needs.

Meanwhile, the product and design teams are focusing on shipping new capabilities. It worked great when it was a startup with a a tight-knit team, but as the company scaled, it became more important that multidisciplinary teams worked together more efficiently and effectively, and remained customer-centered.

The situation the product and design teams were facing:

No structure when it came to conducting customer interviews and sharing insights. Every team has been collecting anecdotal (often biased) feedback from customers, and feedback were shared in inconsistent channels, creating communication silos between teams across the organization.
Participant recruitment was particularly difficult since the target customers/users are highly specialized individuals within the insurance and banking industries. They are not easily accessible.
Lack of adequate user research and product analytics tools to ensure reliable data collection and analysis. Anecdotal feedback from the customers the team happened to have access to, makes it difficult to connect the “what” with the “why”.

The approach: we not only have to be problem solvers, but problem finders, framers and removers

Inspired by the work of multi-disciplinary researchers like Teresa Torres and Tomer Sharon, our ambitious goal was to introduce the concept of “Continuous Research”: an agile research approach to proactively find user needs, pain points, and desires on a regular basis throughout the product development process.

Unlike traditional user research, which is often limited to a single, in-depth study and conducted only by research specialists, continuous user research is done by both design and product teams and seeks to create a constant stream of valuable user data to make better product decisions.

The three pillars of continuous research

Frequent: Focus on research that requires only a minimal setup, can be done frequently, and is participant-led.
Collaborative: Everybody on the design and product team should do or be involved in regular research so that we all connect with users and continue to improve our product experience.
Accessible: All research data and insights should be accessible to anyone in the company and easy to find and share.

So, how did we go about building a continuous research culture?

We needed to put the appropriate processes, tools, support and documentation in place to ensure the quality, consistency and impact of the research. We needed to implement a Research Ops framework.

📘 Note: Usually the Research Ops framework encompasses 8 pillars, however, we wanted to start small and focus on the ones most critical for us at that time.

Implementing Research Ops

Tools

We researched, selected, and onboarded the tool ecosystem based on current needs and a set of criteria that was discussed with various stakeholders. We created quick start guides to shorten the learning curve for our teams and to speed up tool adoption.

Participant pool

One of key factors for deciding on a suitable user research platform was the automation of the participant recruitment process.

This included quick access to a vetted pool of highly specialized target users, the ability to ask multiple screening questions and participant compensation. We selected Usertesting.com which made it also very easy to create and share video highlight reels.

The workflow

Our design and product team members had various levels of research experience so we created playbooks and templates to support them, mainly focusing on evaluative research methods and best practices. We also drafted a research cadence which we started to iterate on once we knew what was working and what needed refinement.

Playbooks, templates, and coaching

The design and product team members had various levels of research experience so we created playbooks and templates to support them, mainly focusing on evaluative research methods and best practices. We also drafted a research cadence which we started to iterate on once we knew what was working and what needed refinement.

Insights repository

Creating a searchable, easily accessible and shareable insights repository was the most important pillar in our Research Ops framework. It demonstrated the value of our continuous research initiative, especially to stakeholders.

Everyone across the organization should be able to quickly find research nuggets related to a product feature or initiative. Since our company was already using Confluence/JIRA, it made sense to set up our repository there with the added benefit of directly linking design and dev tickets to specific insights.

The outcome and impact

From guessing to evidence

By introducing the concept of continuous research, we not only enabled the design and product teams to regularly connect with their users but also replaced guessing with evidence and data. They now had full visibility on customer behavior and product interaction by triangulating research insights and product analytics with their own back-end data. With our Research Ops framework we created processes for better communication and collaboration between various teams and stakeholders, helping them to make better and faster decisions.

Summary and Learnings

Bring unbiased customer feedback to product and design teams: The goal of implementing continuous research is to make sure the product and design teams are making decisions with accurate and clear evidence, bringing a holistic view of the customer's needs and wants, and we can then translate them through the product lens into the right solutions.
Democratizing research is a long shot: While this should always be encouraged, it might not be feasible in the beginning due to the team's lack of expertise (including unintentional bias), lack of time or even lack of interest. We changed to a more hands-on approach, supporting research initiatives where necessary, while coaching the team members to learn research practices and skills.
Tool adoption takes time: Even with tutorials and playbooks in place, it takes time for teams to adopt a new tool. So we scheduled 1-1 sessions with team members and held workshops to emphasize the tools’ value and impact.
Show, don’t tell: When trying to get stakeholder buy-in, nothing beats showing research in action. That’s why we made it compulsory to add a video highlight reel to each research nugget in our repository in addition to any written insight.