Overview

background

While working at a B2B enterprise software company, I worked on a three-year initiative. The reason behind this three-year initiative was to meet the changing demands of the financial industry and provide our customers more accurate and efficient software. The main objective is to migrate customers from the current On-Premise solution to a new Cloud B2B product. 

• The first-year objective was to design a migration journey from sales to implementation that offers the best customer experience and meets the needs of our customers.

• The second-year objective is to refine the planned migration journey.

• Finally, the third-year objective is to successfully and efficiently migrate target On-Premise customers to the SaaS B2B product.

GOAL

To achieve the first-year goal, I focused on gaining a better understanding of our target personas and their primary needs. In addition, I sought to understand our current sales and migration process. This more in-depth understanding of our customers and understanding our own “as-is” scenario informed the design of the future sales and migration journey.

OUTCOME

• Refined personas, to help our teams understand our target audience and their needs 

• Detailed “As-Is” journey and four personas

• Future “Discover, Try and Buy” sales user journey aligned by cross-functional teams

• Three mission statements to help enable the future  “Discover, Try and Buy” sales user journey

• Successful completion of outlined mission statements by the end of the first fiscal quarter

Tools

Miro, Webex, Airtable

Duration

3 months

MY ROLES

I was responsible for carrying out all internal and external user interviews. I also designed and facilitated multiple cross-functional workshops.

Stakeholder Workshop

Goal: Identify our riskiest assumptions about our users and prioritize what customer base we should focus our learnings on first. 

To get started:

•  I organized a workshop with key stakeholders such as product owners, customer success managers, engineers, and customer success managers. 

• I helped the team identify knowledge gaps we have about our customers and identify the different types of user groups for the product.

Exercise 1: I first encouraged everyone to brainstorm their baseline understanding of our customers and identify the most impactful learning gaps. 

Exercise 2: In the second part of the workshop, I narrowed our focus by running a user focus grid to prioritize which customer base we would reach out to first.

Remote Moderated Interviews

Goal: To start, I focused on interviewing premise customers to learn more about their current workflow as well as to learn more about how different company roles play into the SaaS product buying decision.

The pre-workshop and secondary research helped me frame the research questions and gave me enough information to write a research plan. 

Recruitment: 

After working together with the product owner and the project sponsor and finalizing the research plan and questions, I decided on interviewing premise customers first. 

1. External Interviews to understand our target audience

I initially focused on interviewing Premise customers. In a 45 minutes moderated session, my goal was to answer the following questions:

• What are the needs and goals of the target audience?

• How does the target audience approach their work today?

• How do our target personas respond to the Cloud product? 

• How are vendor buying decisions made?

• What prevents customers from wanting to migrate to the Cloud?

From this cohort, I refined original hypotheses. I also collaborated with the design team to sketch out mid-fidelity wireframes.

For the second cohort, I focused on interviewing SaaS customers. To understand the current sales and migration experience, I prioritized talking to those customers who had recently gone through a migration. Each interview consisted of an interview itself, and an observation portion where I tested core SaaS product concepts. 

Remote Internal Moderated Interviews

Internal Interviews to map out the current sales process: 

To further understand our current sales and migration experience, I then focused on interviewing our Sales Engineers and Account Executives. 

Using secondary research, I created a draft of our current sales and migration experience. During each interview, I asked the participants to review the user journey. 

Sharing Research

In addition to the user journey map of our current migration and sales experiences, I analyzed the qualitative from the externally moderated interviews to create more accurate customer personas.

To communicate the research findings 

• I widely shared the personas with the whole team through presentations and shared knowledge space (Confluence).

•  I led a personas training workshop at the annual Sales Training Event. 

User Story Mapping

Goal: Goal: Define and align on the future “Discover, Try, and Buy” sales experience. Set measurable project objectives to be accomplished during Q1. 

After the research phase, I collaborated with the VP of Customer Experience, Chief Operations Officer to learn about their target goals. This collaboration helped me identify how I can use valuable insights to best support the three-year initiative.  

I led a user story mapping workshop to align cross-functional teams on a future  “Discover, Try and Buy” sales user journey.