DISCOVERY RESEARCH AT CONVOY

Understanding the needs of Convoy Sales and Account Team members who provide service to shipper customers

Overview

Methods In-depth interviews, observation/shadowing, qualitative data analysis

Customer/user Internal team members that provide sales and account management to enterprise shipper customers

Contribution This project was highly collaborative across functions, I co-led the research with a UX Design teammate

Context

Product leadership made a quick shift in focus to developing products and/or processes to support the internal sales and account management teams that provide service to shipper customers and bring in business. These product leaders wanted to understand what products and processes existed to support these internal sales and account folks and where there were gaps in support.

Process

Ten initial interviews were scheduled and run by a small group of product managers, engineers, designers, and myself. I worked closely with a teammate to help guide the script creation and direction of the interviews and to coordinate delivering highlights from interview sessions to stakeholders. We prioritized communicating interesting findings to stakeholders throughout analysis on an ongoing basis in order to keep the team apprised and engaged and to facilitate discussion. I worked on a deep analysis of qualitative learnings with my designer teammate to find themes and insights. Working together helped us cover more ground quickly and test out our interpretations with each other to limit the bias that every person inherently brings to their analysis. We scheduled more interviews and shadows to fill in the gaps of our knowledge, getting demos of the tools and products they use and talking to partner teams with whom they collaborate. 

Sharing

As I worked with my teammate to refine our final list of takeaways, I prioritized findings that were foundational to the decisions that would be made in upcoming roadmap planning. Of the four findings, three of them were strategic opportunities of how to better support these users in their role, and the fourth suggested a specific tooling gap. An example of a strategic finding we found was that there are many internal teams building tools (e.g., products, dashboards, queries) for these users and that there is a risk of overloading them with too many tools and a risk of wasting time by building redundant tools in silos. All of the findings would require further research before there could be specific recommended solutions. This was intentional as we needed to build alignment and see how stakeholders interpreted the priority of the findings with other current business needs. My teammate and I presented to a large, cross-functional audience by reviewing our process, our findings, and sharing quotes that simultaneously demonstrated rigor and helped our audience develop empathy for these internal users. 

Impact

At the time of the presentation, there was a small amount of discussion and many expressions of gratitude at the thorough analysis of the needs of these users. However, the real impact of the research was seen over time, as stakeholders slowly started incorporating the point-of-view expressed in the findings into their strategy. For example, in a future effort to plan product roadmap, the product team worked directly with another supporting team to learn about their scope of ownership and what they were working on to avoid the risks mentioned previously. Another example happened when, in a future research planning session, product leadership asked if I could take on a research question that was top of mind for them, but was also an ideal follow-up question to one of the research findings. These examples illustrate how the research findings shaped the way that product leadership was thinking about their work, an outcome that can only be seen over time and by observing the comments, perspectives, and actions of project stakeholders.

Reflection

At first, my teammate and I struggled to find the right level at which to focus the findings. We wanted to distill and summarize without letting our audience miss out on the depth of insight we had gleaned from analysis. My impression at the time was that we might have gone too deep. As time passed, I was able to gain perspective on which findings were resonating and how to better communicate them. When I was asked to review the findings, I presented them in succinct and accessible language, helping people quickly absorb and recall before moving on to the next item in the meeting. In retrospect, it was appropriate to start with more depth, and come back to it later at this higher altitude, and the perspective afforded by passing time was helpful in curating a concise review.