Product managers who do customer research
Enterprise-grade research platform for the whole team
There are questions you don’t know to ask, until you talk to customers. These conversations can lead to answers now, but also opportunities in the future.
Rob Barrett wanted to see more of these conversations happening at Experian. As Head of Innovation Portfolio, Barrett is responsible for ensuring best practices for innovative B2B product development are adopted by the global tech giant's 150 UK-based product managers (PMs). Customer research is vital to their work.
“One of our principles at Experian is to talk to customers about what they want,” Barrett said. “Don’t assume.”
PMs at Experian did customer research before Barrett entered his current role, and it’s still their responsibility today. But there’s one area in particular where he saw an opportunity to help Experian’s PMs improve the quality of their research so they could turn customer insights into visionary products.
In supporting Experian’s Product Managers, Barrett noticed a key distinction between where they excel and where they struggle with customer research.
“Product managers tend to be okay when there's an existing product, and they're talking about what's not working today,” Barrett said.
"They struggle more with greenfield innovation where you need to understand what the customer's problems are and immerse yourself in their lives to understand how that problem is manifesting itself in their business.”
This requires a mindset shift from problem-solving mode into customer discovery — easier said than done.
“That's quite hard for people who are day-to-day running an existing product,” Barrett said. “So that’s what we facilitate."
When getting PMs started with customer research, he’s noticed that their aha moment often comes when customers offer insight that alters their original idea.
“When they suddenly see their idea has gone off in a different direction, or they thought they had a winner and then the first three clients they interview say, ‘it's great, but we won't buy it,” this helps them realize the power of customer interviews. Once they see it in action, they get it. It's a change of mindset.”
Even after these aha moments, Barrett recognized that customer research at Experian was still underutilized. There were no processes or tools to set people up for success.
“Some people did research better than others, if they did it at all,” Barrett said. “Typically our salespeople who are frontline client-facing would feed back what clients tell them, which is not a bad source of information. But it's not robust enough in and of itself.”
Managing candidates, recording interviews, storing data — everything — was done manually across various tools, none of which were purpose-built for B2B customer research. To build out a healthy research practice that drives real product innovation, Barrett knew they needed a more systematic approach and a dedicated tool. A home for all things research.
In 2023, Barrett set out to find a tool that would empower Experian’s PMs to run B2B customer research more efficiently. Their biggest need was an easier way for PMs to connect with customers at a time that works best for everyone. Fortunately, he found Great Question, a UX research platform built for B2B companies.
“For our B2B customers, we need to speak to people and interview them,” Barrett said. “So we were looking for a tool that could help us manage participants, run and record interviews, and store insights."
"As far as I can tell, there’s only two or three products that actually do all of that well. We compared them and concluded Great Question was the best one.”
In evaluating their options, here’s what stood out to Barrett about Great Question — both in the product and in the people.
“One of the great things about Great Question is you can schedule research any way you want,” Barrett said.
It’s true. Great Question’s research calendar allows you to sync with your work calendar and customize your availability to schedule 1:1, collective, or round-robin customer interviews without conflicts.
Plus, features like time proposals, waitlists, scheduling notices, and buffers between events (among others) help create a great experience for researchers and participants alike.
Innovative teams need innovative tools. So naturally, Barrett took note of Great Question’s rate of change and responsiveness to customer needs.
“The rate of roadmap progression has been very good,” Barrett said. “That is a real strength of theirs — the rate that they adapt to their clients. So we felt that the Great Question product would carry on evolving really quickly and solve a lot of things we haven’t solved yet."
He was also pleasantly surprised by the quality of customer support.
“They have a process to prioritize what gets built next, and we're part of that. We've had a voice in their roadmap and the functionality was built very well. They are super responsive, better than I expected.”
Product and people aside, Barrett also recognizes the impact that having a central solution for customer research has had on their process. It provides structure and discipline to keep things running smoothly.
“When you run dozens of interviews across multiple studies and get to fifty, sixty participants, the chances of messing up get higher and higher,” Barrett said.
"Great Question keeps us well organized. There’s so many ways things can go wrong, and Great Question reduces the chances of that happening.”
Looking ahead, Barrett plans to add more and more users to their Great Question account, growing Experian’s customer research practice. It’s something he’s confident will show a strong ROI, given the great price and fast time to impact.
“Without Great Question, everything would be more manual. A lot more spreadsheets and filing. A lot of headaches and things going wrong."
"We'd have to employ somebody to do it because the amount of admin work it would create. That avoided cost alone makes Great Question worth paying for, let alone the less tangible but significant benefit of higher quality and faster turnaround on research.”