Research or restart: How customer research can prevent costly mistakes and restarts
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Assuming Makes an Ass Out of U and Me
I’m surprised how underutilized strategic research is within companies. Far too often I see assumptions run rampant, and they’re typically rooted in bias and ego. Product managers build the features they want to see instead of features designed for the target persona. Leadership focuses on reacting to competitors instead of considering customer needs. Marketing makes excuses for failed messaging, even though they’ve never actually spoken to customers (but #MQLs are up!).
TL;DR: At Olivine, we’ve witnessed our fair share of bad business decisions based on assumptions. I polled our team for their most compelling anecdotes and present 3 cases where research could have prevented major mistakes and 3 cases where research really paid off 🧐📊🏆
🚫 Lessons learned the hard way: pricing rollout nearly ruined customers and created new competition 🤯📉
A few years ago, one of our own was working in-house and their company decided it was time for a new license model and price increase. The company had just been acquired, and the changes were mandated by the new board. Product Marketing was brought in at the final hour 🙄 and their only scope was to produce messaging for the announcement. Though the team had plenty of objections and proposed more research to ensure a successful pricing rollout, the project moved forward. Not only was the company crucified publicly, but the new packaging structure had the potential to bankrupt several of their customers who had built their entire business on the former license model. This company disrupted an entire ecosystem and cleaning up the PR disaster took months (if not years) of work. The company had to implement special discounts, custom contracts, and a slew of other remedies to try and keep their customers. In the end, they lost customers, they inspired new competition, and their name was tarnished in the industry.
🚫 When shortcuts lead to dead ends. 🚫👥
In another example, a member of our team was working with an enterprise company that was attempting to replicate a competitor's product, believing it would easily generate a new revenue stream. Over the course of two years, this company invested significant resources in developing a product that closely resembled the competition, assuming developers would eagerly adopt it. The unfortunate reality? The product lacked any distinct value propositions. It failed to garner any demand and, as a hail mary, they offered it for free for six months before having to decide between laying off the team or reallocating them to different projects.
🚫 Sometimes, positive early signals are just smoke and mirrors. 🌬️🪞
Lastly, we have a first-hand account of a startup that found itself building a product that was too niche. Inspired by the prospect of revolutionizing a mature industry, they thought they had discovered what seemed to be a significant market need when they received two incredibly strong false positives — an early eager design partner and tech acquisition talks. With this intel, the team kept building for a few more months to round out an MVP. Unfortunately, when the beta version was ready to be released for testing, the initial interest had dissipated. They discovered this business need was limited to a few niche users and didn’t garner any interest for wider applications.
The bottom line: research demands time, but accelerates success 📈
It’s not uncommon for companies to go through price increases or build feature parity to competitors in their product, but can you imagine how different the outcome would have been if these companies had invested more time talking to customers and researching the industry landscape more?
Here’s the thing: research is time-intensive, which might explain why a lot of companies shy away from investing in it. What so many companies fail to recognize is how much the right intel can accelerate business goals, whether those are conversions, product adoption, building the right features, finding product-market fit, or simply validating your personas.
And now let’s give a round of applause for the following companies that used research to help them confidently make key business decisions and achieve their goals. 👏👏👏
✅ Functional upgrades over fancy features
A client approached us for customer research with the goal of expanding into new use cases and product features that would help expand their customer base. After a two-month-long research project consisting of both customer surveys and interviews, we uncovered findings that were eye-opening.
Contrary to the client’s expectations of the need for new and innovative features, customers primarily wanted functional upgrades, improvements in user experience, and a more intuitive user interface. These findings highlighted the importance of enhancing basic functionality, revealed previously unknown competitors (legacy tools that were preferred by potential users), and provided clear direction for the client's roadmap to increase product adoption and customer satisfaction.
This client could have spent months and a lot of development and marketing budgets going head-to-head with competitors with fancier features when the key to unlocking new market penetration was a better understanding of their customers’ needs.
✅ From Security’s Backseat to Revenue Driver
On another occasion, our team worked with a client where we discovered a new revenue opportunity related to security, despite it not being a primary focus initially. This discovery happened during a personas workshop where we witnessed a misalignment between the sales team and leadership over the significance of security in the product.
The company didn’t have a strong focus on it, but the sales team indicated it was a key decision factor for some personas. What we heard from sales led us to explore the security persona more. We decided to test the idea using a smokescreen ad and landing page and saw high conversions. We developed a new sales journey around security and were shocked to see continuous high conversions even without changing the product.
This prompted the product team to build out new security features to close out the security gap and now this offering is driving significant revenue and featured prominently on the company's website.
✅ Research-driven revival 💪🚀
And finally, back to the company from the first example. After the pricing debacle and a few more acquisitions (because once they start they don’t stop, right?!), their approach to rolling out new products and features was updated to include a LOT more research.
The next big product release our team worked on included lots of customer input and collaboration, competitive intelligence, and a soft launch with a testing/iteration period. Guess what the results were? Record-breaking product adoption, happy customers who felt heard, and a new line of business for the company.
🌟 When research is non-negotiable 🌟
While I strongly advocate conducting regular and continuous research, I understand that not all teams have the resources or capacity for it. However, there are certain situations when research becomes crucial. Here are some examples:
Competitor closure influx 🏪
New pricing strategies 💲
Product launches 🚀
New competitors entering the market 🥊
Rebranding 🎨
Sales decline or churn increase 📉
Sales model shifts (e.g., B2B to B2C) 🔄
Mergers or acquisitions 🤝
Geographical expansion 🌍
Research gives you the recipe for developing your secret sauce. Embrace it, and you'll be the product your customers need and choose. 🚀
In today's customer-centric business landscape, understanding your customers has become more critical than ever. Research is the first step in building out your business strategy, no matter what stage your company is in. Customer research and interviews provide the insights needed to create exceptional products, build meaningful relationships, and drive long-term success. If we haven’t convinced you yet, check out what some of these experts have to say about it:
