Shifting Chargebee's Market Understanding and Disrupting Product Strategy
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The Brief
Perspective
User Research
Solutioning
Wrap up
Overview
Internal interviews
Market research
Workshops
Interviewing​
Usability testing
Impact
#1 The Brief
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Background
Chargebee is a multi-national business with over 4,000 customers and over $100M in annual recurring revenue. Leadership is looking for the next big bet to push the business forward​. Chargebee does not suffer from a lack of ideas, but an over abundance. Ideas are coming from sales, high value customers and observing competitors - research needs to be able to provide product with a solid direction.
Challenges
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Many stakeholders fighting to have their voices heard, research would be another voice
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Sales have a direct value associated with their ideas
#2 Perspective
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Sales people are not competing with research, but a complement research. They intimately understand the market they serve, this is not always communicated to product. First step was to gather their ideas and what impact they would have on new and current customers, and the roadmap.
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Segmentation
To understand potential impact was to dive into Chargebee's segmentation. We have set ICPs, but no overview of the amount of customers that fit into each of them. The product strategy team put together a framework to quickly understand our customers
🚨 Depending on the average order value, we classified them into either PLG, SLG or hybrid... this made no sense 🚨
PLG = Product Led Growth, SLG = Sales-driven, Hybrid is a mix. This is how a company obtains new customers. We develop solutions, such as checkouts and quoting, which have an impact on each segment.
Our leadership was looking at this data and making decisions on how to direct the roadmap. One of the key insights was that sales-driven companies was the smallest segment. I manually categorised these companies by assessing their websites. I outlined how sales-driven companies are the biggest segment we served.
OLD
NEW
Example charts
Market research
To put our customer database into perspective, I needed to compare our segmentation to that of the market. I conducted my own market research, categorising over 500 companies of different sales motions and revenue segments.
Example charts
Impact
I outlined a huge underserved opportunity and the rationale behind the discrepancies. Next steps was to showcase what type of experience these customers are looking for, and how we can optimise it, i.e. capture new customers. Enhancing our quoting capabilities was one of the suggestions thrown around a the salesperson. This is something we needed to dig into.
#3 User research
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Connected with over 40 companies that matched our profile. Outlined key journeys - sales, invoicing and collection processes. Stating JTBD and personas throughout them, highlight pain points and opportunities.
Example simple version
One of seven parts of the journey
End to end journey workshop
Together with the product, engineering and design team, I held an end-to-end journey workshop. This is to outline, step by step, how a customer would achieve a certain task. This would outline each screen involved, other tools used (such as CRM or ERP systems) and potential challenges at each step. As gaps in people's knowledge were made during the workshop, these feed back to research to direct me, generating a feedback loop.
#4 Solutioning
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Designed reimagined this experience, saw where our current offering fell short and created a new quoting tool. The tool needed to serve multiple personas - customer success, account executives, sales-leadership and RevOps, each with unique needs and challenges. Armed with the personas and customer journeys, a robust solution was created. This went through various rounds of concept testing with multiple personas. Over 80 areas of improvement discovered. Many of these are addressed in the MVP, or moved to the backlog.
#5 Wrap up
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By reimagining our customer segmentation I was able to focus product leadership on the biggest opportunity and develop a thorough understand of who we really serve. During the solutioning phase, the team was able to have a deep understanding of the customers and what type of value they are looking for. With many rounds of iterative concept testing, the backlog for ideas was filled and our solution was refined.
Learnings
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Develop a key foundational understanding of your entire customer base to speed up decision making and set direction
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Mix both market and user research to ensure we guide product to most impactful solutions
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Create feedback loops via workshops, so everyone has a chance to identify gaps in our knowledge and guide future research
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Break silos and coordinate with departments outside product, especially sales