User and Market Research

Summary: During my time at Autify, I spent a lot of time researching the market and users. It informed us on what decisions we should make and ultimately led to some big pivots in the company.

Why did we undertake this initiative?

This initiative was a constant job I did in my tenure at Autify. There were a lot of reasons for doing market and user research. In it's essence doing market research makes you able to make much more calculated decisions on where a companies focus should be.

1) When I first joined Autify, the company had done no market research in the US. Autify was a Japanese based company that was trying to expand into the US. I was it's second hire. To say I was a bit shocked was an understatement but the company was doing really well in Japan. So one of the very first things I needed to understand was how the US market was different than Japan's

2) When we expanded internationally, I again needed to understand differences in markets for Europe, India (it's own market), East Asia, and Australia.

3) Understanding who our users where also gave us some really good information on what they cared about and allowed me to develop our buyer personas with the marketing team.

What did I do to complete this initiative?

I was constantly doing market research and there were a lot of things I did, too much to list out everything. Here are the highlights -

1) When I first joined, I conducted interviews with our small group of current customers in the US to find out who they were, why they bought Autify's products, what they cared about and what they wanted.
2) I also did a number of demos for trial customers and during these demos I asked key questions that gave me an idea of what their company structure was like and how they managed their testing. I kept a file on every single one of these demos with answers to these questions. Questions include company size, job titles, how they went about testing, what was most important to them, etc

3) Once I got about ~70ish of these responses, I analyzed and simplified the data to present to my leadership.
4) I took that data and compared it to the Japanese market to get a sense of where the markets were the same or different.
5) I did the same things as above for the international markets when we opened up to them.

6) I also analyzed our support tickets to understand where the biggest pain points were for our customers.

7) I went to testing conventions and testing forums to talk to testing professionals from the US to get a sense of what they loved and hated about testing.

8) With the help of my marketing team, we did a lot of A/B testing on what worked in the market to get our product seen and increase trial conversions.

Results of the initiative?

The findings we got over the years helped us make some pretty impactful decisions. Here's a list of some of the biggest takeaways we got:

1) The US and Japanese markets were completely different. The US market primarily wanted to use testing tools that were primarily coding based. NoCode tools had a reputation of being clunky and not effective for long term testing as they failed when applications got more complex. The US market was also saturated with testing tools and everything was being heavily automated (more on this in competitive analysis section). By contrast in Japan, Autify was the sole testing tool outside of Selenium so most companies were doing manual testing. That's why Autify succeeded in Japan, because there were no real other options. It was incredibly enlightening and if we were going to succeed in the US, we had to make a series of pivots for the market. That's part of how our products of Autify Nexus, Muon (in beta), and Genesis came to be born. All because of the market research that I did.

2) We were able to form a number of different buyer personas from the research I did and determine what features we could produce to satisfy that group of clients.

3) We were able to narrow down our targeting to buyers that we best thought would convert for the smallest amount of feature development.

4) We reformatted our messaging to suit the market and sell our products.

5) Our users were clamoring for certain items in our product that I have illustrated in other section of this Portfolio.