Before you commission a single new study, institutional knowledge and existing research can give your product roadmap a head start.
In Tuesday’s post, I made the case for observing workers in context with fresh eyes. It remains one of my favorite methods for insight, and it can be done quickly and cost effectively. But there are other ways to establish a strong foundation for new product development, too.
The code name for our project was “Killer App.” The goal was to cannibalize our own technology consulting business by giving sales reps a new way to consume analytics; we wanted to disrupt our business before a competitor did it to us. And we got to a working concept quickly — without starting from scratch.
Start with the people who already know
B2B sales enablement had been at the heart of ZS for thirty years, so we didn’t begin with a blank page. We began with our own thought leaders — the consultants who’d been solving these problems since the firm’s earliest days — and their seminal projects. That institutional knowledge, built up over decades, was shared with us and became the foundation for our initial product ideas. The perspective and insights were at our fingertips, and we had established the relationships to sit down and ask.
Most of the signal already exists
Before we ran a single new study, we pulled together what we already had on hand, including nearly 100 rep interviews across ~20 pharma companies, and a review of 35 transformative ZS projects and their deliverables. That was enough to shape our initial thinking. Once our early concepts had been developed and iterated internally, we did new primary research to test and sharpen those ideas. Eventually we conducted a modest round of usability testing (12 reps) to refine our ideas. But the key point here is that net new research didn’t jumpstart the work; it de-risked ideas that were already well underway.
From early concept to ZAIDYN Field Insights
What started as a germ of an idea grew into a new, multi-year roadmap that changed how our experts thought about field-enabling solutions. A client pilot showed a 15–40% improvement in engagement and a 15–30% downstream sales lift. The product is in market today as ZAIDYN Field Insights, used by more than 100,000 reps. (I wrote up the full case study here — Personalized Analytics.)
The signal you already have
You may not have thirty years of consulting data. But you have more than you realize: your won and lost deals, your support tickets — and, most underused of all, the accumulated knowledge of your professional services and post-sales teams. All of that can inform prioritization of the product roadmap and even new product direction.
Who in your organization is reading your sales calls, deal reviews, implementation post-mortems, and support tickets for patterns and ultimately for product signals? And do you have the trusted relationships with those teams to get at what they already know?
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