activating personas

Year: 2021
Role: Research Project Director, Insights Enablement
Research Method: Quantitative Survey, Diary Study, In-depth Interviews
Research Type: Exploratory research
Company: Miro

Due to the sensitive nature of some of my work, the detailed case study is available by request only. If you’re interested in checking it out, please drop me a quick line here or through LinkedIn for the password.

In the meantime, below is a high-level outline of the goals of the project, methods used, learnings and outcomes. 

background and goals

In 2021, Miro was evolving from an organic, product-led growth model to an enterprise business. We had recently reached 12 million users, with 95% of all Fortune 100 enterprise clients. We were also competing in an increasingly competitive landscape, with Covid bringing many remote collaboration products to market.

Our priority with this project was to drive growth and build our brand, with clearer category definition and product positioning. The audience understanding was key to driving the evolution of our brand, while supporting a rapidly scaling business.

For this project, I partnered with Studio intO, a specialist research company that would execute on the research while I directed the project and translated insights to our executive leadership team and broader internal audience.

​Audience Research Goals

• Map the spectrum of 'knowledge workers' that are the foundation of Miro's customer base, hypothesize about future audiences.
• Define and explore nuances of key customer personas, moments of fulfillment when using Miro, and gauging awareness of Miro's competitors.
• Weight the quantitative sizing of customer personas in proportion to one another.

Business Goals

• Build audience and brand awareness in an increasingly competitive market.
• Drive deeper alignment across product, sales, and marketing teams with a consistent language for how we talk about our customers.
• Pull disparate efforts together to focus on a more human-centric taxonomy.
• Drive sales enablement training, product rituals and marketing messaging.

method

We conducted the research in three phases over three months:

• Phase 1: Building the foundation, tapping into internal knowledge at a stakeholder workshop, desk research, and reviewing existing research. Finally, set up a quantitative study to identify demographic and usage data of 2000 Miro users.
• Phase 2: Conduct fieldwork, leveraging ideal participants from the quantitative study. Provide participants with a pre-task after which we conduct in-depth interviews. Wrap this phase up with a digital diary study over the course of one week to gain insight into what users hope to achieve with Miro.
• Phase 3: Analysis and delivery, synthesize data and organize evidence. Run several insights activation workshops with leadership, roadshows for sales, marketing, and product teams, and interactive and self-serve learning experiences for all 1000 employees at Miro.

crucial insights

The team developed four detailed user personas:

• Democratic Collaborator: driven by reaching outcomes through alignment, reaching a consensus through team co-creation sessions.
• Unifying Leader: desire to empower their teams, create team cohesion, improve internal and external communication through facilitating presentations.
• Creative Soloist: goal is to settle in a personal space for individual thinking, creative exploration, and reaching inspiration and possibilities.
• Conscientious Planner: wishes for defining and streamlining project structures, keeping teams on the same page, and organizing complex informations.

The full case study can be found here. Please contact me for access to the case study and for additional findings and learnings.

research impact

Strategic Impact​

• This research was the first large-scale foundational research run at Miro. Not only that, but it was incredibly visible across all levels and all departments.
• It allowed us to transform from a product-centric to a customer-centric organization.
  

Stakeholder collaboration Impact

• Sales, marketing, growth, product, analytics, and design were all heavily involved as active stakeholders in the research process.
• Executive leadership was fully present and believed in the outcomes of the research.

Product Impact 

• To this day, product teams still leverage the user personas with at least five daily board visitors over the course of two years. 
• All product streams are onboarded with personas as learning materials, allowing them to hearken back to the insights over the course of their tenure at Miro.

my learnings

• Managing a project with executive involvement requires a lot of time, patience, and flexibility! 
• Be intentional about communication strategy, keeping everyone involved on a need-to-know basis and asking for feedback often and early.
• Managing a team of internal stakeholders while managing expectations of external executors is a test in relationship-building.
• When all is said and done, conducting research is the easy part. The hard part is translating those to actionable insights and driving this home with uninvolved parties.