Highspot SPARK

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September - October 2019

Background & Objective

Highspot hosts an annual customer roadshow across 4 cities (Seattle, SF, Boston, & NYC) that includes a day of networking opportunities, hands-on learning, a product roadmap exercise, and more! I was involved in helping with the product roadmap exercise, which aims to understand our customers pain points and give them a voice to influence our product roadmap.

Structure of Roadmap Workshop

Why a Workshop? We incorporated a workshop as part of SPARK because we wanted to hear from customers first hand and know that their opinions mattered. It also leads to a lot of good conversations between the customers that we’re able to observe.
Time: 1 hour workshop
Steps:

Customers were each given 2-3 sticky notes to write their top pain points/feature requests
Customers broke up into smaller groups of about 15 people to share what they brainstormed
Then, each customer was given 5 stickers to vote for their favorite requests after

My Role & Responsibilities

The product sessions were led my a Co-Founder and our VP of Product. Since we had such a large turnout at the events, we split up into two groups and I assisted our VP of Product in his group. Though, I was responsible for capturing the ideas from both groups and recording them in order to be synthesized. I did this across four cities and had to create a findings report at the end of our SPARK events.

While the product roadmap was the main part of the day for customers to share their pain points, there were a lot of great insights gained throughout the day in 1:1 conversations, questions/areas of confusion during product workshops, and questions during keynotes. There were a wide range of industries, company sizes, and comfort level with our product. I was able to combine my notes from these 10 hour days across the cities, utilize affinity mapping for synthesizing, and identify areas of opportunity.

Challenge: Overall, the events ran smoothly, but with any large events, we continually had to refine our processes. Last year, we were small enough to run the workshop with one group and when we did that at our first city this year, we found that customers were waiting a long time to get to share their idea. Thus, after the first event, I had the idea of breaking up into smaller groups for the workshops. This worked well because it gave people more time share their ideas and it generated more dialog amongst the customers.

Impact

My favorite part about research is being able to be the voice of the customer and through this event, I was able to do that and share areas of opportunity to the company. I got the opportunity to present my findings in front of the whole company at an all-hands and presenting a deeper dive to the product team to inform them challenges our customers are facing.