Structured Listening
Drives Good Decisions

I am available on a full-time, fractional, or contract basis to solve complex problems for enterprise users and buyers.

The approach I use is structured listening...

To leadership: what are we trying to accomplish, and what makes it difficult?

To engineers and architects: where are we today, and what's possible tomorrow?

To sales and customer success: what do we know about this customer already?

To the users and buyers themselves: what's working? what's not? what makes your day frustrating? what workarounds are you using? what do you wish we knew?

Structured listening poses questions in a way that does not bias the answer and where the outputs enable quantitative and qualitative analytics. It enables us to be confident we didn't just have a nice conversation -- we really learned something.

What decisions can I support?

Listening isn't just a "soft skill" -- it holds incredible power. A strong understanding of the problem space and the perspectives of the people involved opens the door to solutions across a variety of areas. See a few examples of business impacts.

Strategy & Roadmaps

Corporate strategy: Clarify goals and create comms for every level of the organization. Ensure all needs and questions are identified. Resolve departmental misalignment.

Roadmaps: Create the process, templates, and content for roadmaps that are simultaneously innovative and achievable. Multi-year, annual, or quarterly, with support for teams breaking the plan down to the sprint level.

Customer Engagement

Advisory panels: Design the process, audience, goals, and collateral for longstanding multi-customer advisory groups. Train teams on tactics to make the sessions valuable for customers and the organization alike.

Research design & execution: Design the process, audience, goals, collateral, and analytics for research with individual customers and prospects. Execute the research, or train teams on effective research techniques.

Go To Market

Product/Market fit: Identify and recommend strategic changes to drive strong "pull" from the market, through market research and close analysis of current sales and marketing processes.

Positioning: Use research with customers, prospects, and competitive products to identify optimizations to messaging to better match the expectations and needs of buyers.

Process Design

Business workflows: Observe interactions, analyze data, and interview the people involved to understand how information and behavior flows across complex processes, and recommend improvements to increase retention and reduce costs.

Information design: Work with SMEs to understand the nuances of the domain, and work with consumers of that information to determine where misunderstandings and inefficiencies lay. Recommend improvements.

Team training & mentorship

You may already have a Product team in place. But research and operationalizing the strategy are hard to learn from online classes or books; Product Managers often quietly want an up-leveling of their skills. If you've got a team who needs training in customer research and translating the results into strategic roadmaps, I can provide hands-on coaching so that your team is equipped for the future.