What the hell does a Product Researcher do at Pipedrive?

We're looking for a Product Researcher for Pipedrive Prague and since it's not that common role in where I come from, while waiting for a plane to Tallinn at the Vienna airport, I thought I would sum up my take on what this role is.

Forgive me if it's not complete or cohesive enough, but since I've gotten exactly the same question as I'm asking in the title of this article, I'm gonna give it a try anyway.

It is actually a fascinating role a tad of everything. You need to be good at listening to people, starting with talking with customers and ending with complex data analysis. At Pipedrive, we have an amazing research team, it's always a pleasure to work with them and see them in action.

In essence, they help us make sure we work on the right things and we implement them the right way.

Making sure we work on the right things

Everyday new ideas pop up - from customer support, from any employee, but mostly from Product Managers. Before deciding to invest precious time of an entire team on building something, it is imperative, that we validate the problem the idea should solve.

Researchers use various techniques to validate those problems - data analysis, heat-maps, surveys, analysing support feedback and ending with interviews and field studies. They design the best strategy for given problem and then execute it.

With the research done right, it's then much easier to validate the original problem and even stack-rank various problems against each other and decide what should we focus on first.

Making sure we implement them the right way

Even after we choose the right problems to focus on, we're not there yet. There are multiple ways how to solve a problem and choosing the right one is a similar challenge. Researchers come to a rescue. As the whole team come up with solutions, the researcher again helps with designing a strategy on how to get the best level of certainty before we go full steam on implementing a solution. Again it's a combination of techniques - A/B tests, usability tests and again interviews.

Without these outcomes, we would spend so much more time and money on building the wrong thing (or at least not the best possible thing).

But that's a job of a product manager, isn't it?

Yes, that's what a good PM should think about, however to implement most of these research methods right, requires a lot of expertise and skills, in many cases even the right scientific education, so I strongly believe that having researchers on your team is a great complement to what PMs normally do and it improves the overall outcome of the entire production team.

And wait, there's more ...

The very first interaction each new Pipedrive employee has with the research team is during the first week of their on-boarding. Each new employee gets to become a researcher thanks to our wonderful "Everyone calls" programme. The research team does a quick introduction and training to everyone, helps them distribute an introductory e-mail to a pre-selected group of our customers and let's them have at least one research call, where they ask that customer a series of questions which let us understand better that particular customer, their product, sales process and the way how they use Pipedrive.

I think it's just a wonderful way how to on-board new employees.

I think there's much more what our researchers do which I wasn't able to describe here, so if you want to have a more complete view, you're very welcome to join our next meet-up focused on trends in Product Management which will be held in partnership with Microsoft Czech Republic in their wonderful building on Vysko?ilova street in Prague on Tuesday, April 16th. Paula Koppel, the head of research of Pipedrive, will give a much more detailed coverage on this topic.