@Krish I’m not sure this is formalized, but the way we approach it is:
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Passive learning: feeding information into our Slack so we learn by osmosis. This includes competitor and industry news; support tickets; customer activity; user feedback etc. We also use Feedly and sign-up to lots of email lists to keep us in the loop. We record customer and sales calls and make them available in a shared space, share insights in a weekly meeting, and invite non-customer facing team members to customer meetings.
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Active learning: where we go out to seek insights on a particular topic. This often centres around our content calendar. E.g. we recently wrote an article on growth strategies and so asked a bunch of influencers for their perspectives. We recently interviewed Kieran Flanagan (VP Marketing @ Hubspot) for insights on freemium models (we’ll be publish on our blog later this month). Or we run beta programs and require customers to set up times for us to dive in.
I actually think most product teams are not doing a good job with customer research today. It often gets outsourced to design/UX teams only or happens only when developing a new product. Instead customer research should be continuous and a great way of enabling that is through in-product microsurveys. These make it much easier to collect very targeted feedback at scale, in both a passive and active way, and can substantially speed up product success.