Proactive Meetings Help Keep Research Relevant in Fast-Paced Tech Industry - Friday Folly
Part of my brand-spanking-new Friday Folly about life as a researcher in the business world. Warning - these might ramble on a bit. I’ll try my best to keep them short but things might get a little crazy.
Speed is a big deal in the B2B tech world. We’re always racing to get another product engineered, marketed, shipped and updated. It’s a constant battle to get faster and stay competitive while our competition pushes just as hard to beat us.
When I first started working in tech (coming from the lolly land of consumer research) - I didn’t really have a clue how fast paced it would be. Decisions need to be made and things need to ship. I was awash in data requests that needed answers ‘now!’.
At first, I thought - ‘Calm down and let’s all have a tea’ - but that doesn’t really work in tech when your competitor is about to beat you to the last sip of punch. Greedy bugger.
So somewhere amongst the craziness, I decided the best way to get ahead of the chaos was to sit down with manager’s regularly and start being proactive about getting info on their projects. Once I knew those little gems of information, I could start to get the research ready ahead of their requests and find out what information I could ‘track’ so that it was ready when the rush came to get them answers.
Having those proactive meetings has helped in two main ways:
1. It’s helped understand what products they’re developing now so that in 6 months, when market trending data is needed, I’ll be ready with my tracker
2. It helps keep market research relevant and the regular meetings helps remind the busy product manager’s that we have research resources available to help them make decisions
It’s still a little crazy at times but the proactive meetings have helped in a lot of scenarios where data was needed and it was needed very quickly.
