Developer Persona
Qualitative and Quantitative research aimed at understanding a new customer's attitudes, behaviors, and buying journey.
THE PROBLEM
AppDynamics (a subsidiary of Cisco) was interested in expanding its appeal to modern, full-stack developers. In order to target their sales and marketing to this new user, they needed to know the developers behaviors, attitudes, current toolset, and marketing channel opportunities.
As the lead user researcher, I began with stakeholder interviews of various Product Managers and Sales leads in order to gain an understanding of their knowledge of this user types workflow and potential pain points.
After creating a research plan, I shifted into the creation of a broad survey. The challenging part of this survey was finding the right type of developers who would commit their time. My workaround was asking if developers would be interested at the end of the online survey.
HIGH LEVEL TIMELINE
14 weeks Part-Time.
MAKE OF THE TEAM
Lead Researcher, Recruiting firms, User Testting team for technical remote testing assist.
MY ROLE
As Research Lead, my focus was on all aspects of research: methods, recruitment, moderation, and research summaries as well as marketing opportunities.
Methods : Survey and IDI's
The online survey was branched; it included specific questions for each developer sub-type that I had identified. I recruited a mix of developers using modern languages and those using older languages so that we could identify unique attributes of each type.
Survey results were reported quickly in the form of charts, graphs, and quotes. The results of the survey helped drive the questions of the in-depth interviews.
The survey results helped to refine and target participants for the In Depth Interviews (IDI's). 25 developers who met a pre-screen of requirements were interviewed for 1 to 1.5 hours. The results were logged, coded and mapped onto empathy maps for analysis.
Research results were used to create a customer journey map which included touchpoint opportunities and specific marketing tactics.
THE OUTCOME
The final readout of the project included user personas that included easily digestible information and graphics including demographics, goals, needs, frustration, trusted marketing sources and the value propostion that the AppD product would bring them.
These at-a-glance personas, along with the final presentation, were widely circulated among sales, marketing, and product teams in order to align them on the new user types the company was hoping to attract.