Since the problem we were tackling was relatively new, we had very few existing resources to guide our decision-making process for how to address the problem. The only resource we had, however, turned out to be incredibly valuable: the thoughts and opinions of members of our business who had already identified this problem space as an issue. If we were going to assess and recommend changes to our business, it was intuitive that we make sure our recommendations matched the needs of the people who were asking for them. We conducted eight interviews in total with our coworkers throughout the Verizon Connect business and in a variety of departments (i.e. marketing and product management). Each interview was approximately 30 minutes long.

Research Goals: By communicating with our colleagues, we hoped to identify the most critical priorities and needs of our business in relation to our problem space. By interviewing people from different departments, we would identify different perspectives that would add nuance to our goals. We also hoped to isolate and prioritize asks from leadership specifically as to ensure that our bosses would be satisfied with the project’s direction.

My Contribution: I conducted more than half of the stakeholder interviews and performed the affinity map analysis seen below.

Findings: From this research, we were able to conglomerate our stakeholders’ thoughts into affinity maps. I recommended using affinity maps because it would allow us to categorically sort similar statements and summarize the most important statements made by our colleagues while still allowing us to identify individual statements made by particular stakeholders. We would later take the results of our affinity maps to develop the artifacts we would need for our alignment meeting with those same stakeholders. This process will be discussed in the next section.

Aligning Priorities and Goals

Once we had organized and identified all our major priorities from the stakeholder interviews, we prepared to hold an alignment meeting. This meeting consisted of all the stakeholders we interviewed in addition to a number of others who did not have time to participate.

Research Goals: The primary goal of the alignment meeting was to get all the stakeholders on the same page with respect to our findings. Once they understood the project’s scope, we asked them to read through the evaluation chart (right) and asked them to vote on the most important initiatives listed. The goal of this voting was to agree upon the most critical elements of the project as a group so that we could proceed with research with the consent and understanding of our stakeholders.

My Contribution: I sat in on the meeting and voted for the most important problem spaces to evaluate.

Findings: At the end of this alignment meeting, we were able to achieve our research goals. We had isolated the most important goals and would move forward with the development of our hypotheses (described later).

Once we had completed the alignment meeting and acquired the results of the voting, the Product Discovery team met to discuss our findings. We isolated the highest voted assumptions, categorized them based on common themes, and attempted to create a hypothesis that reflected the assumptions for each category.

Research Goals: Following the recommendations of the Lean Product Playbook, we hoped that generating hypotheses would help us direct and validate the success of our research.

My Contribution: I assisted in developing our critical hypotheses.

Findings: There are no findings to report at this point, but these hypotheses would become the foundation for all future research.

A screenshot of our work in Miro to develop hypotheses based on the alignment meeting.

Based on customer behaviors stored in our databases, we were able to pull the emails of the target users we wished to identify. This survey was sent to almost 50,000 customers, and we received feedback from 600 of them.

Research Goals: This research was intended to give us information on customer perception of the Hum product, typical customer behaviors, and customer demographics. We also hoped that this research would inform our development of critical artifacts related to these target customers, such as general behavioral commonalities and personas. Finally, by asking these customers if they would be willing to participate in more research, we were accumulating a list of willing participants for future phases of work.

My Contribution: I assisted in designing the survey flow, writing survey questions, and implementing the survey in SurveyMonkey.

Findings: The findings of this research are confidential, but we achieved our goal of more completely answering our questions about who our target customers were, what portions of the consumer journey were lacking, and how we could start to think about fixing them.

An initial view of our survey flow during brainstorming.

The findings from the survey were our first major interaction with customers. The common behaviors we identified answered and validated a number of our questions in the previous hypotheses.

Research Goals: We used our new knowledge to iterate upon and improve our previous hypotheses based on our new research findings. We hoped that this process would inform our next phase of research experiments into critical areas of interest within the Hum consumer journey.

My Contribution: I assisted in iterating on our critical hypotheses.

Findings: Again, there are no findings to report from hypothesis iteration, but these hypotheses would inform all future phases of research and experimentation.

A screenshot of our work in Miro as we iterated on our first hypothesis based on the findings from our survey.

As mentioned previously, we were able to reference the survey results for participants who were interested in future research. We isolated those individuals and separated them based on their persona. Then, we invited them to participate in a one hour long in depth interview (IDI). We interviewed eight participants in total.

Research Goals: We asked our participants for the details of their respective consumer journeys from the purchase of their Hum device to current day. We probed deeper on questions related to but not inclusive of: in-store experience, installation, Hum usage, general Hum experience, perceptions of price/features/value proposition, etc. We hoped to learn the minutia of individual experiences so that we could find similarities in experiences, validate personas, and reaffirm the best areas for which to promote consumer engagement.

My Contribution: I assisted in developing the interview guide, conducted four interviews, and listened in and assisted with followup question development where needed on the other interviews.

Findings: Many of the findings for this phase of research were confidential, but we achieved our goal of validating personas and generating more complex qualitative views of our customers by persona, described below in Data Analysis.

This Data Analysis was my final research activity at Verizon Connect. Based on the previous phase of research, Stephen identified three critical persona types relevant for our purposes: Larry, Robert, and Heather. Then, we attempted to present some of our findings and potential solutions to marketing. It did not go as well as we expected. Many of the recommendations that I thought were critically important for certain points in the user journey were discredited. This moment was when I realized that we needed to change how we communicated with other teams within the organization. Instead of presenting solutions and asking for feedback, we needed to present the moments in the consumer journey we deemed as critical for promoting continued consumer engagement and ask for help generating viable solutions. Simply proposing solutions when the audience did not understand the context or importance of having solutions at certain phases of the consumer journey would hinder the effectiveness of our solution generation and collaboration overall.

Based on this realization, I asked Greg if I could work with him to generate consumer journeys for each persona based on the survey and interview findings. With his help to develop the ideal timeline for the journeys, I drew on the information from all previous research to generate a consumer journey that included: journey milestones (yellow), emotions (emojis with green sticky notes), observations and effects of milestones (red), and solution ideas (orange). Had I had more time, I would have iterated on these consumer journeys to make them more visually appealing and include more call outs to the most important areas for improvement.

My Contribution: I recommended and developed the consumer journeys for all our target personas.