Product research, direction, testing, and customer development

I collaborated with the team at Pavelka as they worked on their vision to create a stickier, subscription-based service, that could sustainably scale across companies, while increasing engagement.

Pavelka’s vision is to light up the world with wellbeing through a framework of four elements they had established to bring wellbeing into your life. Given how much time we spend at work, the focus is on working with companies to implement and improve wellbeing practices and culture for leadership and their teams.

To protect company confidentiality, specific numbers or insights have been obscured, altered or use placeholders where appropriate, unless the number is specified to highlight a change as a result of the work or a public stat. Projects like this are always interesting because there is often a misalignment of needs and desires between the user and the economic buyer, while both are an end-beneficiary. I enjoy trying to reconcile this!

2024 Project

The scope

A two-phase project with Orbit29 to research the leader landscape, understand business desire to solve, form, choose, and align on a product direction, and support quicker testing and development processes.

My role

Working as a product researcher, strategist and designer, to understand the problems, develop a product direction, align the team on the solution, and support client-base sales growth.

Audience

Medium sized businesses primarily in five industries, through to large departments within enterprise organizations, with a particular focus on leaders, team managers, and economic buyers.

Bigger picture

Targeting leaders to create healthy teams and cultures through wellbeing, that cascade through workplaces, communities, and families.

An image showing a screen design of the app, a service, an event, a module and integration with Microsoft Teams, Slack, and Google workspace.

Quickly designing the potential workspaces, content, and integrations to help the team visualize the direction.

Market research and competitor analysis

While I chatted with the team to understand the progress of Pavelka, what was working, and what was challenging, my fellow Orbit29 colleague did fantastic work pulling all the industry competitors together and creating numerous key outputs for research. I reviewed the current positioning and ecosystem, and then dove into a few key activities to pull out what components, delivery, and theme clusters were common. I identified what we needed specific research to uncover and drove a number of small activities for the Pavelka team to start working out various ideas and misalignment.

Five research goals of those created shown such as who is the key economic buyer and who is ready to jump ship, alongside a positioning activity and project management screenshot for the project

Implementing research goals, positioning activities and project management

An image broken into a quad with the top left for Community examples within corporate wellbeing, the top right for coaching and mentoring, the bottom right for training and development and the bottom left for live events and workshops offered.

Reviewing the landscape and identifying key components

Developing interview frameworks, survey design, and research recruitment plans

To kick-off the research I created a recruitment plan, developed the templates for outreach, created the interview guides and goals, and managed the participant scheduling, interviews, and follow-ups. Pavelka was also going to be sending out a survey so I designed that up to ensure we created non-biased answers, had a broader reach, and asked questions that would impact the product direction rather than what was already known from client experience.

Managerial context: As Pavelka was focused on US and UK markets, I analyzed government data and industry reports to align on manager demographics. This supported a sustainable product direction and provided context for our recruitment and research needs. In order for change to happen we need to understand how current buyers see the problems and would implement solutions. At the same time there is an increasing presence of women in managerial positions, and workplace changes as younger generations start junior roles and move into management. Women are more represented in leadership within industries such as education, care, human resources, and marketing, while male-dominated sectors like tech, engineering, and logistics continue to have predominantly male managers. Executive roles and board positions across most industries remain largely male, and in the US, these roles are primarily held by white men.

This image shows 7 boxes, all white with a black border. The boxes are representing the interview guide, interview goals, survey goals, participant management, recruitment email templates, recruitment plan, and survey email templates.

Running interviews and developing resulting research findings and next steps

I held the interview session with managers, leaders, and executives. From all these sessions I pulled together a significant number of insights, categorized by primary product drivers, secondary possibilities, and other considerations. I combined this with academic literature and the numerous workplace reports that exist as we wanted to leverage these insights (accounting for bias where needed). Pavelka digested these and we had a great follow-up session to run through all the questions and bounce ideas and actions.

Knowing what to do was largely not the problem; working out how to do it within roles that demanded a lot from them was difficult. Half of the participants expressed not putting enough guardrails in place for preventing wellbeing issues, while others expressed that it would be (or that it was) a health issue that would push them to prioritize their own wellbeing.

An image with a small screenshot from one of the research questions answered surrounded by post-it notes of wellbeing habits and needs.

Academic and workplace report research snippets and articles highlighted.

A screenshot from one of the survey questions and the corresponding answers.

A solid purple background shows two large screenshots from the research synthesis with most of the text blurred, and screenshots from statistics and analytical research.

A few foundational findings

Nearly all managers practiced at least one form of wellbeing; often related to boundary setting, sleep, physical exercise, or nutrition.
A lot of people tend to think of "perks" when they think of wellbeing at work such as gym offers, health insurance, and yoga.
Learning and development budgets tend to be common and of similar value across companies of all sizes, wellbeing budgets are more ambiguious, vastly more dispersed (if they exist) and regularly change where they sit within a company.
Managers were not specifically measured on the wellbeing of their team and there was a general consensus that “bad” managers would be quickly weeded out due to retention, recruitment or HR issues.
Numerous managers directly or indirectly acknowledged that somebody’s wellbeing may not be in alignment with being at that company, or in that role. This was particularly pronounced in sales and recruiting roles, startups, and consulting institutes.
How managers practically support team members with wellbeing is largely similar and could be clustered into four strategies.
The middle-management sandwich is a real squeeze with few current solutions. There was a consistent sentiment that you arrive at the weekend exhausted or find it hard to switch off after-hours.
Women managers are often managing teams at work, and then a household or extended family outside of work. They often feel they’re a manager in both lives. Structural changes are required.
Financial wellbeing was raised on numerous ocassions. There are differences also between the two region in respect to sub-components of this such as health insurance and salaries.
Women managers experience peri-menopause and menopause that can last 3 - 15 years. Women are, largely for the first time in history, aging into managerial and executive positions making this a new topic in the workplace.

I have significant deeper findings, data insights, and ideas. Please contact me to discuss.

I also pulled at numerous other threads that were raised including productivity, grief, remote working, generational differences, toxic positivity, gratitude and mindfulness, mental health, customer wellbeing, disconnection, loss of hobbies, communication amongst men, cultural differences, and retribution.

Try for yourself: What does wellbeing mean to you? I asked this of each participant and ended up with a variety of answers and cluster-types.

Workshop ideation quick quick rapid

With significant research pointing to numerous directions and a few key decisions to make, one of the Orbit29 co-founders developed the problem statements while I crafted the workshop session and activities around this. We facilitated the session at our offices in London and had a fantastic day with the team, ending with rapid prototyping of two ideas.

Photo from a table during the workshop with papers and post-its and drafts of one of the activities.

Screenshot snapshot of the summary from the workshop delivered to the client afterwards.

Photo from one of the hung up butchers papers with colorful post-its and sharpie circles around some of them denoting clusters

Screenshot snapshot of the summary from the workshop delivered to the client afterwards, this time of the prototyping activity.

Photo of some of the workshop participants working around the table.

Ideation from research and helping Pavelka move forward

Given all the insights and activities, I had developed numerous potential product propositions. In conjunction with the workshop outcomes (so as not to bias this work), these formed the review for testing of messaging and product direction, with guidance and opportunity scoring provided.

When they’re at work I want them to be focused and working hard, but away from work I want them to switch off and enjoy their personal life because that’s how I want to live.

Screenshot of three sections (cut off) from the ideation page with much of the text blurred for confitdentiality.

Paving the way with rapid tests

Having landed on a few product directions that aligned with the business goals, customer problems, vision, and revenue requirements, we wanted to rapidly test these to support sales and marketing with positioning and messaging, and the product team with focus. I developed the testing plans, content, and assets, and we supported Pavelka with their implementation.

Showing some of the ads used in Linkedin testing.

An image with multiple shots including mentoring, wellbeing topics, actions, book club and photos.

What do you want to work on as a company? What do you believe in?

With so many internal ideas and industry problem areas, we had narrowed down a few primary, sustainable pathways that would work for the larger vision, leveraging team knowledge and expertising, and providing a clear path to revenue. The final step was therefore taking everything we had learned and helping Pavelka make the decision on what to move forward with while derisking this as much as possible. Given Pavelka's strong human element, a unique advantage, we wanted to make sure to incorporate this, sustainably. I worked on a async approach giving the team quick activities in succession based on the results of the previous to land on the answer, and create the base of what and how this would practically exist, as it would be all hands-on-deck for the product push. There were also a few ideas floating around that needed support in whether they should exist. These activities helped remove or refine a lot of these, and created more focus.

I could now articulate what the problem being solved was and there was agreement across the company. What was needed next was how that actually looked as it still felt very vague. In order to address this, I created a direction page that clarified each part of the initial product and collaborated significantly with Pavelka to visualize it and ensure everyone was on the same page. We could then work backwards to derisk the MVP and make it a low-cost entry to test the markets, and willingness to pay.

Creating what the product is with a clear direction

An image show a problem statement example reworked and a playground of outlining what concepts might be included in the apps.

An image with a solid light purple background on the left showing a framework of some of the product direction questions we answered, and on the right an example from the page itself of how these were answered.

What does this look like? What are we doing?

Concepts can still remain vague until people outside of product actually see what they might be, and can start preparing their own roles and departments for the changes and conversations. As a large part of this also required building workspaces within core work apps such as Teams, or Slack, and human-led services (such as virtual support, workshops, calls, and events), alongside resource building. I worked to visualize a few sketches and designs with the team.

A solid light orange background shows very quick wireframe sketches for the workspace app.

A solid bright darker orange background shows two screens designed, one focused on a web-app and the other on a workplace app integration (Microsoft Teams).

Customer development and selling

For any founder or startup, customer development can feel daunting but we needed Pavelka to take all the theoretical pieces and start testing the product direction and building warm leads that they could later convert into product sales; from current clients and connections, to new cold leads and industries. We had a price check built-in and wanted to cold-review willingness to pay to solve the problem. We also wanted to quickly learn the objections in order to support product or service changes and sales conversations, and the must-haves that companies required before considering a trial.

An image with a solid dark navy background shows a few snippets of this work such as a pitch test, human insights, willingness, and engagement - all measures of the test.

Lastly, we wanted to ensure the team did not spend time or money where it wasn't needed, and didn't start with custom development work until a few paying clients were onboard. We developed a plan for outreach, a pitch deck to guide the conversations, build leads, and held a training session on this.

Some shots from the pitch deck for the target product. With an investment round on the table, the guide would also form the product basis.

Developing buyer and user personas

There was a confusing number of personas that could be targeted in this space and Pavelka wanted to focus on a few key ones so I developed two core personas concentrating on helping team members identify these people, their primary concerns and how to target them, and a list of buying triggers to message toward. Over time the buying triggers were designed to be reviewed so they could be narrowed to the best-aligned scenarios for Pavelka.

The persona of executive buyer is shown with much of the text blurred.

Content framework for learning

I developed a final activity session to help the team figure out what they need to develop content for, starting small with quality work to use with the first number of clients, and building out once feedback and data came through and clients progressed on their journey. As Pavelka already had a great range of existing content from incredible enterprise client work, we worked on using and repurposing much of this too. By creating pillars and packages, we priortized each piece together and which items would be avoided for launch in order to simplify and spend resources appropriately.

A pale yellow solid background shows post-its of various types of content ideas, followed by an example of pillar packages, runs of play, what kind of content is high prioritization and which is lower.

Key messaging

With all the research insights and discussions together, I was able to create key messaging that sales, marketing, product, and execs, could use for positioning and sales conversations.

A screenshot from the key messages page with much of the text blurred for confidentiality purposes. It shows the boxes for painpoints to hit in messaging, tone to achieve, keywords, and key thoughts. Also shown are other examples of key messages used by players in the corporate wellbeing space.

MVP tech stack

Pavelka had their own build team but needed some support in working out what to build exactly. We encouraged them to start small and they created a fantastic human-led service concept that could be used with potential leads. Next up was the first iteration of what would be needed within medium and larger businesses so I walked the team through a framework to get internal alignment and start a short-term roadmap. Finally, we outlined numerous options for how the low-code tech stack might be approached.

A white image with various sections using post-its to show examples of the activity to of what features were in potential play, which are must-haves, which are nice-to-haves, and which should be discarded along with a low-code tech stack example option.

Pricing positioning and strategy

To wrap up, we provided guidance on pricing, acknowledging the variability in the market, which can feel overwhelming. The key is to start somewhere without committing to long contracts at unsustainable prices. I worked on market research and outlined pricing strategies and tests, along with a suggested per-user price and measuring ROI.

We also developed a plan to quickly interpret and act on key insights, emphasizing the importance of tracking sales wins and losses - something often overlooked from the start. Try for yourself:

What are people signing up for?
What do they expect (later: did it/we meet these expectations?)
What was expressed on the pricing?
What was the reason for churn? [or] What was the reason for not signing up?

For Pavelka, pricing isn't necessarily the biggest obstacle. Ultimately the ideal customers will either buy the service, purchase a competitor product, or not buy anything. In order to buy:

Customers caring about this (economic buyers willing to pay money to solve this)
Customers understanding they have a problem (economic buyers looking for a solution)
Customers valuing wellbeing as a solution
Customers recognizing wellbeing is an answer for their solution
Managers and executives influencing economic buyers and key decision makers

Try for yourself: What are the primary external and internal your product, service, or behavioral change is competing with? That wrapped up my time with Pavelka and this wonderful team of smart humans who care a whole lot. Having a glimpse of the next steps, I can't wait to see how it grows!

An image on the pricing work showing hypotheses of value, win/loss data, and metrics to measure for personas.

An image on the pricing work showing different competitors and their pricing models and ROI.

An image on the pricing work showing different pricing models and strategy.