Dollars to Donuts

Today’s guest is Alex Wright, who is the director of research at Etsy. We discuss the partnership between qualitative and quantitative research at Etsy and how his background in journalism helps him with the storytelling aspects of managing the research function.

Etsy’s not just in the business of trying to generate maximal profits every quarter. Yes, we’d like to be profitable, but we also want to serve the community of sellers; we want to be environmentally responsible; we want to support the local community. – Alex Wright

Show Links

* Alex Wright

* Follow Alex on Twitter

* Cataloging the World – Alex Wright

* Etsy

* Rob Kalin

* Jill Fruchter

* Roxie Karpen

* DoubleClick

Follow Dollars to Donuts on Twitter (and Stitcher) and show us some love by leaving a review on iTunes.

Transcript

Steve Portigal: Alex, thanks very much for being with us. I appreciate you taking the time to talk to us today.

Alex Wright: Hi, Steve. Thanks for having me.

Steve: Let’s just start very broadly as we do, and have you tell us about Etsy and what’s your role there, and what that’s about.

Alex: Sure. I started at Etsy about a year and a half ago. I was the first full time researcher hired at Etsy. Not that Etsy had never done any research before, but typically that it involved consultants or contractors or we had a product manager, at one point, who had previously been a researcher. There was some level of research going on.

The company made a decision that they wanted to put more of a focused effort around doing, especially UX research. I think there was a feeling that Etsy had gotten very good at experimentation and A/B testing and had a pretty well-developed approach to data analytics and experimentation. I think that there was a feeling that there was something missing and they wanted to create more space for qualitative research. I came in as a lone wolf researcher [laughs] about a year and a half ago. In the period since then, we’ve been able to grow the team. We’re now about a 10 person research team doing a combination of both UX research and market research, as well as some market trends analysis. We’re a hybrid team. Etsy is very product-oriented culture, so we tend to strongly emphasize UX research. We are now starting to do more marketing and trying to figure out how we can support that more effectively by doing more market research kind of stuff, too.

Steve: Before I ask you about that, maybe you could explain what Etsy is, in case anybody, somehow, doesn’t know.

Alex: Sure. Etsy is a marketplace for handmade and vintage products. It’s been around for almost 10 years now. We are now a marketplace with over a million sellers. In 2013, over a billion dollars’ worth of products flowed through the marketplace.

Our business is fairly straightforward. It’s a marketplace, we take a small commission on products that are sold on the site. Then we have a few other revenue streams like we have some promoted listi...

The post 2. Alex Wright of Etsy first appeared on Portigal Consulting.

Welcome to the debut episode of Dollars to Donuts. Today's guest is Gregg Bernstein, who manages customer research at MailChimp. We discuss how MailChimp uses research to uncover new product opportunities, how the right research artifacts can best provide value to different internal audiences and how humility is an essential soft skill for successful researchers.

Welcome to the debut episode of Dollars to Donuts. Today’s guest is Gregg Bernstein, who manages customer research at MailChimp. We discuss how MailChimp uses research to uncover new product opportunities, how the right research artifacts can best provide value to different internal audiences and how humility is an essential soft skill for successful researchers.

We research people and we try to better understand what would make them happy, what would fit into their lifestyle, what would fit into their day-to-day. We don’t go out with an idea for a product in mind. – Gregg Bernstein

Show Links

* Gregg Bernstein

* Follow Gregg on Twitter

* MailChimp

* Evernote

* Laurissa Wolfram-Hvass

* Stephanie Troeth

* Aarron Walter

* MailChimp Snap

* Square

* Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks by Luke Wroblewski

* Jenn Downs

* Urie Bronfenbrenner – Ecological Systems Theory

* The Big Web Show

* Jeffery Zeldman

* useronboard.com

* MailChimp UX Newsletter

Follow Dollars to Donuts on Twitter (and Stitcher) and show us some love by leaving a review on iTunes.

Transcript

Steve Portigal: Thanks Gregg for being part of this. Let’s start by having you describe a little bit about your company. What does MailChimp do? What do you do there?

Gregg Bernstein: I work at MailChimp and we primarily sponsor podcasts, but there’s also a business model behind it.

We make software to make and send email newsletters. That’s the primary business right there. What I do at MailChimp is manage the customer research team. That’s another way of saying “the qualitative researchers.”

Steve: When you put the word “qualitative,” it makes me think there are other people that are involved with other types of data. Is that correct?

Gregg: We work hand-in-hand with a quantitative research team, a group of data scientists. Together, we’re like Reese’s Pieces of research. We have the chocolaty goodness and the peanut butter, the quantitative and the qualitative. Together, we get a better picture of who our customers are, and what they’re trying to do with our software.

Steve: I think the Reese’s Pieces qual/quant metaphor is something that should go viral. I hope it does.

Gregg: I’m sure it’s unoriginal. It was probably said by somebody much smarter and much more original. If you want to give me credit, that’s fine.

Steve: I’m going to attribute it to you, because I think “Reese’s Pieces...

The post 1. Gregg Bernstein of MailChimp first appeared on Portigal Consulting.