Netlify acquired a company that aimed to solve the problem of developer-marketer collaboration with a no-code visual editor. We would need to understand marketers’ workflows and pain points in order to successfully integrate the product into our platform, not alienate their existing marketer customers, and continue to expand by building for and speaking to them.

There was just one problem – Netlify’s existing customers were highly technical software developers, a passionate and idiosyncratic community that we had been growing with for years. Internally, there was little expertise about the needs, attitudes, beliefs, and jobs to be done of our new audience.

It occurred to me that this was the perfect occasion for a persona study. I got buy-in from the lead PM working on unifying the platform, and we collaborated on crafting a study that would shape the vision for the project and size its potential impact.

As prep for the project, I organized and refreshed documentation on our existing developer personas, how they were created, and how they should be used. This became the internal hub for learning more about our users.

Our goals for the marketer study were:

• Tap into institutional knowledge, document hypotheses, hunches, and questions that internal leaders and future users of the persona have regarding this role.
• Understand the challenges, motivations, collaborators, and responsibilities of digital marketers.
• Understand why and when marketers collaborate with developers.

This would not only help us validate the problems we were trying to solve for marketers, but it would also result in findings we could use for internal enablement around our new users.

To accomplish these goals, we used the following methods:

• >300 Sales call recordings analyzed, to gather hypotheses about developer-marketer collaboration pain points
• 9 stakeholder 1:1 interviews to gather hypotheses, concerns, and questions
• 10 user 1:1 interviews to validate or invalidate hypotheses

The lead PM shadowed me for the study; I completed the study over three 2-week sprints. I presented the insights and recommendations to the team, including members of senior leadership. The report included each insight with supporting data and recommendations.

I also created short versions of the personas that emerged in the interviews – based on their distinct jobs to be done, I identified two personas: content marketer and digital marketer. These became vital artifacts for the cross-functional teams working to launch the new experience. PMs, designers, and marketers referenced the personas as they made creative and strategic decisions before the launch.

The product was rebranded as Netlify Create, and you can see the landing page describing the challenges faced by marketers, and communicating the value prop of the feature. This positioning was directly drawn from this research.