Building a customer insights operations from the ground up for a portfolio of products with many simultaneous projects mid-stream. Bringing full scope insights to roadmaps and projection forecasting.
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Overall:
This newly formalized customer insights program meant including customers in the process of product enhancements – while keeping the entire org aware of our communications, clear methods for increasing and maintaining the pool of participants, as well as lowered risk and unknowns about all future development time-spend.
When I joined Lenovo’s Software division, the team served thousands of schools, millions of students, and more – spanning K-12 education, Higher Ed, and SMB markets. The product portfolio included 2 classroom lesson orchestration products, a higher-education Single Sign-On and Remote Access portal, a SMB tech stack access, collaboration, training, and subscription management tool, a VR product launcher for classrooms, and internal tooling — each with its own user base, pain points, and business stakeholders.
There was no formal customer insights program.
What existed was a single point of contact — a salesperson retained on staff — who conducted all research by reaching out to the same small group of long-standing customer relationships, plus our customer success team. Leadership relied on this input, along with anecdotal feedback from sales conversations, to make roadmap decisions. The result was a biased, incomplete picture of the customer experience. The same voices were heard repeatedly, while the vast majority of our users had no channel to surface their needs.
I designed an in-product recruitment strategy using Pendo’s targeting capabilities. Rather than reaching out to the usual contacts, we identified users who engaged with our products frequently and surfaced a prompt — placed at strategic moments in the product experience — inviting them to join a customer Insiders program.
The response was significant. We built a diverse panel of engaged users across school districts, higher education institutions, and SMB organizations — people who were actively using the product daily and had real insight into what worked and what didn’t.
I hired a dedicated researcher whose primary strength was customer research (she designed as well, yet research was her core focus). Together, we created structured spreadsheets of our panelists, established a coordination process with Salesforce so that Sales and Customer Success had visibility into when and why we were contacting customers, and began running qualitative research interviews that included prototype testing for specific product gaps.
I personally owned the Pendo implementation — not just the strategy, but the execution. I oversaw the tagging strategy across our products, often doing the tagging work myself to ensure we had clean, reliable data flowing into our dashboards.
Each month, I produced an insight deck for business leaders. This involved cleaning and consolidating the raw data, exporting it into spreadsheets for analysis, and building a PowerPoint presentation that translated behavioral patterns into strategic implications.
What emerged was fascinating: clear fluctuations in user behavior by time of day, day of week, and time of year. For the first time, we could see how teachers interacted with our products differently during the school year versus summer break, how usage patterns shifted on Mondays versus Fridays, and which features saw spikes during specific academic cycles.
This was the foundation that shifted our roadmap process from gut-feel to evidence-based prioritization.
The organization had product health data scattered across fundamentally different systems — server performance data from Datadog, SQL query-based reporting from our licensing databases, and behavioral analytics from Pendo. None of these talked to each other, and leadership had no unified view of what was happening across the product portfolio.
I created a unification strategy to bring these sources together. This started with card sorting exercises to develop a shared taxonomy and logic model — a common language that could bridge server data, licensing data, and user behavior data into something coherent.
From there, I designed wireframes for a new dashboard system that went beyond static reports. The interaction patterns I designed enabled business leaders to build their own custom dashboards — pulling in specific, specialized data components and applying filters aligned with their individual needs. Rather than waiting for someone to prepare a report, leadership could self-serve the exact view they needed, when they needed it.
I evangelized the idea that Customer Success should not be passive recipients of product changes — they should be active participants in the customer experience. I pushed for and operationalized a Pendo adoption program where I trained Customer Success team members to create in-product walkthrough guides themselves, targeting the most frequently reported support issues.
This meant the people closest to customer pain were empowered to address those pain points directly, at the moment of need, inside the product.
