Day in the life: Developer
The TL/DR:
I led user research project to understand the interactions between development and other departments of organizations, attempting to uncover shared workflows and key pain points. Through this research, I proposed a new targeted solution that was integrated into the Tidelift browser extension. We then connected with organizations and customers to share the new experience, which yielded positive reception, both from current customers, and prospects.
Introduction
Upon listening to sales cycles that did not make it through to procurement, I noticed a common theme: Tidelift was able to prove our value to our intended personas of software developers and Engineering managers, however, the financial decision makers, were not always as convinced of our value, as we (in the eyes of some) "Only aided the software development team." As a result of this, there were times where our value was questioned by other departments of organizations, to which we could not visually show positive impact to other sectors of a given organization. Upon discovering this, I led a research project, to learn more about the different persona’s that software developers work with, and impact, to design potential solutions that could positively increase Tidelift's overall impact.
Over the course of a little over a month, I interviewed users, synthesized research, and designed a new feature within our Tidelift browser extension™ that allowed us to better display, how our software, can reduce time spent researching, remove barriers to software approval, and secure the health and security of their software, not only for engineers, but for other departments who depend on their software’s security.
Discovery
First, I reviewed our existing research from the creation of the Tidelift browser extension, as that would greatly help inform the user journeys that I currently understood to exist. In addition, I reviewed the secondary information that our sales team could provide me, via anecdotal information, interviewing stakeholders who are key parts of the sales cycle, and listening to calls, recorded via Gong, that transcribes calls and helps categorize themes. All of these individual elements of research provided key information on who our stakeholders speak with in a typical sales cycle, outside of developers, who makes the decisions for purchasing, and where stakeholders were having the most difficulty proving Tidelift’s value.
In addition to this research, I sent out an informal survey, via google forms, to our partnered open source maintainer community. This community consists of hundreds of software engineers, who have day-to-day job experience as software developers. This data would help to inform my understanding of the developer experience, and continue to validate the different users and role titles that are impacted by development. This data would influence which users I should be aiming to interview, and what questions I need to ask to better understand the users pain points.
Following this data synthesis, I began a user research study plan to begin screening, recruiting, and interviewing users of different roles within various organizations and ecosystems. Using UserTesting, I was able to fine-tune my criteria, screen potential participants with some example questions, and structure my research project questions to get to the heart of user pain points and where Tidelift can increase our value.
Research process overview
Overview of the research process I followed for this project. (2024)
Throughout this study, I managed the end-to-end research process and data collection/analysis. I conducted a total of 12 in-depth interviews with users from Legal departments, IT departments, and even C-suite executives within the tech sector in domains such as government, education, and finance. Once the interviews were completed, I owned the data analysis and used affinity mapping techniques to uncover key data points that had commonly been referenced in the data gathering phase, as well as a shared pain point: Time spent doing research for approval purposes.
Based on the affinity map trends, I did a comparative analysis between the key data points that these different groups specifically are responsible for, and where, if anywhere, our software capabilities were able to provide this data.
Comparative chart of the various data points that are important to users and where, if anywhere, they can be found in our product suite.
While some of the data points, are not able to be provided to users, by us or any of our competitors due to the nature of the data points being immeasurable, there were quite a few that existed within the browser extension already. With this in mind, I recommended a solution for positively impacting various users: the ability to download a PDF document that contains all of the data that we currently can provide users, while also making it easily accessible, via the browser extension.
The reason that this was the solution I presented was because the browser extension can integrate into web browsers, already works within the research being conducted, whether by a developer or another user, and shortens the time that it takes a user to culminate the information before a user has to reach out for software approval. My proposed solution to stakeholders, showcased a simple document (designed using Google suite) that included all of the useful data that we can provide users, and how it could be formatted to provide necessary documentation and include Tidelift's unique value.
The discovery research and presentation conducted throughout this project led to the additional software offering of creating PDF documents for software packages, both new and current. These PDF documents currently exist and can be downloaded and shared with any whom require it. We conducted usability testing with prospects, where we presented documentation of software packages to prospects that we were in conversations with at various stages, to ensure we were on target with user needs, goals, and were actively addressing the identified pain points.
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An example of the new downloadable PDF document, that can be accessed from Tidelift's browser extension.
Takeaways
We shipped this feature towards the end of November 2024 and we have begun socializing this with our broader customer-base, much to positive reception. In addition, we decided to incorporate this feature into our freemium version of the browser extension, with some limitations, to both allow for more users of the extension, as well as increase our reach to potential prospects and customers, who may not already be familiar with Tidelift.
The jury is still out as to whether this has a significant impact in closed sales, but in terms of market outreach and sales interest, we have absolutely hit the mark. This new capability helps us tell the story of Tidelift's ability to reduce time spent researching new software, removing barriers to software adoption, and securing the health and safety of their software, not just for engineers, but for other departments as well.