One of the highlights of my time at Procore was the chance to conduct on-site qualitative research interviews in 7 target countries. All interviews were recorded and assessed comparatively according to a rigorously vetted Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) framework.
This project was a collaboration between UX Research and Procore’s Corporate Strategy team, with additional support from Sales and Customer success. Top executives saw the effort as a vital piece of Procore’s ability to unlock new TAM, and the project was given considerable priority and budget.
I co-led efforts in:
Canada
The UK (England and Northern Ireland)
Ireland
I led cross-disciplinary teams and was primarily responsible for producing reports in:
Mexico
Spain
Germany
France
This included conducting interviews in Spanish, French, and (some) German.
Results
Our findings were presented in reports to C-level executives, which led to establishing internationalization OKRs with Product, Sales, and Customer Success leaders to make sure the organization was prepared for next steps.
Product teams from across the organization prioritized features vital for increased presence in ANZ, the EU, the UK, LatAm, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and UAE.
Procore continues to build its international presence based on these recommendations, and recently launched in France. A full German launch is soon to follow.
The Process in Detail
I always prefer to show rather than tell, but I was unable to take any of the final country reports with me upon leaving Procore. This section will read more like a blog post about the methodologies and output of the project.
A note on recruitment: Recruitment was largely done in partnership with GLG, a global research organization. Additionally, some recruits were existing customers in countries with limited Procore adoption.
Team
Zach Buchman (Senior UX Researcher - Project Lead); Ryan Butler (Director, Corporate Strategy - Project Lead); Sophia Nitti (UX Researcher); Jose Vega (Sales Engineer, LATAM); Bryan McCarthy (Sales Engineer); Raquel Casares Villaverde (Sales Engineer, Canada); Luisa Goytia (Product Manager); Brendan Gillies (Sales Engineer, Canada); Gerardo Perez (Senior Enterprise Customer Success, EMEA); Alexandre Teplitxki (Sr. Product Marketing Manager, International)
Research Questions
How prepared is Procore to launch its product internationally given cultural and procedural differences in global construction practices?
What (if any) high impact changes to Procore’s product should be prioritized to create better international product-market fit?
Which countries should be prioritized for new market entry given market size, product fit, and competition?
Methods and Rationale
Independent Secondary Research: This is almost too basic to mention, but significant effort went into online research to “get smart fast” about each country’s construction industry, size, practices, and competitive landscape.
Surveys: For each country, a survey of construction pros was sent to an average of 100 construction professionals across emerging, mid-market, and enterprise segments (Qualtrics).
I find surveys to be poor, overused qualitative tools, which is why the goal here was to establish hard facts: most used construction management software, and annual software spend. This information gave us a sense of the broad construction software context in each country before we arrived, and allowed us to check our assumptions and secondary research findings.
Expert Interviews: For each country, we conducted informal phone interviews with construction executives across segments.
These conversations were meant to give us an overall view of software adoption and construction needs. I would categorize this more as an extension of our secondary research.
Recruiting was outsourced to GLG.
Group Journey Mapping (see header image): In in-person meetings consisting of 2-10 research participants, we had each person in the room write down steps in the process for the last major project they worked on on post-its. We then had them place the post-its on a timeline, instructing them to put things that work well higher up, and painful steps lower down. We then had each participant present, and laddered on certain points based on our research goals and past learnings. All sessions were recorded.
This is the method I’ve come to appreciate and use more than any other in the research toolkit. Particularly for construction, processes are highly complex and vary tremendously based on roles and company size/domain. Nothing gets you an end-to-end understanding of processes and pain points better than this method.
Group journey mapping is not perfect from a pure research standpoint, but I would argue that it is an excellent choice for a method that can travel easily, adapt to any role at any company, and accommodate any number of research participants (we never knew who/how many would show up - the reality is that these factors were beyond our control in this case). In short, it was extremely flexible, and got us tons of great data while minimizing the risk of groupthink inherent to many “focus group” methods.
Analysis
Key to the impact of this project was our method of creating “country reports” to sum up our research findings. These reports were first vetted internally by top executives following pilot trips to Australia, Canada, and the UK/Ireland (countries where Procore had a significant presence already). With their approval, we moved on to creating these reports for each candidate country.
Here’s the top-line stuff people paid attention to:
A few highlights here.
At the top-left is a red-yellow-green breakdown of product-market fit among company size/type (y-axis) and construction type (x-axis). This works as a general gauge of product readiness, as well as an indication of where the sales team should focus upon initial launch.
Next to that is a written summary covering overall entry analysis, segment analysis, and primary tool fit gaps. Below are links to detailed analyses based on “tool fit” (every PM immediately went to check how their tools rated), individual scores for each company interviewed, and scoring based on our JTBD framework (more on that in a second).
Below that is the competitive landscape breakdown by segment and project phase based on survey results.
Not pictured is an automatically generated chart showing fit in comparison to estimated TAM for each segment.
Then the detailed stuff:
The backbone of the study was our Jobs-To-Be-Done framework, a highly vetted list of JTBD across all phases of construction broken down by organizational responsibility (Owners, Architects, General Contractors, and Subcontractors all figure in). While I wish to focus more on the process following the establishment of this JTBD framework, this generic list of vital construction tasks was created through crowdsourcing and interviews with internal construction pros.
How we used this:
Following each interview, each member of the team graded each JTBD in two categories on a 1-5 scale.
The first category was a similarity score, as in: “How similar are the details of this JTBD compared to construction in the US?”
The second category was an importance score, as in: “How vital is finding a better solution to the challenges associated with this JTBD?”
Scores were subjective (this is still qualitative, even with numbers attached), and team members with greater construction expertise were given greater sway, particularly over similarity scores. Most scores represented the average consensus of each country team.
Often, we could not cover every JTBD in each interview. JTBDs that were not covered adequately were marked as such, and the team specifically inquired about them in expert interviews that followed. Interviews were meant to cover what was top of mind for potential users in each country – confining our questioning to specific JTBDs would have been leading the witness.
Results
The reach of these country reports was widespread, and their impact is still being felt within the company.
Country reports were distributed across R&D for PM evaluation
C-suite executives were briefed on all country reports and received copies
Insights were used to enhance fit in ANZ, Canada, Mexico, and UKI through direct product changes
The reports helped the company determine their next internationalization targets: France and Germany (I was the lead on both of those efforts)