The problem

TrilineGRC (now Drova) was receiving increasing amounts of negative feedback from customers, lacked a product roadmap and was reactively allocating limited engineering resources to retain its long-time and highest paying customers.

At core, the problem stemmed from customer feedback living across Google Docs, emails, or in people's heads; making it impossible our team to help identify key features or problems to fix.

To address this problem, our team and I interviewed 10 long-term TrilineGRC customers to identify the biggest, common pain points in TrilineGRC and help provide guidance on feature development.

Customer discovery and roadmap guidance for TrilineGRC

March 2024 - April 2024

Outcome

This research project helped TrilineGRC kickstart their roadmap planning and also helped with achieve 3 key outcomes:

  1. Identified 6 themes of pain points that strongly affected customers. The top issues—Reporting, Security, and Friction—were found to be interconnected, highlighting opportunities for broader improvements through targeted fixes.

  2. Resolved 6 customer-reported bugs from the interviews: These included login errors and broken report exports. We closed the loop with affected customers, improving relationships and reduced churn risk.

  3. Rebuilt customer trust: Several customers proactively re-engaged after interviews. The findings were also used by our co-founder in follow-up conversations with high-value accounts.

My research process

To guide TrilineGRC’s product direction, I conducted interviews with the 2 primary users and personas of the product, Risk and Compliance Managers and Chief Risk Officers (CROs).

These are the key people in most organisations who manage Governance, Risk and Compliance matters in an organisation and rely on TrilineGRC to get their jobs done.

Our hypothesis was that if we uncovered and synthesised these 2 persona’s core pain points, we would have enough information to inform and guide TrilineGRC’s roadmap.

1. Planning and brief preparation

I worked closely with the Chief Design Officer to define the research brief and co-developed the recruitment messaging, interview script, and session agenda to ensure alignment with business goals.

2. Participant recruitment and interviews

I emailed 48 CROs and Risk and Compliance Managers from a curated shortlist over one week and recruited participants through direct outreach and internal referrals.

Over 3 weeks, I conducted interviews with 10 customers from 7 organisations—2 based in the UK and 5 in Australia. I led and moderated all interviews over the course of a month.

3. Synthesis of learnings

Summarised individual customer notes in Confluence and analysed the feedback. I identified common themes in each interview and then further synthesised it by quantifying how impactful it was on the customer and how often it was raised by customers.

My findings were then consolidated into one report on Confluence.

4. Sharing insights and knowledge

I presented my findings to both the Engineering and Go-To-Market (GTM) teams to ensure cross-functional visibility and alignment. The insights were used to rebuild and rekindle customer relationships to reduce churn AND it was used to begin discussions on what are the key roadmap items for TrilineGRC.