NZTE
Customer Needs Discovery Research
Uncovering invisible workflow gaps and reframing product priorities through discovery
Role
Product Research & Strategy
Overview
Business context
NZTE aims to leverage customer data for better decision-making, but lacks visibility into how customer needs were being captured across the global team.
With inconsistent practices between regions and roles, the organisation cannot effectively harness valuable customer insights hidden in their existing data.
Project context
I was brought into this project to investigate and document the various formats used by OGT to capture customer needs, understand the reasons behind these practices, and identify whether a consistent, actionable format could be established to enable data-driven insights.
Where it began and where it landed
Outputs
- Formalised initial product assumptions into a research plan with artefacts including a discussion guide, participant tracker, and a collaborative planning workshop.
- Co-facilitated 9 generative user interviews with Customer Managers across 6 regions and 4 sectors.
- Synthesised and analysed insights, delivering a clear visualisation of how customer needs were currently documented relative to the existing Customer Way business framework.
- Created digestible insight summaries and current-state maps for internal product and leadership stakeholders.
Key journey mapping asset consolidating research insights
Impact
Prevented premature investment
- This work provided evidence-based insights that led the Product team to pause and reconsider their initial project direction. It prevented premature investment in changes to the existing CRM structure and avoided introducing new asks or processes to internal teams that wouldn’t align with their day-to-day workflows.
- Beyond addressing the immediate brief, the research surfaced broader operational inconsistencies (such as how market maturity tags were applied) highlighting opportunities for more cohesive, scalable data practices across the organisation.
Evidence-led path for future discovery and improvements
- While this discovery phase didn’t result in an immediate solution, it unlocked a clearer, evidence-led path for future discovery and operational improvements.
- Specifically, this research unlocked foundational insights that informed NZTE’s first AI literacy initiative, sparked a parallel discovery stream into CRM market maturity tags and identified a medium-effort product opportunity to embed customer needs data into existing KPI-linked workflows.
From insights to quick wins, spikes and further discovery
Reflections
Looking back, two lasting insights from this project continue to shape how I approach research, partnership and impact in product design:
Research should challenge, not just confirm
Surfacing contradictory insights with tact prevented wasted effort and revealed higher-value opportunities.
Strategic partnership multiplies impact
Close collaboration with the lead PM turned delivery into co-strategy, enabling the project to progress beyond its original scope.
