LinkedIn

Business Challenge 

Solution

Today the insight and product marketing teams work in lockstep with the rest of the organization to build the right products and ensure the right product-market fit.

Insight communities at LinkedIn have evolved from one small community in 2016 to eight in 2018 which support their growth engine across four categories: hiring, sales and marketing, premium as well as their expansion into global markets.

To scale the almost daily activities and needs of the large product organization, including product marketing, product management, engineering and UX, the research team operates as subject matter experts and have revolutionized the research process. They prioritize the work, ensure the right questions get asked of the right audience and nurture members with a positive, engaging experience because they see feedback as an important piece in a member’s journey with the brand. To put product marketing team even closer to the member’s voice they thirst for, the product marketers do their own analysis, digging into open-ended responses, moderating discussions and drawing their own conclusions. The research team reviews reports to ensure the analysis is sound.

The team also operate an internal wiki for community best practices, use cases and prior studies. And they maintain templates for questions and types of studies they run frequently so they don’t have to reinvent the wheel each time they start a project.

When it was time to revamp LinkedIn’s desktop experience for the first time in 10 years, they engaged members from the very beginning. LinkedIn needed to de-risk decisions and make sure they were on the right path for an exceptional member experience.

They dug into how members feel about core elements of the experience including job, profile, feed, messaging, notifications and network by interacting with smaller groups and then weaving the results together into a collection of insight. Members of each group evaluated early prototypes of the new desktop experience and offered feedback. The result is a cleaner and user friendly desktop experience that aligns with the company’s mobile experience.

The connection to behavioral data helps the team serve up studies based on what they already know about members. For example, reaching out to members who haven’t posted a profile photo or only access one area of the site on a regular basis. Asking relevant questions of the right people builds engagement and supports the members first principle.

Results

The collection and application of consent data provide insight at the speed required by the fast-moving technology industry, where the product development cycle is measured in weeks, not years. This enables the business to accelerate innovation and truly put
members first.

LinkedIn was able to dig into the why behind behavioral data, build empathy about members so engineering can put their limited resources against the products and features that members find most relevant, drive revenue by creating strategies to increase adoption of premium memberships and empower product marketing to act on insight within weeks to develop and improve marketing messaging, positioning, and copy.