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Customer Story

How LinkedIn’s product organization involves members across the entire product development process to de-risk decisions and build the right products with the right product-market fit

LinkedIn Achieved

600% increase in monthly research activities

Drove premium membership conversion

Informed the redesign of linkedin.com

Overview

LinkedIn is the world’s number one professional network. Their vision is to create economic opportunity for every worker in the global workforce, and being members first is their primary value. To continue driving growth, LinkedIn is focused on boosting value for its members by developing the advanced features members need to create economic opportunity.

Goals:

Accelerate innovation

De-risk decisions

Business Challenge

With a strong desire from CEO Jeff Weiner to put members first, LinkedIn’s research team had a critical role to play in building empathy for customer experience. They wanted a scalable way of harnessing member feedback to inform product development. Speed was a big requirement: the company needed member insight that traditional market research was often too late in delivering. And they needed to build on what they already knew from behavioral data across LinkedIn interactions, digging into the reasons behind people’s behavior.

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. The connection to behavioral data helps the team serve up studies based on what they already know about members.

Insight communities at LinkedIn have evolved from one small community in 2016 to eight in 2018, supporting their growth engine across four categories: hiring, sales and marketing, premium, and 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.

LinkedIn’s marketing, product and engineering teams work closely with the research team to leverage agile insight in the product development process. For example, informing the desktop experience’s most significant redesign in 10 years, enabling product marketing to get qualitative feedback at scale, digging into the why behind behavioral data, driving revenue by creating strategies to increase adoption of premium memberships, and redesigning the LinkedIn app’s main menu.

The collection and application of feedback provides insight at the speed required by the fast-moving technology industry, where the product development cycle is measured in weeks, not years. This enables LinkedIn to accelerate innovation, boost conversion, enhance the user experience and truly put members first.

"Alida has changed the way our stakeholders view market research. With our insight communities, we involve the member in the entire product development cycle, from idea generation to design to validation. The insight of our members allows us to understand the ‘whys’ behind the ‘whats’ that Big Data gives us. It provides intelligence at the speed required by the fast-moving tech industry. There isn’t another tool in our toolbox that delivers the same credibility and agility for our stakeholders."

– Tony Tong, Senior Market Research Manager, LinkedIn