Pantheon amplifies research impact with Marvin

Before they found Marvin, Pantheon stored research reports in a tool that lacked search and sharing capabilities. Stakeholders relied heavily on dedicated researchers to find relevant insights. With Marvin, everyone can self-serve and find useful information across reports. The research team can now focus their time and effort on strategic research.

Customer Outcomes

• Made research more accessible to everyone across the organization
• Maximized the research team's capacity, saving 2-3 hours on every user interview
• Reduced time to create quarterly research reports by 50%
• Streamlined the workflow by collecting passive and active insights in one repository
• Surfaced insights for design and product teams to prioritize user feedback in roadmaps

Pantheon's Small but Mighty Team

Pantheon is a WebOps platform with features, workflows, and state-of-the-art tooling with governance for teams. They work with agencies, content marketers, developers, designers and growth teams across industries. They prioritize customer-first decision-making, and rely on their research team to facilitate it.

Cathi Bosco and Jenna Harmon are the research duo that provides insights to the 400+ employees at Pantheon. Cathi has a deep interest in information architecture, including strategic research, visual, journey and alignment mapping. Jenna has experience in quantitative research, as well as qualitative research skills from her PhD training.

"We are a very powerful team, even though it's just two of us," Cathi said. "We do strategic research, tactical research. Most of the testing of visual design and patterns gets done by the design team. But we do help them set up their research studies. If they want help with research questions, test run things for them, help them pick audiences.”

"We also do some innovation work. So working at the bleeding edge of technology, we do research in that area. We do organizational research, we look at the culture here and do transformative work with our organization as well. Our primary function, is to reduce risk for decision makers in the organization"

But their stakeholders were struggling to find and use this research. "You had to really scroll through the titles of all of the reports to find something that looked like it might be related to what you were looking for," Jenna explained.

"Previously, we were organizing our research in a research repo through Confluence. Every quarter we would do a research readout. And that linked back to the stories we would tell through Confluence. It was very manual. It wasn't scalable in terms of discovery," said Cathi.

Anyone looking for data would invariably ask Jenna and Cathi. They were spending a lot of time manually searching for and sharing research, which cut into their bandwidth for more strategic work. They decided to evaluate Marvin as an AI-powered solution to simplify their research workflow.

Insights Made Searchable, Shareable and Accessible

Pantheon's research culture has become more robust under Cathi's guidance over the past three years. She makes sure all of her and Jenna’s work reduces risk for decision-makers through actionable research.

One of Cathi’s initiatives has been to create a detailed labeling taxonomy to standardize annotation of all research. Before the taxonomy, the organization struggled to understand customer needs at a high level, with each team and function using a different language to describe customers and features. A shared taxonomy across the company enabled insights on related topics to be aggregated together across projects and initiatives, allowing leaders to quickly answer questions like “What are the most common pain points our customers are having?” Being able to quickly assemble insights enables leaders to put customers at the center of their decision-making.

Together, they also put together quarterly summaries of ongoing initiatives like their Bi-Weekly Customer Call program. To make the reports, Jenna would conduct hour-long sessions with customers twice a month. She would try to uncover the common requirements, pain points and higher-level trends that emerged from these interview sessions.

"I was working across Google Sheets, Miro, Zoom, and Google Drive, because that's where we were storing all of our Zoom recordings. There's probably something else that I'm forgetting. These were Google Slides because that's where I was putting together reports. So that's five different tools that I was all using to do this work that now can literally all be done in Marvin."

Jenna had to annotate each note as a cell in Google Sheets, which could take as many as 90 minutes for each call. Once she took this data over to Miro, she would manually sort the notes into themes. Compiling insights across calls in this way could take up to four hours, depending on the volume of notes. In Marvin, Jenna spends fewer than two hours on the task using Marvin’s automations and a streamlined workflow. While Jenna enjoys labeling notes herself, she saves time because Marvin automatically transcribes each call and auto sorts labels.

"The post interview work is now down to half hour, 45 minutes. So like from 90 minutes down to a half hour 45 minutes. And then the reporting in aggregate.That is down to two hours max. Because I have all of my weekly customer calls in the one file, and so I can compile all of those notes together. I'm using the same tagging system so it's very easy to like sort it all together. I'm not having to like work across all these different Google spreadsheets. I can pull it all together. And yeah, I mean I would very comfortably say that the amount of time that it takes me to do the analysis and share out work from this project has dropped by like 50%."

With reports created quicker, stakeholders can consume the information more easily. They even now reference Marvin insights in meetings with executive leadership. The decision-makers can surface research easier (and faster!) to prioritize roadmaps. For example, the CEO was apprehensive about allocating team bandwidth to make their website mobile-responsive. The head of design instinctively knew the effort would pay off, but he needed user feedback to bolster his point. He searched Marvin for "mobile design". Not only did he find quotes across 15 different studies from the past year, he could also quantify that 12.5% of users mentioned “mobile design” as a pain point.

Pantheon has integrated Marvin into the decision-making cycle. They switched from using Jira and Confluence to moving all research data into Marvin as their source of truth.

The Journey from Reactive to Proactive Research

The research team uses Marvin for a range of research projects. Jenna uses it to understand the billing experiences of customers. She also conducts customer calls to learn how the company can redesign pricing and packaging. While it is not traditional UX research, it contributes significantly to business growth.

Cathi was initially unsure if a small team like theirs would be able to justify the budget for a dedicated research tool. Senior leadership, on the other hand, had no doubts from the beginning because they saw Marvin's potential to save many work hours.

With first-hand experience of how AI enables data-driven decision-making, Cathi echoes the sentiment, "The value we're getting is fantastic... We needed a tool like Marvin so that research was more self-serve and discoverable across the organization. And it really freed us up as a powerhouse of two to be more strategic".

Jenna agreed that they needed a centralized place for storing research reports where they were easily searchable. "That is a really overlooked and undervalued piece of the research puzzle."

"Thanks to Marvin, we found a place where we could make our research insights and reports easily discoverable using the AI and everybody being able to have. I would never put our research intel anywhere that the entire org couldn't have access to it. So it feels really good to be using Marvin."

Cathi is glad that anyone at Pantheon looking for research can find exactly what they need, right when they need it:

"With the rapid evolution of AI and Marvin's ability to implement it in a way that's perfect for our use case and our needs, it was just a no-brainer that once we found it, it was a really good fit for us."

Jenna prefers Marvin to their older system because it removes the drag and overheard from her work. She remembers how it was much harder to implement Cathi's taxonomy system in those systems. They were trying to impose organization in tools that were not geared for it.

Most important, Jenna and Cathi elevated their research workflow:

Connecting those calls, getting recorded in there, getting our questions in there. The note, the insights, being able to get granular insights and also larger reports like so effortlessly. I think getting those granular insights was something we were missing. Making those all so actionable.

Cathi believes they can use Marvin more extensively to combine their qualitative research with the Experience Quality Score that Jenna is driving:

"It's going to be a force-multiplier for us. And it just frees up our time to be able to do the analysis and help be more strategic and more proactive instead of reactive with our research. So we're kind of at that tipping point where, you know, in part thanks to Marvin, we have more ability to be proactive as opposed to reactive."

Jenna is also excited about digging in deeper with Marvin, thanks to the approach we take to product development. “As a UX researcher, I've really loved working with the tool because you can tell it was built by other researchers,” she says. “It signals to me there's a conversation happening here. I know y'all are hearing from us, but you're listening, and you're taking it in and making iterations in response to it. And it's that closing of the customer feedback loop that is such an important thing that companies do.”

She's absolutely right! We love talking to our customers and using their feedback to keep improving. It's why we built Marvin to be a research partner for everyone.

Learn how Marvin can be your research sidekick. Book a demo today.