Wave Adds Incredible Efficiency to a Small Research Team with Marvin’s AI

The user-centric company leverages its centralized feedback repository to surface insights and fuel strategic business decisions that make a big impact.

Customer Outcomes

• Empowered the company’s sole researcher to democratize research across 5 teams
• Gained insights from user feedback 20X faster
• Report creation reduced to just 4 hours from 10 days
• Implemented a feedback loop to track and reduce churn
• Created a dynamic hub for stakeholders to use customer feedback to shape project outcomes

Powering Innovation through Research

Wave offers simple money management solutions that help small businesses start, survive, and thrive. Their customers operate across a diverse set of industries and often have just 1–5 employees. Research plays a key role in helping Wave understand their customers and keep a pulse on the solutions they need. They use Marvin to primarily centralize, analyze, and share research.

Josh Litwin is the sole specialized researcher at Wave. But he’s not the only one conducting research. With his guidance, designers, product managers, marketing, and customer support also conduct usability tests, interviews, and feedback analysis.

Building an Accessible Research Tech Stack

Over the past 3–4 years, Wave has invested in onboarding the right research tools over hiring specialized researchers. They share insights through research reports and highlight reels on Marvin, Loom, and Figma. Stakeholders use these tools as hubs to come in and learn about customers.

By doing this, the company has leveraged research as a strategic advantage that influences product innovation and roadmaps.

The team switched to Marvin from Dovetail to help people surface insights better. Previously, a lot of time was spent manually annotating and analyzing files because the AI experience felt disconnected. They appreciated that Marvin designed AI into the complete workflow so they now get quicker and more accurate answers.

“That move (from Dovetail to Marvin) has allowed us to think about research in a different way, organizationally speaking. So it's a little bit less usability tests, it's a little bit more generative and higher level thinking.”

Using Tools to Democratize Research

Josh has democratized research at Wave by helping his peers begin with shorter but more focused research tasks. They start by conducting a few interviews.

“We have a whole bunch of different, continuous streams of data that come in. And we can democratize research, but things like analysis and synthesis do take knowledge, they do take expertise. That typically ends up either being on my plate or adjacent to my plate and helping teams do that.”

Once he shows them what kind of insights they need to look for, they can quickly surface them using Marvin’s AI.

As a result, more people can be involved in research. Even if an interview isn’t perfect, Wave learns a lot about its users. And that’s worth the engagement.

“They don't necessarily have to sit there analyzing every single qualitative interview. They can get to the point where they get what they need out of it and then they can move on to the next stage. And I think that's something that the structure of Marvin helps them do too. Instead of having to really closely read every interview and label, like tag every single thing and then look at the tags and combine them, if there are specific things that they're just trying to even disaster check, you can get that very quickly to move on to the next thing.”

The Impact of Integrating Marvin into Workflows

Marvin fits into various research projects at Wave.

Extracting insights from surveys

Earlier, it would take Josh half a month to collate insights from NPS surveys. Since Wave onboarded Marvin, it takes him half a day. He replicates the process for information from a suggestions channel and exit surveys.

“That was a lot of what I would call high-volume, low-content stuff. And in Dovetail, I was literally going through and tagging every single sentence, every month. And so it ended up just sitting there. We had all the data, but we weren't using it. And now, I can put those three reports together much faster and circulate them to the whole company. And everybody has this pulse on all of these things that are happening. We can get to a concrete insight in probably half a day. It's easier to get that out to the whole org and to inform their foundational base of knowledge.”

With less time spent on creating reports, Josh can contribute to more strategic projects.

“For me to spend that much time on it just was not effective. Now if I can do it, I can spend two days and get all of the reports done for the month. Great. Now we have the rest of the month to do a ton of other stuff too.”

Journey and empathy mapping

Teams at Wave work on distinct parts of the product. By mapping the customer journey, they can build a more cohesive experience. They use Marvin’s AI analysis to synthesize feedback across channels and determine which parts of the journey to tweak.

Similarly, the marketing team can leverage research to create user personas.

“We have dug in to our audience and really started to understand, okay, so in this domain, where are they, what language they use, what's their emotional experience, what kinds of problems are they trying to solve. That's the stuff that I think unlocks a lot for the marketing team. How do we make it accessible? How do we respect the people who have knowledge, how do we talk the way that they're talking? And I think as we're starting to see that as a growth edge, that's really helping us to try different ways of communicating. Educating is a really big piece of it.”

By staying in touch with their users’ knowledge, beliefs, thoughts, and emotions, Wave can reach the right people much better.

Answers mapped to research goals

Josh creates customized discussion guides on Marvin for each research project. He combines these with his research questions using AI analysis. Marvin maps interview answers directly to goals, helping him find better insights and create reports faster.

“It led to these insights where we have things like ‘what benefits do they experience, how do taxes influence their use of Wave?’ And these were really effective as presentation tools. I didn't create slides for any of this. I just presented this to the group and putting like the clips in there, putting all of this stuff directly into the Insight was really effective. And then they have access to it going forward. ”

Tracking churn

One of the ways Josh tracks the value of research is to show how it mitigates churn.

He collates insights across files with Ask AI, creates a churn report, and draws up a list of action items. The company can then periodically track how the numbers change.

Observing interviews with live streams

With Marvin’s live stream feature, anyone can watch a live interview without committing a lot of time. They can stay for ten minutes or the whole session. Either way, they can join and leave without interrupting the conversation. This flexibility has made it easier for teams to connect to customer feedback. “We’ve set up a shared calendar now—whenever someone has an interview, they just add it there with a link to watch on Marvin. I’ve had sessions where 20 people were watching. It’s created more chances for people to say, ‘Hey, I’ve got 10 minutes, I’ll hop in.’ It just makes it all feel real for them, and that’s been great.”

Making Qualitative Analysis Accessible

A lot of people turn to Josh for research that will help their projects. With Marvin’s analysis and sharing features, he can respond to more requests. For example, the customer support team made a last-minute request for data on NPS trends. Instead of spending hours gathering the data, he made a Loom on how they could use Marvin instead.

He filtered NPS data to focus on what detractors had said. Marvin created a pie chart of data from hundreds of surveys. This immediately quantified and visualized areas of improvement. He then ran an effective thematic analysis with AI.

“Here's your report of all of that stuff. That's five minutes. That's a video. Now they have a lot more to work on to start their conversations and that's super fast. So if I didn't have that, I'd be going into like, this is what I would do. I would go into this spreadsheet. And it's a humongous spreadsheet and I would have to search for customer support and then I would have to download it all into a separate CSV and I would have to try to make some sense of it. It would just be a nightmare.”

These instances help Josh explain the importance of a qualitative analysis tool:

"I describe Marvin as doing two key things for us. It’s our qualitative analysis tool, helping us quickly make sense of interviews and data. It’s also our research repository—anything you want to know about our customers should be in Marvin. And with its AI features, it’s easy to find what you need fast."

Wave shows us that even a research team of one can make an incredible impact on an entire organization. And we’re proud to be their trusted research sidekick every step of the way.

“Thanks to the Marvin team for all these wonderful quality of life and workflow improvements!”

Find out if Marvin could be the right research partner for you.