B2B software startups do a lot of research whether it’s a research into their market place or about something as simple as what color to use on a button. In this article, we will go through what a research repository is and why it’s critical to a b2b SaaS startup.
What is a research repository?
One place to store all research artifacts. Every organization leverages them a little differently, but for us it serves as a central spot for team members to add research they have done and for everyone to have access to it.
Why do you need a research repository?
As your startup continues to grow, you will need a place to go and review historical insights. This will help reduce the time spent digging through old reports.
It helps inform new product decisions and features, and enables all team members to learn more about our users by accessing findings whenever they want.
Depending on the tool, you can leverage it to start seeing patterns or trends across different research studies and to speed up research in general by having a consistent process for analyzing and sharing findings.
You also can avoid duplicating research by having visibility into everything you’ve done. While that might not seem imperative right now, you have the opportunity to establish a foundation of research insights that you’ll continue to lean on and leverage as you grow.
How to choose a research repository for your startup?
Research repositories have become an essential tool for product development and product marketing teams.
Product development and product marketing teams research customers, market segments and other contexts.
The context is usually about the competitive market with a constant need to collect data and insights about competitors, new technologies that impact business conditions and many other issues to help grow the business and drive the market
In the technology industry, for example, a research repository might be used to store market and competitive research and feedback from focus groups about a new product under development.
It can also be used to collect information about customer pain points related to a new feature in an existing product.
Regardless of the industry, a software product company needs to be able to rapidly access relevant research evidence to aid in strategic decisions related to the enterprise.
A research repository helps to achieve this objective by storing information on the company’s various customers, markets, competitors, technologies, products and internal activities.
Traditionally, this information has been collected and maintained in paper files but today most enterprises use digital document management systems to keep documents organized and up-to-date.
Such systems are ineffective at storing information and data in forms that encourage analysis or understanding of connections among information.
This leads to fragmented use of data sources and eventually to chaos when a company needs to use its collected data for research, market analysis or strategic planning.
A flexible software tool purpose-built for storing a wide variety of data types can make it easier to analyze and gain insights.
This tool is sometimes called an “insights engine” and can be used to create visualizations of connections and patterns in the data sets.
When choosing a research repository, your company should carefully consider its ability to meet your business requirements.
It must clearly provide functionality for storing, managing and analyzing relevant data for your business environment.
Let’s look at four key capabilities a good research repository should have:
Organize documents in a taxonomy that’s relevant to your organization
Because different types of information are stored under different taxonomies, it should be easy to search for a given type of information.
Store and organize structured data for analysis
These data might include market research or customer satisfaction survey data that are stored in tabular form but need to be analyzed to understand market trends or to identify opportunities for improving customer satisfaction.
Data can also include diagrams, charts and images that need to be grouped with other descriptive information in a structured way for further analysis.
Extract data from unstructured information sources and transform it
Insight engines typically analyze textual data in blogs, forums and other unstructured areas to better understand the opinions and expectations of customers and other stakeholders.
These texts are often stored in digital formats and can include information such as product documentation, sales reports and support emails.
Software tools are needed to extract this information from source documents and convert it into structured format so it can be stored in the appropriate place in your research results archive.
Create visualizations based on analytic queries
Innovative companies use a research repository to store research findings from customer feedback, user testing sessions and general analysis.
So there you have it, what a research repository is and why you need it for your startup. To get started using a research repository, click on the link to check out Insight7 innovative research repository.
