“Startups that regularly conduct qualitative research (not just quantitative) experience faster results in their quest to achieve product-market-fit.” – Mitchell Posada, I’m a startup, do I need to do Qualitative Research?

Why?

Because by regularly doing qualitative research, you are engaging with (and acting on) the voice of your ideal customer. To the point where the customer actually becomes a part of everything you do.

Whether you’re a founder about to launch a product or someone who is simply keen to understand and put into practice qualitative research methods – 👇🏼 you’re in the right place.

Just keep on scrolling and I assure you that on finishing this Process Street blog you will be well versed in all that is qualitative research.

Alternatively, to skip to a specific section of the post click the links below:

• What is qualitative research?
• A closer look at qualitative research
• Types of qualitative research
• Qualitative research in practice: The chocolate method 🍫
• Is qualitative research for you?

Keep reading to find out exactly what chocolate has to do with qualitative research!
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You’re waiting for the train on your way to work. You’ve got a long day ahead, and don’t feel like swinging by the grocery store afterward. Fortunately, there’s a supermarket kiosk on the platform. You scan the barcodes with your phone and arrange for your food to be delivered when you get home.

As you cross the street to your office building, the strap of your computer bag finally breaks. You don’t have time to run out and get a new one, but that’s okay. Once you’re in your office, you log on to the company’s website, put on the augmented reality headset, and virtually try on different bags.

At lunch, you head down to your usual restaurant. The AI in the touch-screen kiosk suggests sandwiches you might like based on your order history, then uses facial recognition to complete the order and charge your account.

This is phygital marketing – all made possible by advances in augmented reality (AR).

The global AR and virtual reality (VR) markets are expected to reach 18.8 billion USD by the end of 2020 – over 78% growth from spending in 2019. By 2025, that growth is only expected to increase exponentially.

With the sophistication of AR/VR tech, more companies are incorporating it into their campaigns – and more consumers are expecting it.

In this Process Street post, we’ll take an in-depth look at the what and why of phygital marketing, but you can also skip ahead to one of the following sections:

• Phygital isn’t a real word… Is it?
• Living in a phygital world: Nintendo, Porsche, and Sephora
• Phygitalizing your brand

Let’s get phygital!

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This is a guest post by Donald Fomby. Donald is a freelance content writer who works for ClassyEssay. He has spent more than seven years in the copywriting and blogging industries, writing articles, guides, and checklists for small eCommerce businesses. Donald uses his curiosity about online business to write about topics valuable to small business owners.

The product manager’s role is a juggling act.

To fulfill the needs of expectant customers, the product manager needs to work with the sales, marketing, and engineering teams — alongside the rest of the product team — to facilitate necessary changes and improve the product(s) in question.

But that juggling act has gotten even harder as of late.

With the COVID-19 pandemic, many product research and management processes that were done collaboratively and in-person have now pivoted online. Needless to say, this change had made it more difficult for product managers to succeed in their role and complete projects in the way they’re used to.

This transition may have caused workloads to build up, task lists to overflow, sprints to stagger, and thus, impacting the rest of the product team.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. The truth of the matter is that you can successfully manage any product research or development project remotely with optimal organization.

It’s the key to bettering collaboration with your remote team, and ensuring you and the rest of your product management team are keeping on the right track. If you strategically organize your work, you will also be able to instill and maintain successful collaboration with the people you’re working with, despite the many miles that keep you apart.

Seeing as 86% of executives say that a lack of collaboration is the most common reason for failure in their companies, it’s something that you need to get to grips with, particularly as a product manager.

By reading through this Process Street guest post, you’ll do exactly that. To boot, I’ll also provide some extra tools to help you thrive as a product manager! Just make your way through these sections:

• The 4 must-follow tips & tricks to excel as a product manager
• Product management tools to thrive in 2020 and beyond

Let’s get started.

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“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” – John Wanamaker, 19th-century marketing pioneer

Fortunately, it’s no longer the nineteenth century.

Thanks to wondrous advancements in technology, you now have all the tools you need to determine exactly what is working within your sales processes and why.

How? Through the use of sales metrics.

Sales metrics help to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your marketing and sales strategies. They also provide insight into how much your business spends on securing a lead and allow you to monitor and analyze the progress of your marketing actions.

The question is: which sales metrics should you be tracking? 🧐

This Process Street blog takes you through 11 of the most valuable sales metrics, how to calculate them, and how to turn the metric’s data into actions that encourage your business to grow.

To jump to a specific section of the post click the links below:

• What are sales metrics?
• 11 essential sales metrics for digital businesses
• Make your sales metrics actionable

Alternatively, to get fully clued up on all 11 metrics and how to use their data in an actionable, positive way – just keep scrolling. 👇🏼

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For organizations, updating prices is like getting plastic surgery (I imagine).

You’re painfully aware that people can see what you’ve done, but under no circumstances will you ever talk about it. It’s a forbidden topic.

“The first rule of pricing is: you do not talk about pricing” – Medium, The First Rule of Pricing is: You Do Not Talk About Pricing

Until now. I’m sticking two fingers up to the stigma surrounding pricing and I’m lifting the lid to reveal what goes on, behind the scenes, when organizations like Process Street change their SaaS price model.

😱

I know. I’m brave, right?

Over the last few weeks, I’ve coerced and cajoled the Process Street pricing team into sharing some of the biggest pricing lessons we’ve learned (sometimes the hard way), since we launched in 2013.

And, here they are…

• SaaS price model lesson #1: Pricing is a never-ending process
• SaaS price model lesson #2: Pricing is about perception
• SaaS price model lesson #3: Yearly is better than monthly
• SaaS price model lesson #4: Listen to customers, not competitors
• SaaS price model lesson #5: Involve the whole team

Curious?

Let’s hope I still have a job at the end of this… 🤞

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When I first heard the phrase “entrepreneurial spirit,” I laughed. Scoffed, actually.

I pictured zen-like self-help gurus in yoga pants up on a mountain retreat à la Topher Grace’s Black Mirror tech genius encouraging his followers to embrace their culturally-appropriated spirit animals and open their chakras for more fulfilling hostile takeovers.

Or Jared Leto.

“Does anyone even say that?” I asked Adam, my editor, during our 1:1.

“It’s an interesting concept,” he said. “I think you should explore it.”

Dubiously, I set off to find out what this entrepreneurial spirit thing was all about.

Naturally, Adam was right.

Not only did I discover it’s definitely not as mystical as it sounds, but it draws heavily on some very ancient philosophy, and makes sense for both the personal and the professional.

I’ll walk you through what I learned and how you can use it, or you can skip ahead to the juicy bits:

• What is an entrepreneurial spirit?
• What does ancient philosophy have to do with modern entrepreneurs?
• Ryan Holiday: writing, entrepreneurship, and Stoic principles
• Arianna Huffington: Stoic inspiration for a better work/life balance
• Tim Ferriss: the philosophy of one of the most innovative entrepreneurs
• How to cultivate your own entrepreneurial spirit

Now, get comfortable and still your mind…

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Alex Zubkov is a technical writer at LITSLINK from Dnipro. Alex has 15 years experience in sales, marketing, and product promotion for both local and international markets. He’s also a techno geek and amateur photographer with a love of gadgets and the Arsenal FC.

Quality assurance (QA) is an essential stage of any software development cycle. It helps developers catch the lingering bugs and inconsistencies in the product’s functionality before you deliver it to your customers.

According to Statista, companies spent 35% of their financial resources on software testing in 2015. In 2019, this figure went down to just below a quarter of the company’s budget, but it is still taxing in 2020 to balance financial expenditure and product performance.

A sophisticated QA process can cut costs by reducing the number of errors that need fixing and, subsequently, the amount of iterative testing required. It can also improve the reliability of the testing process, further reducing expenses, which is crucial for startups and low-budget, middle-size enterprises.

In this article, we’ll briefly run through the key stages of the QA process:

• Key stages of the QA process
• What tools should you use?
• The role of QA processes in your startup growth

Let’s get started!
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Inhale… Exhale… Inhale… Exhale… 🧘🏻‍♂️

Why the deep breaths?

Perhaps because of the pandemic, its subsequent lockdown measures, and the impending breakdown of life as we know it?

In the midst of the global crisis, people are increasingly turning to mindfulness and meditation to regain a sense of calm in their lives.

This means that while the world goes bust, it’s boom time for the mindfulness app industry.

Downloads of mindfulness apps have doubled since mid-March and the digital mental health market is projected to reach $4.6bn in 2026; a massive jump from its value of $1.4bn in 2017.

Continue reading to take a look at the two key rivals in the mindfulness app game: Calm vs Headspace. We’ll also examine why people are turning to mindfulness as a means to cope with the pandemic, and check out two other alternatives beyond the Calm vs Headspace feud: Waking Up and Reflectly.

To skip to a specific section of this Process Street blog post click the appropriate link below:

• Why mindfulness and why now
• How to be more mindful?
• Mindfulness Apps: Calm vs Headspace (the top dogs)
• Beyond Calm vs Headspace: Waking Up and Reflectly
• It’s not a question of Calm vs Headspace, the question is: Are mindfulness apps for you?

Take a breath… Now let’s get started! ✨

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Quality management. Oh, how I love thee.

You’ve given us rubber flavored cookies, phones that go up in smoke, and exploding car airbags (we’ll get to all of that later).

Last year, 337 food products passed through stringent quality management procedures and went to market with major issues. So major, in fact, that each and every one of those products had to be recalled. This cost the US economy over $7 million.

But, the cost of poor quality management surrounding the production of food is only a tiny part of the picture:

“Defective product incidents have caused in excess of $2 billion of losses over five years” – Allianz, Product Recall, Managing the Impact of the New Risk Landscape

When you consider that the global quality management software market is valued at $7.96 billion, why are we, as consumers, still being exposed to low quality, defective products?

Because, contrary to what most organizations think, there is more to quality management than simply making a good product. You need to know how you’re going to make it good and how you’re going to make sure it remains good.

In other words, you need a plan. A quality management plan to be exact.

The reasons for this will become even clearer as we make our way through this Process Street post and discuss:

• What is a quality management plan?
• What is the most useful thing about a quality management plan?
• What’s included in a quality management plan?
• How to enforce a quality management plan

Let’s get planning.
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“The misinformation crisis is a symptom of the enormously significant ways that the internet has changed our information ecosystem, which I don’t think anybody, least of all governments and traditional media, has fully got to grips with.” Al Baker, Managing Editor at Logically

If you’ve been on social media at all in the past decade, you’ve likely spoken to at least one synthetic person without even realizing it.

To be honest, probably more than one. In the early months of 2020, Twitter purged 174,000 bots it claimed were being used by the Chinese government.

This is what propaganda looks like today. But no, you say, propaganda is kitschy, cartoonish posters from the 1940s, and, once upon a time, you’d be right. The truth is, though, modern propaganda is almost completely digital – and not nearly as easy to spot.

Dictators use bots to stifle uprisings. Political candidates use bots to promote their platforms. Civil rights advocates use bots to schedule protests and share information. That new startup has bots to raise its brand profile, and if you’ve ever scheduled an automated post, you’ve used one, too.

Like most technology, bots aren’t malevolent by nature; how they’re used, however, is another matter entirely.

This article is going to examine the methods and origins of modern propaganda and what’s been done to combat it.

• Is there a difference between “fake news” and propaganda?
• Is modern propaganda really doing anything new?
• Meet the AI generating synthetic content
• How you can spot modern propaganda

Onward, we go:
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