Jon Hensley

Stakeholders

Primary: Arity senior leadership, Segment product teams, Product leadership, Sales, Marketing 
Secondary: Engineering, Data Science 

Summary

When Arity went through a reorg, it was clear that our mobile strategy needed to be adjusted to increase connections to Arity’s SDK and create new revenue streams. In order to do this, we needed to understand app users’ motivations and behaviors to understand how our capabilities could improve their experiences. 

In collaboration with Product, Marketing, and Sales, I embarked on an initiative to create and execute strategy for Arity’s new Mobile Publisher segment. The objectives of our strategy were to: 

• Align Product, Marketing, and Sales on which mobile app categories to focus on. 

• Understand the motivations and challenges users of apps face within the established categories. 

• Establish and validate use cases where Arity’s capabilities could potentially improve mobile app publisher’s user experience. 

We landed on a strategy that relied on market research, subject matter expertise, and mixed methods user research.

Challenge

Arity’s mission is to make transportation smarter, safer, and more useful for everyone. To meet this mission, Arity needs telematics data from as many connections as possible to understand people’s driving behaviors and mobility patterns.  

With 260 million smartphone users in the United States, and the average smartphone containing 80+ apps, we realized that combining Arity’s mobile SDK capabilities with the mobile app publisher ecosystem could greatly increase the connections we make with people.  

To make partnerships with app publishers, we needed to understand their user’s motivations and challenges and improve their experiences in unexpected ways. We also needed to recognize which of our capabilities best fit certain app categories to create unique experiences. Therefore, our challenge statement became:

How might we understand which of Arity’s capabilities will create the most unique user experiences to help us figure out which app categories to focus on for partnerships?

Solution

Collaborating with stakeholders from Product, Marketing, and Sales, I chose a triangulated research approach, to assure the validity of the research and to capture different dimensions of the mobile publisher ecosystem. 

Market Research & Subject Matter Expertise 

To focus on the app categories that had the most users and fit with Arity’s capabilities, we utilized App Annie, a suite of tools that provide mobile app market analytics, as well as our own subject matter expertise from leaders in Product, Marketing, and Sales. This helped us land on an initial set of five categories to focus on: Retail, Fitness, Real Estate, Quick Service Restaurant, and Travel app categories.  

Workshops 

Next, to uncover use cases based on Arity’s capabilities, I planned and facilitated multiple virtual workshops with multidisciplinary groups from not just Product, Marketing, and Sales, but also Engineering, Data Science, and User Experience. This diversity of thought and experience was critical in capturing different frames of reference and produced a richer set of use cases for us to explore. 

Mixed Methods Research 

As the use cases our workshops produced were assumptions based, I wanted to see if we could validate them through research with app users. A mixed methods approach was decided on as the best way to validate the use cases and also uncover the motivations and challenges app users face. 

• Qualitative research consisting of 40 one-on-one interviews over five app categories. 

• Quantitative research employing Qualtrics, an online survey tool, to validate findings from our interviews at scale with 1,800+ participants.

Outcomes

The result of this strategy helped the business to: 

• Align Product, Marketing, and Sales on which mobile app categories to prioritize. 

• Help Product teams establish which use cases to explore. 

• Help Sales understand the motivations and challenges app users face to help them in conversations with potential app publisher customers. 

• Inspire Marketing to create app category one-sheets for use in promoting and selling Arity’s use cases and capabilities. 

• Acquired Arity’s first mobile publisher partnership

Reflection

This was a great learning process for triangulated research. Doing this in the future, I am going to attempt to overlap qualitative and quantitative research slightly, to see if I can speed up the process. In addition, setting up branching logic for the survey had a huge learning curve. In the future, I will reach out to Qualtrics for help sooner in the process.