How do you build a successful product for a customer when you’re missing key information about them?

MYOB’s understanding of Soloists was largely based on demographic segmentation. The product team believed Soloists lacked confidence in managing their businesses and wanted tools to empower them. But through research, we uncovered a much deeper story.

Project Overview

  • The goal of this project was to gain actionable insights into the Soloist segment, a group previously defined in a segmentation study that felt overly simplistic and focused on demographics. With the product team nearing the launch of a Soloist-specific product, they needed a deeper understanding of this audience to ensure the product’s relevance. At the same time, they faced challenges recruiting the right Soloists for a beta program.

    Meanwhile, the website team was revamping the company’s site and struggling to create content that resonated with Soloists. On top of this, I was tasked with addressing a major gap left by earlier research: understanding how and why Soloists rely on Excel to manage their businesses.

    The analysis and results were partially delivered in snippets within a week of starting the interviews, but the project extended to six months. It required substantial effort in presentations, workshops, and stakeholder management to ensure the information was disseminated effectively across all necessary forums.

    Key Outcomes

    • A deeper, shared understanding of Soloists across the company.

    • Improved segmentation, informed by both qualitative and quantitative data.

    • Targeted website and marketing updates tailored to Soloists’ needs.

    • Broader organizational changes.

  • As the UX Researcher on this project, I played a central role in uncovering insights and ensuring they translated into actionable outcomes. From planning and conducting research to collaborating with cross-functional teams, I worked closely with stakeholders to address their specific challenges while driving the overall vision forward.

    The Team

    • 2 Product Managers

    • Head of Design

    • 1 Design Manager

    • 1 Designer

    • Me (UX Researcher)

    Partway through the project, I got additional support. A new researcher joined the team, providing extra help as the project evolved. I also had the opportunity to mentor a junior designer, who assisted me with interview preparation and facilitation.

  • I used a mix of qualitative and collaborative techniques:

    • Internal Stakeholder Interviews: To understand existing knowledge gaps and align on research goals.

    • Desk Research: To analyze prior studies and industry trends as a foundation for the project.

    • Proto-Persona Workshop: Collaborated with stakeholders to create preliminary personas for hypothesis-driven exploration.

    • 33 In-Depth Interviews: Conducted using Grounded Theory to uncover behavioral patterns and motivations.

    • Self-Service Walkthrough: Evaluated how Soloists interacted with existing tools and workflows.

    • Results Workshop: Facilitated a collaborative session to interpret findings and prioritize actions.

    • Company-Wide Presentations: Delivered insights through multiple presentations to ensure alignment across teams.

    • Microsoft teams

    • Dovetail

    • Miro

    • Powerpoint

The challenge

When I joined the project, MYOB already had a segmentation study for Soloists. However, it was focusing on demographic traits rather than behaviours or motivations. This left the product and design teams struggling with several challenges

  1. Product Team Needs: Ensure the relevance of a Soloist-specific product by deepening insights into their behaviours and needs.

  2. Beta Recruitment: Identify the right Soloists to participate in the beta program.

  3. Excel Insights: Address a gap in understanding how Soloists use Excel to manage their businesses.

  4. Customer Journey Mapping: Map the Soloist journey, from starting a business to purchasing accounting software

To complicate matters, the Stakeholders were time-poor and working with different (and sometimes conflicting) assumptions. I realized early on that building trust and creating alignment would be just as important as the research itself.

The approach

Starting with What We Knew

I began by diving into existing knowledge. MYOB already had a wealth of data scattered across the company—customer support tickets, prior segmentation studies, and sales metrics. I consolidated these fragmented insights into a single Miro board, allowing patterns to emerge and creating a shared foundation for the project.

Engaging Stakeholders Early

Before heading into the field, I invited stakeholders to a proto-persona workshop. This collaborative session allowed us to surface assumptions, hypotheses, and diverse perspectives about Soloists. It also helped build early engagement and buy-in from time-poor stakeholders.

Research cards - self service and collaboration

When we started to get results from the interviews I wanted to deliver quick results to the team, with some snippets. It was a time when the they were working extensively to go to market, so getting everyone in the same room was impossible.

So we developed a self-serviced board with Research Cards, where people could come and walkthrough the partial results by themselves. This way stakeholders could brainstorm, discuss, and share ideas on how to address the challenges. Those ideas were then incorporated into the narrative to support the teams and to bring cohesiveness to their view.

Uncovering the Real Story

Through 33 in-depth interviews, I applied Grounded Theory to uncover Soloists’ motivations, behaviours, and workflows. Instead of starting with a rigid discussion guide, I let themes emerge organically, probing deeper into each respondent’s unique story.

A surprising pattern emerged: Soloists were not lacking in confidence. In fact, they were proud, self-reliant, and determined. This insight directly challenged the team’s belief that Soloists needed confidence-building tools.

Results

A new way of looking at Soloists

Through our research, we discovered that there are five distinct types of Soloists, each with a unique way of managing their business. This finding significantly altered the team's previous belief that the Soloist segment was a single cohesive group.

The research revealed that each of the five types of Soloists had different motivations, challenges, and workflows. For instance, some Soloists might prioritize efficiency over control, and outsource their work when possible, while other soloists would be less likely to adopt digital tools to manage their business.

We discovered that the presence of significant individuals (such as a father, friend, or mentor) in their journey was an important topic not initially on the team’s radar.

Another interesting pattern emerged when they shared their excel file with us: colour coding is a common way for them to organize their finances and each soloist would develop their unique system of managing the business.

By identifying these variations, we provided actionable insights that allowed the product and design teams to create more targeted communications and redefine the previous roadmap

Shifting the perception about the Customers

The team held a strong assumption that Soloists lacked confidence and that this was their major need. Through our research, we were able to dispel this myth by presenting compelling quotes and customer videos. These materials vividly demonstrated the confidence and pride Soloists have in running their businesses. This shift in perception helped the product team strategy and it shifted the marketing and website communications and content.

Promoting collaboration

This project involved a large number of stakeholders from product, design, customer success, website, and marketing. None of them had a unified view of who the customers were. They had different perceptions and assumptions, which led to working in silos and creating a disjointed experience for customers.

Through extensive workshops and presentations, we shifted this situation and unified their perception and understanding of Soloists.

A complex customer journey

Our journey involved the five archetypes, their pain points, feelings, tools, and data related to each step. I also added a section called “What Could We Do?” that collated all the feedback and brainstorming gathered from stakeholders.

Opportunity Maps

This journey was complemented by "Opportunity Maps" we created for each segment, describing their use case, pain points, emotional needs, functional needs, and their support network, which was crucial for this job.

Outcomes

Resegmentation

In MYOB, all the segmentation is done by a Market Research team. After our research was spreaded across the company, the senior leadership wanted to know what would be the potential market for the new product that was being developed. So my involvement in this was to support and guide the segmentation survey, I created a big summarized table of all archetypes and helped them tailor the questionnaire.

This innitative led to the discovery that the targeted archetype was one of the smallest in the market, resulting in strategy reshifts, and cancelling the Beta program.

The new segmentation included:

  • Use case

  • Key trait

  • Behavioural traits

  • Mindset

  • Finances & admin accumen

  • Triggers to use business software

  • Accountant use

  • Typical number of years in business

Company Restructure

While talking to many stakeholders I uncovered a disconnection between the product teams and the product, and how this was affecting production. There was an overlapping of attributions to two different tribes, under different segments. This was creating not only friction to the teams but also lack of of clarity on the initiatives.

Talking to the Head of Design and later with the senior leadership, I supported them with an internal survey to collect quantitative data about the situation.

This led to a company's internal restructuring.

Change in communication and content

Before this project, the MYOB website was very technical and focused on features. While we were talking to the Soloitsts, we also explored how our communications were resonating with them, and the answer was that they weren’t.

So we recommended the company change this. Today the part of the website dedicated for the soloists only talks about benefits.

The content team took our suggestion to incorporate videos of Soloists showing how they manage their business using MYOB software, to avoid website reviews often perceived as not real according to our findings.

Whatever it is, the way you tell a story can make all the difference.

My major challenges were twofold: managing the numerous demands of the project and unifying the diverse views stakeholders had of Soloists.

Achieving cross-functional alignment was essential but difficult, requiring months of conversations, presentations, and workshops with a challenging group of stakeholders. For example, I had to book one particular group for a presentation four times before they finally attended.

So my strategy to finish this project was rooted in persistence and empathy. I approached every interaction believing that everyone was doing their best and never gave up on this work. I continued to book workshops and presentations, delivered my best efforts, and assumed others were also striving to contribute.

Although I did not stay at MYOB to see the sales results of the product, I heard that they recently launched an exclusive app for Sole Traders based on this project.