Autodesk

Business Challenge

Autodesk is a customer-focused company and provides numerous opportunities to listen, engage and incorporate feedback into its decision-making process. This allows customers to actively follow and participate in Autodesk’s design technology journey.

Over recent years, the ARC has grown proactively both geographically and through the inclusion of targeted niche roles to support Autodesk with the customer feedback it needs to inform its business decisions.

To ensure balanced representation in user feedback and product experience, the Research Ops team began working with external groups and industry organizations to welcome underrepresented voices. This effort to drive diversity and inclusion within ARC’s customer member base ensures Autodesk is delivering innovative solutions with its tools and technology to solve customers’ collective challenges.

Solution

The Research Ops team has continually developed and evolved their processes while sharing their best practices to ensure scalability and to simplify research execution.

Scalability and internal enablement

This year, the Research Ops team has created and launched a DIY Toolkit for participant recruiting. This helps onboard and empower internal teams, who may or may not have research ops support, to launch and conduct their own projects confidently and efficiently. This has helped to meet the increased demand for research across the business whilst delivering the best possible customer research experience.

The team has also templatized and documented much of their recruitment strategies and best practices so others are able to easily participate and leverage the team expertise without hands-on support. 

“Training documents and templates have also allowed busy teams across the business to contribute and engage with our members as effectively and efficiently as possible,” explains the Research Ops team.

Regular internal team communication, updates and reporting have also helped to promote the importance and value of research through the ARC in delivering the company’s business objectives. Weekly Research Ops meetings ensure the business is supported through first-class research practices. Consistent governance reviews and updates help to align research coordination and proactively identify issues to best support Autodesk’s researchers, designers and product managers. 

Closing the loop with community members

It is vital to the team to make sure community members know that they feedback has been heard and to shareback the impact of customer insights on business and product decisions.

Research sharebacks are required from the internal teams who conduct activities through the community. These posts provide a brief summary of research objectives, key learnings, and the next steps the business is taking to drive forward development of products customers use today, and industry innovation for tomorrow.

Where possible, these sharebacks help illustrate how research conducted within the Autodesk Research Community has helped inform or contribute towards delivering product roadmaps.

Results

Leveraging insights from the community, Autodesk has the ability to deliver products that are actively informed by customer needs, expectations and preferences. Through their focus on internal enablement and process refinement, the ReOps team can efficiently fulfill requests to support the business's customer-centric goal of empowering and supporting customers to create, build, and innovate products to the best of their capabilities with the technology and platforms they need. 

The team now collects testimonials that showcase how the Autodesk Research Community has positively impacted business objectives through quality research standards that facilitate timely and efficient project completion. 

Due to increase in activity and demand, Autodesk has also invested in dedicated Community Managers in 2022 to support internal business units to deliver content and engagement activities in the Member Hub.

This focus on two-way communication highlights to members Autodesk’s research objectives, key learnings, and next steps for product development. Through sharing this feedback, customers learn:

• The different research taking place across the company
• How their contribution to research provides value to business teams
• What other participants shared during the research activity
• How their participation helps influence the future of their Autodesk experience
  
  

Additional content within the Member Hub has included the impact of research, team member interviews and their goals for research, product launch information, and new developments lead by the Autodesk Research Community. Autodesk also uses newsletters to promote content and drive more views and key engagement metrics.

As a B2B community, engagement and relationship building with members is vital for creating transparency, visibility, and trust among customers in Autodesk's design technology and industry innovation journey.