Managing customer discovery interview data for better insights

In 2020, amidst the pandemic, a large-scale customer research project at Zalando was initiated to understand changes in fashion buying patterns, involving product managers and user research teams interviewing 200 European customers. The process emphasized structured data management, unbiased data collection, and collaborative efforts across multiple teams to derive actionable insights. The research led to the creation of user personas and a company roadmap for 2021, demonstrating how organized customer discovery can align teams and prevent data overload and inconsistencies. Key challenges identified included lack of standardization, data overload, time-consuming analysis, and broken collaboration, which were addressed through centralized data management, consistent data tagging, and clear documentation. The blog also offers a downloadable customer discovery spreadsheet template, encouraging a systematic approach to collecting, organizing, and analyzing customer insights.