Role: My role during this project was a User Researcher II working within the Grammarly Business self-serve team whose main focus was on driving retention and expansion of Grammarly Business within professional teams. The self-serve team was the arm that focused on non-managed accounts, which meant the team sizes of the accounts were normally under 50 seats
Problem & Context
Grammarly offers three tiers of subscriptions: Free, Premium, and Business, with Premium and Business both being paid subscriptions. The Free and Premium tiers are aimed at individual consumers, while Business is aimed at Business teams. The problem we were seeing prior to this research was that Businesses often had multiple Premium users instead of a singular Business account. This led to several hypotheses from various product teams working within the different tiers before even getting into research, such as a lack of awareness of different tiers and minimal value perception differences between Premium and Business tiers. From a business perspective, a Grammarly Business account provided a greater lifetime value over multiple Premium accounts of the same size as it allowed for improved expansion across teams, which ultimately improved revenue and retention. Directing research into this area would help multiple teams throughout the organization understand how our users viewed our different tiers and enable us to better conform our tiers to match the needs of those it was targeted at while also connecting to our company’s OKRs for the year around expansion and retention of professional users.
Challenges
One of the main challenges of this project arose during the shareout phase of this study in that the results showed a need to pivot our thinking of how we defined the different product tiers. Instead of using the results to show how we can improve both Premium and Business individually, I steered the conversation towards how these results show an opportunity to rethink how we structure our product tiers. This required me to gain buy-in by connecting results with company OKRs and existing data to show how this would not only be an immediate win but also a long-term win for our professional user base.
Research Goal
The main goal of this research was to better understand how our Premium and Business tiers were used in a professional environment by answering the following research questions.
- -How do users decide which product tier to use?
- -Why do users select the Premium instead of the Business tier?
- -How are Premium and Business accounts used within a business?
- -What value are Premium and Business users receiving from their accounts?
By answering these questions, we would be able to develop strategies and experiments that would help drive further adoption of our Business tier in the professional space, which we knew was linked to improving retention and expansion within teams using Grammarly.
My Process
- Communicate: The first step for me is to always identify my stakeholders and set up listening sessions with them. These sessions are not only to let them know about the research I will be doing but also to learn what they know about what I will be researching to better inform my research plan and questions. For this project, I met with several stakeholders across teams in design, marketing, product, and engineering. These stakeholders were also spread out between Grammarly Premium and Business teams. During these listening sessions, we discussed the current ecosystem of both Premium and Business accounts, exchanging potential hypotheses as to why we were seeing Premium usage in the Business space, as well as what questions we could answer that would best help the team move forward with moving our metrics towards increased Business tier adoption. This is also when I develop my project timeline to meet any deadlines affecting my stakeholders to ensure the research will be able to impact upcoming efforts such as experiments or design sprints.
- Identify: After meeting with my stakeholders and gathering their thoughts and ideas into the problem space, I moved on to identifying what research questions would have the greatest impact and lead to actionable outcomes. For this project, I believed it would be important we not only learn about why Premium users in a business environment use Premium and not Business accounts but also how existing users of both Premium and Business accounts use Grammarly within their teams. These questions would allow us to have a better understanding of what our user’s experience looks like and what they want to get out of using Grammarly. From these questions, we could also learn about our user’s journey of how they came to use either Premium or Business accounts, as well as their value perception of different Grammarly tiers.
- Plan: After identifying which research questions I wanted to answer, I moved on to creating how I would answer them. For this project, I wanted to dive deep into our user’s behaviors and attitudes toward Grammarly’s different product tiers, which led me to focus this research on a qualitative methodology. The most effective methodology for me to do this was 1-1 in-depth interviews with real-life Grammarly Premium and Business users. This part of my process where I am creating my research plan is also where I like to bring stakeholders back in to look through both the research questions and moderator questions being asked during the interviews to ensure their thoughts are being addressed and the potential answers would be relevant for them. The outputs during this part of the process were a research plan containing the goals, methodology, participant criteria, and logistical operations for the study and a moderator’s guide, which contained the questions that would be asked during the interviews.
- Research: When I moved on to conducting the interview sessions themselves, I took the opportunity to not only collect data but also to build user understanding for my stakeholders. When scheduling the interview sessions, I also created an observer sign-up sheet for my stakeholders so that they could sign up to watch interviews live. This provided my stakeholders a first hand opportunity to see what our users were thinking and provide early insight into the problem area while I finished conducting and analyzing the results. I knew many of my stakeholders had experiments currently being built out or planned and that being able to see live sessions would also serve as a way to provide early insights that they might be able to act on.
- Analyze: When analyzing results, I look to see what my stakeholders need beyond a final report or presentation. During this project, because there was high interest, I thought it was important to keep stakeholders updated on what I was seeing. To do this, I compiled a brief summary of some of the consistent insights before moving on to creating a full presentation slide deck. By establishing the clear themes early, I could give stakeholders a sense of direction in how the insights might affect their projects and timeline while I finished analyzing the more nuanced insights. After creating and distributing the summarized brief, I put together a full presentation of the results, including an executive summary, key insights, additional learnings, and recommendations.
- Share: Once I had created a full slide deck from the interview analysis, I put together a shareout meeting during which I presented my findings to my stakeholders through a Google Slides presentation deck. Presenting the results is not where I believe research ends, however. After the shareout meeting, I continued to meet with individual teams during weekly syncs for specific projects or the team in general. This provided me the opportunity to continue to evangelize the results so that they would be acted on.
Methodology
This research was a qualitative study using in-depth 1-1 interviews of real-life Grammarly Premium and Business users. I chose to do 1-1 interviews as it would be the best method to uncover our users’ behaviors and attitudes with our existing product tiers. I would be able to learn about their behaviors from the actions they took to become users of the product tier they were currently using and their attitudes toward how we promote and present our product tiers. The interviews were split into the following four groups:
| Group | Tier | Role | Count |
| 1 | Grammarly Business | End-user (IC) | n=6 |
| 2 | Grammarly Business | Admin (manager) | n=6 |
| 3 | Grammarly Premium | IC | n=6 |
| 4 | Grammarly Premium | Manager | n=6 |
These groups were chosen based on the product tier they used and their role. The role was important as the Business tier has different potential roles, end-user, and admin; a user can be designated. With this designation comes limited or expanded ability to manage their account, such as setting up features, inviting new members, and managing billing and other account information. For Premium accounts, there is no role structure as with the Business tier, so I considered the role for these users similar to their role in the workplace, manager, or IC. Typically, with Business accounts, Admins are managers or team leaders, while end users are the ICs on those teams. Including the manager and IC groups for Premium allowed me to see the dynamics of individual accounts within a team environment and compare them them the group accounts interviewed for the Business tier. Differences between the two tiers would help highlight roadblocks and the strengths and weaknesses of each tier.
Key Findings
This research highlighted several key insights that proved critical in shaping the direction of our product tiers (Note: The below summary is not from the slide deck but includes the main takeaways that were included).
Outcome
This research led to the eventual outcome of a consolidated product tier structure. While this change has not been implemented yet, by consolidating the Premium and Business tiers into one, we could improve feature access and awareness. From the business perspective, this is important because by increasing access to team-related features that otherwise may not have been used, we could improve our ability to retain and expand accounts within professional teams. To achieve this outcome, it was important I stay connected with my stakeholders as they apply the learning from this particular study to new designs and experiments on their individual teams. By staying connected during this time, I was able to have these learnings impact a number of projects, which eventually led to a consolidated tier structure that would be able to move our business KPIs.