Customer research plan template
Clarify research goals, identify customer segments, and choose your methods
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About the customer research plan template
Understanding customers is essential to building a lovable product. The more you learn about who your customers are and what they need, the better you can solve their problems. This template provides a central place to capture your overall strategy and plans for customer research — including objectives, focus areas, and customer profiles.
Included in the customer research plan template
This customer research plan template includes capabilities like:
Structure to help you capture and organize key customer details
Quick-access to best practices
A rich text editor to format content clearly
Built-in AI writing assistant to help you research, write, and revise
Inline comments to gather feedback, questions, and ideas from teammates
Overview of the customer research plan template
Use this template to outline and manage your approach to customer research. Suggested sections prompt you to identify objectives, target customers, research methods, and more. By documenting this information, you prepare the team to conduct research into what customers need in a thorough and data-driven way.
Once the details are filled in, refer to this template to help confirm or deny assumptions. What do your customers want? How do they use your product? What is their overall experience? By collecting and analyzing the relevant information in one place, you can better answer questions like these and determine the right opportunities to pursue.
How to use the customer research plan template
Establish a plan for conducting customer research that will help you make more informed product decisions.
Start with objectives: Know what you want to achieve. Set goals that are purposeful, measurable, and support the overall product direction. The insights you gather are only beneficial if you know what decisions they will influence.
Specify focus areas: Decide what to include in your research efforts, such as a group of related ideas or upcoming features.
Concentrate on the right customers: Identify target personas, customer segments, and organizations that will gain the most value from the ideas and features you want to research. Layer in other information, like product usage data, to further inform who you reach out to.
Select methods and set a timeline: Balance quantitative and qualitative research methods so you can consider hard numbers alongside human insights. Note research activities, what needs to happen, and when. @Mention teammates in the template to keep everyone aligned on the plan.
Summarize and analyze: Distill learnings into a concise summary that folks can digest, and capture any action items that require follow-up.
FAQs about the customer research plan template
Why is a customer research plan important?
The most important input about your product will likely come from customers. A strong customer research plan can help product managers organize and analyze customer feedback in a consistent way. This allows teams to identify data-driven insights and make more customer-focused product decisions.
What are some customer research plan best practices?
Define your research goals first. Then choose your methods for gathering data — such as surveys, interviews, or product analytics. As you design your research plan, ask for input from cross-functional teams so everyone can align on the process for customer outreach.
Who is this customer research plan template for?
This customer research plan template is designed for product managers, but members of other teams can benefit, too. Marketers, UX designers, and anyone involved in the product development process can use insights gained from a customer research plan to help understand and prioritize user needs.
Is this template free to use?
Yes. To use this customer research plan template, sign up for a free 30-day trial of Aha! Whiteboards. (You can also try this template in Aha! Roadmaps if you need a complete product management solution.) Easily customize the template to suit your needs and then share it with as many people as you want (for free) to streamline collaboration.
