B2B retailer discovery across the US and Canada
Refining a roadmap before beginning a new product line.
The Challenge
Product context: A new B2B SaaS initiative to support retailers with digital promotions
Product direction for a new SaaS portfolio was being shaped largely by sales conversations. While this was highly valuable intelligence, it tends to skew to larger retailers and the insights are narrow in scope.
Before committing to a roadmap, leadership needed to know whether it matched what the broader market actually needed.
Not a validation exercise… a genuine step back.
B2B discovery has its own specific challenges.
Sales were involved in retailer relationships and were incentivised to introduce concepts and build early buy-in; a legitimate goal for their work, but one that would have compromised the research. I needed access to those relationships while keeping interviews grounded in retailer reality rather than proposed solutions.
The design principle I held to throughout: understand the context retailers operate within before deciding what to build.
The Research
40 group interviews across the US and Canada: 125 people in total, spanning marketing, digital, and promotions teams.
Representation across retailer size, category, and digital maturity.
Interviews focused on real-world workflows and constraints, not feature feedback.
Every interview was structured using a common framework so findings could be compared across retailer types rather than collected account by account.
Insights were clustered by retailer maturity, not by individual retailer, so patterns reflected the market rather than the loudest voices in it.
The most important step was pressure-testing what retailers said against what their actual workflows revealed. Reported priorities don't always reflect foundational needs — in B2B research, that gap tends to be significant. Separating the two shaped the recommendations more than anything else.
Themes were translated into a Now, Next, Later framework - giving leadership a view of not just what to build, but when and why the order mattered.
Analysis: Grounding In Reality
What the Research Found
The existing roadmap wasn't wrong — it was incomplete. Some priorities were confirmed with evidence behind them for the first time. Others were refined.
The more significant additions were the ones nobody had anticipated: opportunities that sales conversations hadn't surfaced because they tended to reflect what established retailers were already asking for.
One example: home improvement retailers consistently described the value of dynamically promoting content based on weather conditions. It wouldn't have emerged from grocery retailer conversations alone.
New opportunities were moving forward fast. But given the vastness and diversity of retailers across North America, and the revenue goals attached to this new portfolio, I was to further assess how representative the opportunities were across retailer size and category, and whether competitors had comparable solutions in development. That work separated opportunities worth prioritising from ones that were real but niche, and gave leadership a defensible basis for sequencing the build.
Up Next: Representative Signals
Impact
The roadmap was refined with evidence behind existing priorities and expanded with product lines and features that hadn't been on anyone's radar. GTM targeting became sharper — built around specific retailer segments with a clearer rationale for who to go after first. Build sequencing was grounded in competitive context rather than internal assumption.
Discovery research rarely produces a single defining moment. What it does is shift the quality of every conversation that follows — which features get prioritised, which segments get targeted, which assumptions get retired. That's what this work did.