How Northspyre's product team leverages Hubble to prioritize its product roadmap

Optimizing Product Development Cycles: Northspyre's Acceleration with Hubble's Usability Testing‍

Northspyre is the leading purpose-built technology for real estate development teams that leverage technologies like automation and data analytics to help modern real estate teams get more predictability around outcomes, bend the curve on cost overruns through smarter execution, and give best in class reporting to your financial partners – in essence a command center for the modern real estate development team.

Sandra Li is a product manager at Northspyre and she focuses specifically on tools to expand their target audience from developers and owner’s reps down to general contractors and vendors and looking at how to incorporate them seamlessly into the user workflow.
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"Hubble’s unified user feedback platform has been extremely powerful for our team’s user research and feedback initiatives. Hubble helps us by providing a unified variety of tools for us to be able to collect feedback from users while also helping us to find research participants."
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How is user research incorporated in the design process at Northspyre? Why is user research needed?
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For Northspyre, user research is crucial when understanding general contractor and vendor needs when building new products. Since we want to branch out from our traditional market and continue to expand in to others, it’s crucial for us to conduct research with various user personas to understand their workflow, needs, and pain points. As we build, it’s also crucial for us to continue to test with users to ensure we’re moving in the right direction and deliver impactful products as we continue to grow.
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What challenges or pain points were you experiencing before using Hubble?
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One of our biggest challenges when conducting research, especially as a SaaS company in the B2B space, is finding participants for our research. This is particularly true for some of the new products we’re developing as we wanted to research specifically developers and owners reps, general contractors, and vendors to understand each of their individual perspectives and needs and how they all work together. For our product team, it has always been difficult to not only pinpoint each of these subgroups of the commercial real estate space, but also specify project type and company size on top of those to find the right participants.

How did Hubble help address those challenges?
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Hubble’s unified user feedback platform has been extremely powerful for our team’s user research and feedback initiatives. Hubble helps us by providing a unified variety of tools for us to be able to collect feedback from users while also helping us to find research participants. The customer success team is always highly responsive and finds and filters research participants for us much faster than the complex surveys and questionnaires we would have to set up previously to filter users. After signing up to Hubble, I have always felt like I’m in good hands when conducting research with both outside participants and collecting feedback from our actual users through Hubble’s in-product SDK.

What specific features or aspects of Hubble have been the most beneficial to you? Why?
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One of the main features we use actively on Hubble are the in-product surveys. A recent one we ran with great success was asking users a multiple choice question on which products they would like to see next with a number of different options. We were all surprised by the results as the most voted options didn’t include any of the products we initially expected. This was able to help us identify which products had the most user interest, which we then prioritized when building out our next quarterly roadmap.

We also use Hubble’s participant recruiting feature. I find this to be very helpful because I’m often ideating for features that aren’t built yet and it allows me to pick the mind of potential users of the new features. Sometimes, getting detailed responses from our active users can be difficult, so having access to external participants can help us to validate our assumptions quickly.

For your recent/latest projects, how did Hubble help?
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I was able to draw some crucial insights during some of my latest user research sessions from Hubble. One feature in particular was validated by user feedback, with one user going on for over 15 minutes about how this particular issue was a pain point for them and a huge stressor in their lives. They emphasized how being able to remedy this would save him hours every week and would be a huge time saver. We were able to use this as justification for building out this feature next quarter, and may potentially even sell it as a separate module based on his feedback.
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What measurable results or improvements have you experienced since using Hubble?
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We’ve noticed significant increases in responses from participants on in-product surveys, which is hugely important since we’re always looking for important insights and so many product surveys are skipped without a glance (I myself am guilty of this as well). Every additional data point is key, so we love that we’re able to gather more data and make more informed decisions when using Hubble!

"After signing up to Hubble, I have always felt like I’m in good hands when conducting research with both outside participants and collecting feedback from our actual users through Hubble’s in-product SDK."