Contentful
Turning 900 voices into a product strategy for Contentful
We partnered with Contentful to explore the largely uncharted world of content specialists — the people who plan, create, and manage digital content every day. Through global research spanning four countries, we identified the core jobs, unmet needs, and market opportunities that shaped Contentful's app strategy for the next three years.
Outcomes
- Identified 25 Jobs to Be Done across five phases of the content creation journey, sized by importance and market appetite
- Developed three customer archetypes — the Connectors, Scalers, and Sharpeners — to guide product design and go-to-market messaging
- Prioritised five high-value app opportunities for near-term development based on desirability and feasibility analysis
- Delivered a 155-page strategic report that informed three years of Contentful's product development
- Created a reusable Job Complexity Framework and enablers/blockers analysis for decision makers
Beyond the developer: a new audience to understand
Contentful had established itself as a leading headless CMS for developer teams. But their ambition went further — they wanted to become indispensable for content specialists too.
The challenge was that this audience was vast, diverse, and poorly understood. Content specialists span every industry, from healthcare to retail, working in teams of all sizes, and their needs vary based on seniority and role scope.
Contentful needed to understand who these people are, what jobs they're trying to get done, and where current tools fall short — or push people towards clunky workarounds.
Listening at scale across four continents
We designed a mixed-methods research program combining depth with breadth. Our team conducted 37 hour-long discovery interviews with content specialists across Australia, the USA, Canada, and Europe — exploring their day-to-day responsibilities, motivations, and pain points.
Alongside this, we ran a quantitative survey capturing 909 responses from the same four markets. Using a Jobs to Be Done framework, we mapped every task content specialists perform across the entire content value chain, from strategy and planning through to performance reporting.
Nine key findings from our research, mapping 25 core Jobs to Be Done across five phases of the content creation journey.
A new lens on content work — and a clear path forward
Our research revealed that content specialists' work encompasses 25 distinct jobs across five phases, from planning and strategy to performance monitoring. We developed a Job Complexity Framework that maps these jobs by process complexity and collaboration needs, showing where tools can add the most value.
Three customer archetypes emerged — the Connectors, the Scalers, and the Sharpeners — each with distinct growth trajectories that Contentful could align their product and messaging around. Five high-priority job opportunities were identified for near-term app development, grounded in both desirability data and proximity to the existing platform.
You've helped me understand my own discipline (content) in a new way
— Contentful CEO
