Situation

You need qualitative research on a specific question — why customers churn, what job they hired your product for, or what's blocking adoption of a new feature. You don't have budget for a research agency and you can't get 10 customers on a call this week.

What you need

A list of customer emails (or let Specky pull them from Gong/Slack)

A research question or topic

10 minutes to set up; results arrive within 48 hours

Steps

1. Open Alex Research

Navigate to Discovery → Alex Research and click New Campaign.

2. Define your research question

Write a clear research question. Alex works best when the question is specific:

✅ *"Why did customers who signed up in January 2026 not complete their first integration?"*

✅ *"What job are operations teams hiring Specky for that they couldn't do before?"*

❌ *"What do customers think?"* (too broad — narrow it down)

3. Choose your audience

Import from Gong — Alex pulls contact details from call participants

Import from Slack — targets users who've messaged in a connected workspace

Manual list — paste email addresses directly

Alex will conduct 1:1 async interviews with each person via email. The conversation is designed around Jobs-to-be-Done theory: it explores circumstances, motivations, desired outcomes, and switching triggers.

4. Set interview depth

Choose how many follow-up rounds Alex should pursue:

Quick pulse (1 round) — gets top-line answers fast

Standard (2 rounds, recommended) — follows up on ambiguous answers

Deep-dive (3 rounds) — probes for specifics, best for strategic decisions

5. Launch

Click Launch Campaign. Alex sends the first message within minutes. As responses arrive, they're automatically indexed into your Product Graph with sentiment tagging and theme clustering.

6. Review themes

When enough responses are in, open the campaign to see:

Themes — clustered job statements with frequency counts

Verbatim quotes — the exact words customers used, linked to their response

Sentiment — positive, neutral, mixed, negative per theme

Opportunities — AI-suggested opportunities derived from the themes

7. Push to PRD

Select a theme and click Create Opportunity → Draft PRD. The PRD is pre-populated with the research evidence.

Output

Themed research results with verbatim customer quotes

Opportunities logged in your Product Graph

A foundation for a grounded PRD

Variations

Testing a hypothesis? Give Alex a specific hypothesis to probe: *"I want to test whether customers feel they don't have time for research, or whether they don't trust the data they have."*

Post-launch? Use Alex to understand why a feature isn't getting adoption — target users who have access but haven't used it.

Churn analysis? Target churned customers (export from Stripe or your CRM) and ask Alex to find out what the last straw was.