Turning Listener Research Into a Smarter Content Strategy

Product Marketing Adventures is a practitioner-led podcast and content brand created by Elle Grossenbacher for product marketers. The show features real-world conversations, case studies, and practical lessons from PMMs doing the work. As the Market Research PMM in the Product Marketing Adventures apprenticeship, I owned the audience research workstream end to end: the research plan, podcast analytics review, listener survey, interviews, analysis, and recommendations for Elle and the other apprenticeship workstreams. I work in accessibility and wanted to deepen my research skills to bettr understand user needs.

The work served both listeners and the internal team. We needed to understand which content, guests, topics, and formats were most useful to product marketers, while giving the team evidence for content strategy, guest selection, positioning, episode packaging, promotion, and growth. The podcast was roughly a year old and gaining momentum, but decisions still relied heavily on Elle’s experience and analytics. Those signals showed audience growth and differences in episode performance, but not why listeners chose or shared episodes. With AI becoming a major product-marketing topic, the team also needed to determine whether to lean into AI or balance it with broader PMM craft. I began the research to replace those assumptions with direct audience evidence.

Product Marketing Adventures needed to turn growing podcast momentum into a clearer, evidence-based content and growth strategy. The team had performance data and strong audience instincts, but needed to understand why listeners chose episodes, what they valued in guests and topics, and how much emphasis to place on AI versus broader PMM craft.

I owned the audience research workstream end to end: the research plan, analytics review, survey, listener interviews, analysis, and final recommendations. My success measure was not a single growth KPI; it was producing credible, actionable evidence that could validate or challenge existing hypotheses and guide content, guest strategy, positioning, discoverability, and listener experience. The work had to be completed within a short apprenticeship timeline, with limited time for recruitment and synthesis. The final sample—19 analyzed survey responses and three interviews—was too small for broad claims, so I had to distinguish repeatable patterns from signals worth testing and cross-check findings across sources before recommending action.