Call yourself a developer? How Microsoft uncovered their real developer targets

Hetty Fore, Renuka Iyer and Keith Phillips

This paper looks at how Microsoft, the software and technology company, uncovered its real developer targets and gained actionable insights into rapidly changing technical and commercial audiences across industries.

Introduction

Microsoft's need for a solution to an age-old problem – how to make sure the people they target for their research are the right people in a rapidly evolving market and how to gain rich, actionable data from those people – led SSI and Microsoft on a journey of discovery.

The journey began with a somewhat new application of traditional research – using a general population universe for a B2B study to confirm that all potential customers were being identified and included in Microsoft's B2B research. But the journey ended far from that beginning, with new conviction about the...

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