Researching Buyers Who Used to Just Call Sales

The hardest part of Zammit was not the configurator — it was understanding people who had never bought this way. For years, an engineer, architect, or contractor who needed custom laser-cut parts picked up the phone and let a salesperson translate intent into a spec. We were removing that human, so my research had to surface everything that intermediary silently did. I interviewed across all four segments — engineers, architects, contractors, retail professionals — because their mental models diverged sharply. Engineers thought in tolerances; retail professionals thought in finished shelving and showroom outcomes. A configurator that assumed CAD fluency would have lost half of them. I also visited the factory, which reframed the whole effort: research is not only about users, it is about the constraints they are configuring against. For a PM, the takeaway is that scope follows research, not the reverse. The 40 configurators and 10 categories we eventually shipped were prioritized because research told us which decisions buyers could make alone and which ones genuinely required guidance. Without that, we would have built a faithful digital copy of a sales call nobody wanted to repeat.