On the surface, the 40,000 trees that make up The Pando, appear to be no different than any other grove of Aspens. The many vacation photos snapped among these trees, reveal a fraction of what lies below the forest floor. In reality, this is not a grove of individual trees at all. It is the world’s largest single organism. These 40,000 trees share a single, connected, share a root system. They share their sustenance and they communicate. Not unlike these trees, a company’s Dropbox may appear to be a vast forest of individual files and folders, when it is actually an interconnected system of information. An information root system.

Prior to this research, Dropbox was facing increased competitive pressure. A competitive evaluation revealed features related to metadata were an area where we were falling behind. This evaluation showed a feature disparity but it did not provide an understanding of what value customers placed on these features, whether it revealed a competitive risk, or where to prioritize future investments. Leveraging the competitive data and internal insights, I conducted a series of interviews with key customers to understand their frustrations, metadata feature awareness, expectations for Dropbox metadata expansion, and assess business risk.

In order to gain an understanding of the customer impact of the disparity revealed by the competitive analysis, I designed an interview that revealed multiple layers of our customers’ attitudes and needs. Were they aware of the feature disparity, how important were advanced metadata features, and what would they value most in the future?

The types of customers were diverse from banking, video production, cosmetics, and more. Despite the differences between the customers and their business sectors, the interviews revealed a striking consistency in their metadata needs and their severe dissatisfaction with the disparity between Dropbox and other cloud storage options. The immediate needs associated with categorization of content for organizing and retrieving files was not surprising, however, the importance they placed on meeting these needs revealed a key business risk. So important were these needs that they were considering moving to competitors with a more robust offering related to metadata.

The interviews were designed to go beyond current unmet needs and identify new opportunities that would go beyond competitive parity to new opportunities. As customers discussed how they would use various metadata details, it became clear that a key area of frustration was their belief that the files and folders in their Dropbox could also support strategic business decisions. They consistently shared a belief that they could potentially improve business efficiency, mitigate security risks, and support strategic decisions. Beyond the traditional uses of metadata, they recognized the data embedded in their stored content was a key piece of business intelligence and they wanted meaningful access to it. The results of the qualitative interviews were mapped to the competitive analysis to highlight near-term business risk of the competitive disparity. Tying these two sources of data together created a strong case for near term investments and highlighted the severity of our risk exposure. The strategic opportunities provided the leadership team with a longer-term vision of the business value of investing beyond organizing and retrieving files.