Opera Otaku

For those of you who are truly obsessed with all things Opera (and routinely browse through Opera employee blogs), you might have noticed that my title recently changed from Community Marketing & Research Manager to Product Research Manager. If you're curious about what that means, read on...

When I first joined Opera in 2006, I was tasked to help the company learn more about Opera users so we could better reach out to them via our marketing initiatives. As we all know, Opera is a complex piece of software that is many different things to different people, so we need real data and careful planning to determine the best way to let people know about our products.

After a little while, my research activities tapered off a bit, and I became more involved in the day-to-day marketing aspects of Opera, especially in terms of working with our very awesome user community. This year, however, I'm diving head first back into research, but with a slightly different focus.

Instead of just informing our marketing strategy, my work to understand Opera users (and potential users) will be geared towards helping our product managers make decisions about the future of the browser itself. So although I won't be working quite as much with the community on outreach projects (such as what you'd see on Choose Opera), I'll be stepping up my interaction with Opera users to learn more about why people use (or don't use) Opera, and what we need to do to make our product better for end-users.

Of course, we've always had employees reading and/or participating on the My Opera forums, blogs, and studying various user wishlists and feedback forms, and they'll continue to do so. My job is to build on that work, creating new and better processes by which user needs/feedback are incorporated into our decision making. In a way, my work with end-users runs parallel to the very crucial work done by my colleagues (such as David Storey and Chris Mills) who work with the Web developer community.

All that said, I really enjoyed planning and working on projects last year to encourage our community members to go out and tell people about Opera. We'll be hiring a new community manager, and I look forward to working with him or her to keep up the momentum we built in 2007 so we can do even better in 2008!