Taking SmartSurvey into a new category
A survey company had quietly outgrown its category. My job was to name the ambition, position the product, and take it to market.
- Company
- SmartSurvey
- Role
- Product marketing lead
- Timeframe
- Q4 2025 — Q1 2026
- Status
- Live
The problem
UK councils have a statutory duty to consult the public — on local plans, budgets, road schemes, school closures. Most run that work across a patchwork of tools: a survey platform here, an engagement hub there, compliance reporting stitched together by hand. The dedicated consultation platforms sit at two extremes: utilitarian tools that can’t carry a council’s brand or ambition, and enterprise suites priced and built for a different tier of buyer.
SmartSurvey already served hundreds of public-sector organisations, and many were quietly running consultations on it anyway — without the citizen-facing hub, registration, mapping, or “we asked, you said, we did” reporting the job really demands.
The decision
The easy move was to announce a feature. The right move was to claim a category.
We positioned SmartCE as a purpose-built consultation platform in the unclaimed middle of the market — more considered than the utilitarian tools, simpler than the enterprise suites — and anchored it to the platform councils already trusted with their data. One supplier, one citizen experience, from first question to final decision.
What I made
As product marketing lead I owned the launch end to end, alongside a sales counterpart:
- Customer and market research — interviews with policy officers and consultation managers, plus teardowns of every major competitor.
- The positioning and messaging architecture, from category framing down to the words on the landing page.
- A segmented launch motion: existing consultation users first, then the wider public-sector base, then greenfield councils.
- Sales enablement — battlecards, one-pagers, demo narrative — and the internal training to back it.
- The public launch: webpages, launch webinar, campaign content, and the announcement that put SmartSurvey into the consultation space.
The outcome
SmartCE launched publicly in early 2026 — SmartSurvey’s first step from survey tool to experience-management platform, now live and selling to UK local government, with early customers shaping the roadmap.
The specific numbers stay internal. The reasoning is the work.
Reflection
Positioning is a decision, not a description. The product could have been described a dozen true ways; choosing the one that gave buyers a reason to rethink the default — that was the job.