From the middle of the pack to the top right of the Forrester Wave™ for End-User Experience Management.
1E had a genuinely differentiated product in the end-user experience management space — but the analyst community didn't see it that way. In Forrester's evaluation, they were positioned as a Contender: middle of the pack, undifferentiated, and easy for buyers to overlook.
The problem wasn't the product. It was the story. The way the company talked about itself didn't align with the narrative analysts were building about the category. The briefings were product-led rather than strategic. The relationships were transactional rather than trusted. And the company's genuine strengths weren't being communicated in the language that mattered to the people writing the evaluations.
Amy took over analyst relations as a core responsibility and treated it as a strategic programme, not an administrative function. The work covered several fronts, all running in parallel.
The first job was understanding what story Forrester was trying to tell about the end-user experience management category — and then figuring out how 1E's genuine strengths fit into that narrative. This wasn't about spin. It was about finding the authentic overlap between what 1E actually did well and what the analyst cared about.
Instead of quarterly check-in calls and briefing decks, Amy built genuine, ongoing relationships with the key analysts. The kind of relationships where the analyst calls you for insight — not the other way around. This took time, consistency, and the ability to have substantive conversations about technology and market dynamics.
Getting the right people from inside 1E in front of the right analysts at the right time — saying the right things. This meant coaching senior leaders, coordinating across product and engineering, and ensuring every interaction reinforced the same strategic story.
Over time, Amy worked to get 1E's point of view and thesis woven into the broader category definition. Not by pushing an agenda, but by contributing genuinely useful perspectives that shaped how the analyst thought about the space — and where it was heading.
1E moved from Contender to Leader in the Forrester Wave for End-User Experience Management. Not through a single dramatic intervention, but through sustained, strategic work that changed how the analyst community perceived the company and its role in the category.
This wasn't a one-off outcome. It was the product of deep relationship building, a variety of influence-building tactics, and the ability to have conversations with analysts that went far beyond the standard briefing format. Amy's background — spanning development, solutions engineering, product management and product marketing — meant she could sit down with analysts and talk about the technology, the market, and the competitive landscape with real substance.
The result speaks for itself: a Contender became a Leader, and the company had a platform to sustain and build on that position.
Most AR programmes fail because they treat analyst engagement as logistics. Book the meeting. Send the deck. Chase the follow-up. But the meetings themselves are surface-level — product demos dressed up as strategic conversations.
What made this different was Amy's ability to actually have the conversations that matter. Not just facilitate them, but participate in them — with enough technical depth to be credible and enough strategic perspective to be valuable. When you can talk to an analyst about where the market is heading and back it up with real product and customer insight, the relationship changes fundamentally.
That's the difference between being positioned by an analyst and being positioned with them.
If your analyst programme isn't delivering the results your product deserves, let's talk about what strategic AR actually looks like.
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