Introducing MaxDiff

A list of good options is not a decision. Now you have a way to make the right choice.

Every team runs into the same wall. You have a long list of good options, but you can only take a few over the finish line. R&D has twenty flavors for a new sparkling water. Marketing has fourteen taglines for the homepage. Product has twenty-two features on the roadmap. You can pick three, maybe.

In the old days, you’d send a survey. If you ask people to rate each option from 1 to 5, usually you get a pile of ties and no clear answer. And asking someone to rank all twenty flavors in order is too much. Their brain checks out by item six.

MaxDiff fixes this.

Now prioritizing options is simple 

Back to those twenty flavor ideas. Your company wants to launch with three flavors to start. Which three?

MaxDiff shows potential customers four flavors at a time and asks a simple question: which is best and which is worst? Then it does it again with a new set. Each choice is easy. When Listen Labs puts all those choices together, you learn how much people really value each flavor compared to the rest.

You get a clean ranking. No more ties. A real order, from most wanted to least.

Because this is Listen Labs, you also get the why. After ranking flavors, you can ask a follow-up to understand why their top choice won. "You picked Strawberry as most appealing. What makes it a buy for you?" So you don’t only see that Strawberry won. You hear that "Strawberry feels like a treat without the sugar." The number and the reason, side by side.

Then three tools help you turn that ranking into business decisions.

Portfolio Optimization. Back to the three flavors you get to launch. The top three flavors by score are not always the best three to ship together. Two flavors might win over the exact same shoppers. In our study, Strawberry and Raspberry both lead the pack, but the shoppers who love one tend to love the other as well. Put both in the variety pack and you're reaching the same crowd twice.

Instead of just telling you which flavors rank highest, Portfolio Optimization finds the group of flavors that wins the most customers. Here, the top three by score (Strawberry, Raspberry, and Black Cherry) win 51% of shoppers. However, the top three are all in the berry family, and the shoppers who buy Strawberry also tend to buy the others. But the optimized variety pack wins 87% of shoppers: Strawberry, Mango, and Lime. Black Cherry and Raspberry drop out and Mango and Lime come in, because they add a new set of buyers instead of doubling up on the crowd Strawberry already wins. Same number of flavors, a lot more buyers.

Head-to-Head. Imagine the CMO likes Lemon, but Portfolio Optimization suggests Lime as the third flavor. Now you have data to drive your decisions. Head-to-Head shows which option wins more shoppers in a close call. In this case, Lime wins 53% of the time, while Lemon wins 47% of the time. The call is settled by your customers, not the loudest voice in the meeting.

Understand the why behind the ranking. After participants rank their choices, Listen's AI moderator can ask follow-ups like: "You rated Strawberry highest. What makes it a buy?" Every choice comes with the reason behind it, in your customers' own words.

Every score traces back to a real interview

Click any option and you see the people behind the number, with their own words and a link to the source. The ranking itself runs on a well-tested statistical method called the Hierarchical Bayes model. If you’re curious about how it works under the hood, we wrote a deep-dive on how it works.

How Listen Labs customers are using MaxDiff:

• Pick what to launch. Flavors, colors, product lines. Find the few that win the widest audience.

• Set pricing tiers. Decide which features belong in free, pro, and enterprise so you attract users and still get paid.

• Choose your message. Rank taglines or campaign copy, then feature the ones that land with the most buyers.

• Prioritize the roadmap. You can build three features this quarter. See which three matter most to customers, and settle the integrations-versus-analytics debate with data.

MaxDiff also works with the rest of Listen Labs. With Research Agent, drop the prioritized recommendation straight into a slide in your own template.

This is the part no other platform gives you in one place: high-quality qualitative research and advanced quant tools, together, in the same studies. You get the number, the reason, and a clear next step.

Try MaxDiff

MaxDiff is live. Start a new study in Listen Labs and let your customers help you prioritize.

A list of good options is not a decision. Now you have a way to make the right choice.