I help leaders understand who their customers really are, what they actually need, and what to do about it.
Especially when the cost of guessing wrong is high.
Let's talk →Every engagement is different. The pattern is the same: research that grounds decisions in reality and prevents expensive mistakes.
Research-driven shift to prioritize buyer confidence helped improve TrustPilot scores from 3.0 to 4.2. Prevented an estimated 12 weeks of wasted engineering time and millions in misdirected marketing spend.
Strategic research shifted hardware investment strategy, contributing to Lime's rise from #2 to #1 global market position. Influenced industrial design of the Time Magazine Best Invention-winning LimeGlider. Shaped three successive 6-month roadmap planning cycles.
Directed research supporting FDA approval pathway for the Enso pain reduction device and computer vision-powered exercise therapy launch. 1M+ members, 2,000+ enterprise clients.
A 2-week, 3-city research sprint directly inspired what became Uber Rewards. Created rider segmentation integrated into Uber's experimentation platform. Achieved 95th percentile team engagement scores.
Qualitative and mixed-method research that surfaces the blindspots behind your dashboards — the motivations, friction points, and unmet needs that explain what your data can't.
Concept testing, customer segmentation, and foundational research that gives your team the direction to prioritize ruthlessly and invest in what actually moves the needle.
From standing up a practice from scratch to elevating an existing team — research operations, stakeholder engagement, and the infrastructure to make insights stick across your org.
I do my best work with companies that have product-market fit and are ready to deeply understand their customers — but aren't yet sure what the research function should look like.
After scaling research teams to 20+ at companies like Uber, Twitter, and Yahoo, I deliberately moved closer to the work. I spent years as a founding researcher at high-growth startups — building practices from zero, conducting the studies that shaped strategy, sitting in the room when decisions were made.
That combination is rare: the organizational knowledge of someone who has built 20-person teams, and the craft of someone who still does the research. Fractional work lets me bring both to companies that need both — but aren't ready for a full-time hire at this level.
I'm trained as an anthropologist (MA, American University). That matters because your users — whether they're clinicians, engineers, or lawyers — have professional cultures, workflows, and unspoken norms that surveys alone won't reveal. Understanding expert users requires deep, contextual inquiry. That's what anthropology is built for.
I'm energized by impact, not research theater.
I take on 1–2 engagements at a time. Let's find out if this is the right fit.
I'll be in touch within two business days.