Product Leadership Research | Discovery + Big Bets

Product discovery for “why now” big bet clarity

Deciding what to bet on, and what to walk away from

The expensive research mistake is not a bad study. It is a thorough study that funds the wrong bet.

Value, Delivered

Knowing where to invest is the biggest challenge for either start-ups or F100 companies. I have found that research is either powerful or dangerous in equal measure. When thoroughly evaluated to business goals across systems, business, and market, it buys conviction. When thin and biased, it buys permission to be wrong expensively. I turn insight into a narrative leaders can act on, and that includes telling them when the answer is to walk away.

Research is validation over guessing. I lead investigative work where business teams meet customer goals directly, replacing assumption with fact. At TIAA that meant proving outside-asset invisibility was the real driver of rollover leakage before anyone wrote a line of code, and the business case that funded an 11-week AI app came out of it. At Nuveen, a fragmented-file audit and a 23% accessibility baseline became a C-suite investment decision inside 3 months.

I build the instrumentation as well as run the studies: 5 data-maturity heuristics for scoring AI personalization confidence, and the qualitative and quantitative scorecards I originally stood up in 2012 with Accenture's first research center of excellence, before the Fjord acquisition.

  • TIAA (behavioral): Surfaced the outside-assets visibility gap driving rollover leakage, then built the business case that funded an AI-assisted personal finance app. Shipped in 11 weeks; exceeded wealth-prospecting targets by 63%, four months ahead of plan.

  • Nuveen (making the case): Turned a fragmented-file audit and a 23% accessibility baseline into a C-suite investment decision within 3 months of starting. The resulting system shipped in 4 months on $250K, roughly 3% of the sister organization's system budget.

  • Caterpillar: Directed global process research across 53 sales stakeholders in acquired business units, distilled to 5 executive themes; fed a B2B quoting lift of 38% on a $6.9B pipeline and a $34M development contract.

  • Prudential: Led qual and quant persona research across 5 constituent groups, validating the unified architecture behind a $27MM transformation of a $1.55T-AUM business and earning $23MM in follow-on development.

  • Vanguard: Competitive financial and SEO research for market strategy that drove a 26% engagement performance lift YoY on "America Saves" wealth insights.

  • United Airlines: Field research and 9 airport agent workshops drove the change management that unlocked agent adoption of new apps, with an independently measured 3-point CX lift.

  • Dow and Duke Energy: Competitive brand heuristics and post-merger customer research replaced two fragmented utility platforms and removed a leading driver of call-center cost. Peak demand fell nearly 9% against a 4% target.

  • A Place for Mom: Developed deep VoC persona research that defined exactly what to prioritize in roadmap investments for a new digital self-service tied to call-center support.

  • Practice building: Stood up Accenture's first research center of excellence in 2012, pre-Fjord. 73+ design-thinking workshops, 9 of them run inside airports. Razorfish: Built 5 data-maturity heuristics for AI personalization confidence scoring.

KPIs in case studies

  • Quantitative Research studies including surveys and prototype testing

  • Qualitative Research studies

  • Customer mental model Dendrogram Card Sorting and branch success testing 

  • A/B/n Testing Studies; Correlational Studies

  • Content Strategy comprehension and UX testing success methodologies

  • Brand Messaging Research, including empathy and trust relationships

  • Field Ethnographic and Longitudinal Studies

  • Analytical Marketing and CX Performance Measurement

  • Multichannel Communications Strategy Evaluations

  • Segmentation Analytics and Persona Strategy

  • Policy & Process Design Impacts

Collaborative outcomes

“It is wiser to find out than suppose.”

— Mark Twain

A financial planning worksheet with columns titled 'Real User Sorting' and 'Stakeholder Sorting.' It includes lists of goals, solutions, and actions related to financial goals, healthcare costs, family support, and retirement planning, with highlight
Multiple slides from a presentation titled 'Journey Stage Quantitative Summary,' discussing customer experience and purchase research pillars, with sections on resources, purchase definitions, and emotional triggers.
Chart showing responses about attitudes toward vehicle service responsibilities, with most respondents indicating they are responsible for vehicle maintenance and most follow recommended maintenance schedules.
Chart showing sources of information about in-vehicle tech features, comparing the percentage of respondents who use YouTube videos, car manuals, dealer staff, friends or family, customer care, and other sources, with data categorized by purchase typ
Statistics about visual content, photography, and augmented reality, showing percentages of consumer preferences and product engagement.
Chart displaying responses of vehicle buyers regarding their purchase satisfaction, including whether they achieved the vehicle they wanted, if they went home with the same vehicle on the same day, and their feelings about the time it took for their
United Airlines Wheelchair Modernization Research Analysis Decision Tree Flow Diagram, June 19, 2017
Sequence of four mobile app screens for United Airlines customer resolution process. First screen shows a search form with fields for last name, flight number, date, and PNR with a search button. Second screen displays a list of customers with names
A detailed infographic depicting the Caterpillar customer relationship management life cycle, including stages like follow-up customer pricing meeting, final complete presentation, last call, final decision, win/loss, finalizing discount, real-time a
A detailed infographic titled 'Caterpillar Customer Relationship Management Life Cycle Storyboard' illustrating steps in the CRM process. It includes illustrations of professionals in meetings, working on computers, and engaging in discussions, with
A presentation slide explaining the checkout process for online shopping, showing a cart page, a non-cart page with a list of data passes, and a non-cart page with a checkout button. Includes a recommendation to remove checkout on all pages except th
A design guide page showing instructions for creating task icons with dimensions and styles, including examples of icons for print, email, download, and product information, with a screenshot of a shopping cart interface on the right.
Diagram titled "High-level Participant-Centric Agreement" with five categories: What I need to start, Awareness of needs, Strategies meeting goals, Monitor & Adjust, and support me. Each category contains a list of bullet points related to
A presentation slide titled 'Pivotal Moment Map Framework' by Stellantis. The slide outlines a future ownership experience grounded in quantitative and qualitative research. It includes bullet points describing narrative empathy journeys, defined piv
A detailed chart titled 'Dreaming & Considering,' divided into phases, moments, actions, channels, narratives, emotional states, opportunities, experiences, destinations, group types, spend brackets, user preferences, and wallets, with various colore
A detailed timeline or flow chart with multiple rows and columns, including a header in orange, and sections with light blue and beige backgrounds, containing text, icons, and diagrams.
A business meeting or workshop taking place in a modern conference room with large windows. Several participants are seated around a large table with laptops, papers, and coffee cups. One person is standing near a wall covered with sticky notes and o
A CX Persona Readiness Evaluation chart with categories and checklists, alongside a partially visible image of a woman lifting weights in a gym.
A presentation slide titled "Pivotal Moment Success" with focus on customer mindset. It includes sections on triggers and emotions, routines to influence, reward, KPIs, understanding, and gaining confidence, with various prompts and explanations rela
A statistical summary infographic showing research categories with percentages. On Products and Insurance, less than 8% of participants label a category; on Solutions, 78%; on Research, 42-50%; on Retirement, 16%; on Life Change/Stage, 19%; on Tools,
Flow diagram titled 'WHEEL CHAIR MODERNIZATION: RESEARCH ANALYSIS: DECISION TREE FLOW DIAGRAM 2017.06.19' detailing airport procedures from registration to arrival, including sections for lobby, terminal, IRROPS, flight, and arrival, with decision po
Image of a webpage promoting health supplements and wellness products, featuring sections on active lifestyle, natural formulas, customer reviews, bestsellers, and product displays.
Slides from a presentation titled 'Holiday Getaway Plan' and 'Pivotal Moments' discussing customer communication, expectations, and feedback metrics for a travel company, including illustrations of an airline, beach scene, and travelers.
A presentation slide titled 'Migrating sentiments into the journey' showing a partially visible map of customer sentiment analysis, with sections labeled 'When', 'Why', 'Where', and 'What if', and a detailed infographic on customer experience mapping
Screenshot of a phone bill display with a 'Congrats' message indicating the order was successfully processed and recommendations for maintaining billing pattern consistency.
A detailed assessment chart titled 'CX Persona Readiness Evaluation' with sections on persona heuristics, change checklists, gaps, and evaluation criteria, accompanied by a partial view of a woman lifting weights in a gym.
A detailed infographic titled 'Customer Journey & Pivotal Moments' by Sunwing, illustrating the stages and segments of customer experience from dreaming to afterglow sharing, including various phases such as dreaming, considering, booking, preparing,
A chart illustrating gap analysis for home assets with current and competitor states marked, displaying order of importance from top to bottom. It includes categories like product video, description, recipes, supporting products, UGC, product reviews
Three people smiling for a selfie at a workshop with sticky notes on a whiteboard behind them.
A research document titled "Discovery IA Research" discussing card sort research, including methodology, importance, and outcomes, with the Leveraging Opportunities logo at the bottom right.

Featured Case Studies

Caterpillar logo with the word 'CATERPILLAR' in bold white letters and a stylized 'C' resembling a mountain or a gear.

Caterpillar

Salesforce Global Unification Discovery & Alignment

A detailed infographic illustrating the Caterpillar Customer Relationship Management Life Cycle Storyboard, featuring various stages in a customer interaction process with accompanying illustrations of people in office settings and text descriptions.

Featured Case Study : Business Research

When customer success required product process collaboration.

Core Problem: Dealers were losing sales because they lacked the right Caterpillar technical support, not because they were undertrained. Global sales and product lifecycle processes were fragmented across business units with no shared ownership model.

Business Impact: Sales were slumping from either excess configuration or project misalignments. Leadership had no unified view of the sales cycle while profit outlooks were being cut and jobs eliminated. Global business units had fragmented operations that could not easily connect across complex organizational product expertise in quote cycles due to role ownerships and process discrepancies across the sales cycle.

Solution: Connect strategic customer success sales to unify a (SFMC) PMLC pipeline validated from global process research. Led global research across 53 sales stakeholders, distilled it into 5 critical executive themes, and delivered an executive storyboard that aligned Caterpillar's global product catalog model to one future state sales process. Envisioned with a north-star prototype.

Results: Gathered executive agreement on a unified PLC sales strategy that realigned global organization with unified roles. Supported revenue growth $17.7B (2018), a $7.2B two-year increase from increased sales pipelines. Caterpillar's total consolidated public revenue for those years went from $38.5B in 2016 and $54.7B in 2018. Led Accenture to a $34M development contract.

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Nuveen

0-1 system in 4 months

Featured Case Study: TIAA Product Ops

To forecast what’s ahead, you build flexible systems now

Core Problem: $1.3T Asset management platform across 11 sub-brands had no design system to scale future sales/marketing from fragmented files and only 23% A11Y standards met; significant institutional client risks.

Business Impact: Ahead of a 2025 rebrand mandate, unmanageable web component changeover and roll-out management with an increasingly higher accessibility risk per deployment across all 11 brands.

Solution: Within three months of my start, identified and secured C-suite buy-in. Then built 0-1 design system foundation in 4 months with only $250K in budget, only 3% of TIAA’s (sister) system budget.

Results: Increased development velocity ~41%. Removed 1,965 accessibility issues toward full compliance. Secured C-suite investment and support across all 11 brands. Shipped a new enterprise application on the system.

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“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”

— Albert Einstein

Secondary Case Studies

Prudential logo with a white mountain peak inside a circle on a black background.

Prudential

CX modernization with business transformation

Infographic profile of a 55-year-old individual named Dan, titled The Delegator, highlighting his traits, motivations, behaviors, needs, touchpoints, and preferences related to financial planning and retirement.

Secondary Case Study : VoC Personas

When investment behaviors required emotional relationships.

Core Problem: Significant disconnects between customer life goals and complex business products and regulated policies. 30+ disconnected marketing sites left customer, business, and advisor experiences unaligned, with no shared stakeholder ownership.

Business Impact: Sales pipelines and brand scores were suffering. Fragmentation worked directly against the CEO's public transformation strategy at the moment leadership needed credibility most.

Solution: Integrated 30+ marketing/vanity sites into a unified responsive site to align customer, business, and advisor experiences with my persona user-driven research that validated a unified architecture across five constituent groups. Delivered a phased design system, earning client trust for additional $23MM development initiatives.

Results: Work supported CEO Charles Lowrey's public three-part transformation strategy, which targeted growth businesses contributing more than 30% of earnings by 2023, up from 18% at the time, backed by $5 to $10B in planned growth investment.

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Logo of United Airlines featuring the word 'UNITED' with a globe icon to the right.

United Airlines

Airport Vision Modernization Service Design

People waiting in line at an airport terminal near a boarding gate, with flight information displayed on a large screen overhead.

Secondary Case Study: Service Design Physical + Digital

When CX design requires thinking beyond the digital.

Digital illustration of airport check-in area with biometric security gates, self-boarding kiosks, and signage for group boarding

Core Problem: Legacy gate podiums locked agents into fixed, reactive tools while passenger expectations shifted to mobile self-service.

Business Impact: Continued investment in fixed location tools worked against where both technology and passengers were already headed.

Solutions: Developed executive, augmented reality airport concepts ahead of the outside agency's own prototypes and recommended phasing out legacy equipment for modular toolsets with minimal risks and optimal operational ROI targets.

Results: Piloted in Cleveland in 2019, expanded to O'Hare and Denver with biometrics and mobile self-help. Program continued for years after the engagement ended for a 5-year $34MM technology roadmap greenlight.

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Logo for a Place for Mom showing a stylized bird and the text "a Place for Mom" in gray and white

A Place For Mom

Self-serve Site Transformation Strategy

A screenshot of a printed or digital information sheet, featuring a profile picture of a woman with glasses and blonde hair in the top left corner. The document is divided into four columns with headings: Mindset, Actions, Digital, and Site Experience, each containing bullet points and subcategories related to family and digital habits.

Secondary Case Study : VoC Personas

A comparison chart titled "Core attributes across persons" showing four individuals: Sophia, Charles, Janice, and Carol. Each has categories like care type, trigger, urgency, key considerations, category awareness, device + context, trust reviews, and open to submitting personal info.

When knowing what to build required market research.

Core Problem: An intake-only call center model was driving away Millennial caregivers who wanted a self-serve, trust-building experience.

Business Impact: Risked losing new market growth for generational expectations that determined which care provider a family chose, impacting millions in lost revenue.

Solutions: Delivered a persona-driven brand refresh and community-first search experience while preserving the phone channel for less digital-native users.

Results: Delivered full site vision, brand, and marketing strategy. Supported reported growth of 30% in 2021 and a $175M capital raise in 2022. General Atlantic and Silver Lake led a $175M growth equity round in January 2022.

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Product research I lead

 

I connect quantitative scale, severity, or volume with qualitative fidelity and reasoning behind your customer goals and pain points. This includes:

  1. Case Study Evaluations

  2. Business/Market/SWOT Research

  3. Heuristics & Usability Research

  4. Brand Messaging Research

  5. Correlational Studies

  6. Longitudinal Studies

  7. A/B Testing Studies

  • Case Studies

    For CX, case studies can at a single incident such as a reported grievance or multiple cases such as a reoccurring outage. Case studies are typically used in research that describes the development of an individual, group, or situation over a period of time in order to provide a detailed account of what occurred with context.

  • Correlational Studies

    Correlational studies seek patterns or relationships between two or more customer experience deltas. These don’t necessary show causal factors, rather a factors between two or more outcomes customer are experiencing. For example, determining if there is a relationship between the number of complaints during an outage in a community versus seasonal complaints.

  • Longitudinal Studies

    Longitudinal studies surface information about how customers progress over time with the brand. They focus on a cohort (or marketed audience) of customers across time, measuring the same behavior multiple times. For example, we may want to determine if customers are more loyal if competition becomes more or less scarce.

  • Experimental Studies

    A researcher intentionally modifies a customer experience studies to evaluate the impact to the experience. Two subsets is either testing a randomized group of customer or a single-case with a customer.

  • Trial Studies

    Trial studies are a randomized customer segment or cohort study of an experience. trial They are likely to be evaluated in a controlled setting. Similar to experimental group studies, trial studies employ an experimental and control group. Participants randomly are assigned to an experimental scenario where we evaluate their feedback.

Tertiary Case Studies

Dow logo with black text inside a white diamond shape on a black background.

Dow Chemical

Site Brand Heuristics Transformation Strategy

Infographic showing statistics on sustainability recall retention and Coca-Cola branding, with pie charts, images of a sustainability report, product packaging, and media links. Notes include comments on target content, product wrapping, recall participation, and media engagement, emphasizing sustainability themes.

Tertiary Case Study : Competitive and Brand Research

When differentiation required competitive analysis.

A presentation slide showing a line graph comparing performance and Dow Jones Industrial Average scores over time, with key points on recommendations for dynamic content in a report.

Core Problem: Dow's business customers had fundamentally different needs and buying behaviors, but Dow had no defined personas and no cohesive omnichannel model to serve them.

Business Impact: Risked treating a diverse B2B customer base as one audience at the exact moment Dow needed unified stakeholder buy-in for its responsive relaunch.

Solutions: Ran analytical (Quant and Qual) heuristics with prioritized recommendations tied to their business on evidence-based site strategy from sales funnel with risks model analysis.

Results: Comprehensive site strategy across multiple business units, giving Dow leadership a socialized, evidence-based responsive content and site architecture strategy. Dow's CMO confirmed the resulting clarity directly contributed to Dow's net sales rising $1.1B, from $57.1B to $58.2B in 2014, up about 2%, per Dow's own 10-K filings.

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Duke Energy logo with black background and white text

Duke Energy

Acquisition & Regulated Integration Transformation

A BMM diagram from Accenture showing the best merge method for non-residential projects, with sections labeled Account, How to & Backup, Energy Assessment & Solutions, and Usage Assessment, illustrating the flow and confidence levels in the process.

Tertiary Case Study : Unified Site Architecture Migration Strategy

When a product integration required user research.

Slide titled 'What we learned: Non-Residential - 2nd Card Sort' showing a table with categories such as energy management, solutions, and incentives, each with percentage data related to efficiency, savings, tools, services, resources, and analysis overlay.

Core Problem: Customer energy-savings and retail benefits confusion after post-acquisition merger (Duke-Progress) was significant at 43% confidence. Needed to unify two utility websites with three verticals: energy-use content, in-store point-of-sale, and customer care. Complex stakeholders and regional/municipal regulations had limited offers and services.

Business Impact: Merger left customers on edge with municipal approvals. Call center research showed that the site’s confusion was the leading researched driver of customer complaints and support cost.

Solution: Delivered a single, unified site content architecture migration strategy and portal experience, replacing two fragmented legacy platforms and removing a top driver of support cost. Envisioned a site-wide integrated storefront and first-ever customer care site from my research.

Results: Following year, customers reduced peak demand by almost 9% (2014) that exceed their 4% targets, and reduced customer complaints. Two-year revenue rose $17.91B to $22.51B, up about $4.6B, roughly 26%.

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75%

of customers say they lose trust in an organization after a poor in-product experience.

71%

of customers say they place less trust in an organization after a poor customer service experience.

GetFeedback by SurveyMonkey

VoC/E Considerations

  • 1| Identify Listening Posts

    Evaluate your current listening posts. This may include sources like surveys, social media, emails, online reviews, and contact center calls. Feedback comes in different varieties, including solicited and unsolicited, and can be connected to other data, such as purchase history, for deeper insights. Driving sustained CX improvement, LEGO toymaker collects feedback throughout points in the customer journey through “online surveys, customer phone calls, and in-store comment cards” Forrester found.

  • 2| Interpret

    It’s important for your CX teams to evaluate the feedback for useful insights tagged to common, key themes. This allows you to then begin prioritizing necessary actions to the feedback. Forrester found that Health insurer Florida Blue connects “customer feedback and data from several sources, like CRM, call center transcripts, social media, and surveys, to better understand customer context.” By using software tools from Clarabridge, it “applied text analytics to the customer feedback to better understand and respond to customer concerns as the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded.”

  • 3| Plan for Response

    Consumer feedback is rather useless if you don’t apply it for active change. Customer feedback can include both response to the individual customer concerns - as well as improving broader business decisions with policies, products and procedures.

    To drive actions, VoC leaders must collaborate across functions and embed VoC insights into business processes. For example Forrester found that to avoid metrics obsession, company ABN Amro did not include Net Promoter Score℠ (NPS) “on frontline dashboards and instead focused its employees on closing the customer feedback loop.”

  • 4| Monitoring and Reporting

    To show the value of CX VoC teams, track target improvements from the program. A CX measurement program that connects key interaction, perception, and outcome metrics across the journey will significantly help executive leadership correlate to business performance. Quantify the quality of the experience and business benefit.

    Forrester found Marks & Spencer “has been able to demonstrate the VoC investment impact an average 23% improvement in overall satisfaction (OSAT). One key market was able to show the impact in the form of £284,000 in new revenue.”

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