The industrial engineer who decided that machines should learn to understand people - not the other way around.
It was January 20, 2009. Ania Rodriguez had been laid off three weeks after giving birth. Most people would have gone home, taken the maternity leave, licked the wound. She was at a conference. So she stepped into the hallway, called her husband, told him to register a company, and walked over to the venue's FedEx to print business cards. By the time the session let out, Key Lime Interactive existed. The cards were still warm.
That single decision tells you nearly everything. Rodriguez is an industrial engineer by training - a graduate of Carnegie Mellon with a master's from the University of Miami in human factors, the science of designing things around how people actually behave rather than how engineers wish they would. For more than two decades she has pointed that discipline at one stubborn problem: companies build products and experiences for an imaginary customer, then act surprised when the real one walks away.
Key Lime Interactive became one of the most respected user-experience research firms in the United States, advising Fortune 500 and Fortune 1000 companies and posting double-digit growth year after year out of an unglamorous office park in Doral. It crossed fifteen years in business in 2024. For most founders, that would be the whole story. For Rodriguez, it was research for the next one.
In 2021 she founded JourneyTrack - a cloud-based platform that lets entire organizations map, govern, and share the end-to-end journeys their customers actually take. The mission, stripped to four words: humanize the customer experience. It launched in March 2022, tripled its business, and now counts Google among its enterprise users.
My superpower is knowing how to make quick decisions without overthinking every detail.
Most companies know their customer in fragments. Sales has one version, support has another, the product team has a third. JourneyTrack stitches the fragments into a single living map - personas, touchpoints, friction, and opportunity - that any team can see, govern, and improve over time.
A collaboration suite that puts the customer at the literal center. Teams create personas and end-to-end journey maps, then benchmark improvements as they go.
JourneyTrack's stated job is to help enterprises recapture the revenue quietly bleeding out through poor customer experience - the kind no dashboard flags until churn does.
Rodriguez now speaks on building smarter AI strategy for CX - from investment to impact. Agentic AI, but pointed at empathy rather than efficiency theater.
Before there was a platform, there was an agency, and before the agency there was a question Rodriguez kept putting to Fortune 1000 clients: do you actually know what your customer is going through? Key Lime Interactive, founded in 2009 and based in Doral, was built to answer it. A woman-and-minority-owned user-experience research and service-design firm, it specialized in emerging technology and in the unglamorous, painstaking work of watching real people use real products and reporting back what nobody wanted to hear.
For more than a decade the firm posted double-digit growth and earned a reputation as one of the most respected UX research shops in the country. That track record put Rodriguez on the South Florida Business Journal's 40 Under 40 in 2014 and later won her an Enterprising Women of the Year Award. In February 2024 the company quietly passed its fifteenth birthday - a milestone most service businesses never reach.
The firm also doubled as a laboratory. Engagement after engagement, Rodriguez watched enterprise teams commission beautiful journey maps that then died in a slide deck, never updated, never shared, never governed. The research kept revealing the same gap: companies had insight but no system to keep it alive. She had found her second company inside her first.
JourneyTrack closed a $1.5 million seed round led by Portland-based Elevate Capital, with Orlando's DeepWork Capital joining in. The plan: hire developers - preferably in South Florida - and pour fuel on sales and marketing.
Elevate's Nitin Rai summed up the bet in a sentence: "I could spot the passion, I could spot the grit." By then the product, launched in March 2022, had already tripled its business and held retention near 100%.
A Miami-built, minority-woman-founded SaaS company landing institutional capital and naming Google as a customer is not the usual South Florida story. Rodriguez has a habit of writing the unusual one.
Business leaders should always be at least two steps ahead of clients. They hire you because they trust you.
My superpower is knowing how to make quick decisions without overthinking every detail.
Our mission is to humanize the customer experience.
Audiobooks and TED Talks on the drive in. She treats the car like a classroom and the calendar like a to-do list with feelings.
Before any client engagement she reads the press releases, the articles, the stock performance. The goal is to walk in already two steps ahead.
A minority woman-founded, woman-managed company. She treats clients the way she wants to be treated, because to her business was always personal.
Strip away the titles and Rodriguez is, at heart, a human-factors engineer who never stopped doing fieldwork. She holds a bachelor's degree from Carnegie Mellon and a master's in industrial engineering from the University of Miami, with a concentration in the discipline that studies how real people fail, fumble, and finally succeed at using the things we build for them. It is an unusual foundation for a chief executive, and it shapes how she runs the place.
She meets with her senior VP daily - not weekly, daily - to talk operations and growth, treating momentum as something you maintain rather than schedule. She is a self-described over-deliverer, the kind of consultant who adds value beyond the contract because, in her telling, business was never transactional to her. She treats clients the way she would want to be treated, which sounds like a greeting-card line until you remember she has held Fortune 500 accounts for two decades on exactly that principle.
Away from the spreadsheet she is a mother of two, Vanessa and Max - the same Max who was three weeks old when his mother decided a layoff was a fine moment to start a company. The story has become a kind of personal mythology, and not by accident. It is the clearest expression of how she operates: gather enough information to move, then move, and trust that you can correct course faster than you can plan for every contingency.
There is a tidy irony in Rodriguez's career. The most quantitative person in the room - the human-factors engineer, the data-over-perfection decider - has spent twenty-four years arguing that companies undervalue the softest thing on the balance sheet: whether the customer felt understood.
She does not treat that as a contradiction. Human factors is precisely the belief that feelings leave fingerprints, that frustration shows up in the data if you build the instruments to catch it. Key Lime Interactive built the instruments for individual products. JourneyTrack builds them for the entire relationship.
Her aspiration is plainly stated and quietly large: to make JourneyTrack the customer-experience platform of choice for enterprises worldwide, so they can create experiences customers cannot resist and win back the revenue that bad CX quietly steals. Underneath the enterprise language sits something simpler that she keeps repeating - a company built, in her words, to help everyone understand each other a little better.
For someone who started in a hallway with a phone call and a stack of fresh-printed cards, it is a fitting place to end up: still moving fast, still refusing to overthink it, still convinced the customer is a person worth designing for.