research-operations
(12)
Zintro finds the people your dashboard cannot
A stalled software integration, a missing error message, and 18 engineers explain the appeal of Zintro: research gets useful when the right people enter the room.
User Interviews found a business in the people nobody could find
A failed hotel app taught three founders to ask better questions. Their next company made it easier to find someone worth asking - and now its participant network is being put to work in the AI era.
Metaforms made surveys faster. Then the queue moved.
The AI company found its market inside research agencies’ inboxes and spreadsheets. Its next lesson was less glamorous: faster code only helps if the rest of the project can keep up.
The Customer Interview That Almost Never Happened
Great Question was born from a familiar product-team failure: the release went out, but the customer conversation did not. Its answer is a system that makes asking, recording and reusing the answer part of the work.
Brie James Studies the Ritual Behind the Click
At SpotOn, she built a research practice around the people behind restaurant technology. After hours, a lifelong ritual practice asks a remarkably similar question: what is someone really trying to understand?
Dscout Spent 15 Years Bottling Human Context. Now It Has to Keep AI From Watering It Down.
Dscout escaped the focus-group room by putting a research diary in people’s pockets. Its next trick is harder: using AI to make research faster without turning lived experience into beige summaries.
Brian Taylor Is Turning the Lab Into a Flexible Operating System
After a career scaling antibody production and biomanufacturing systems, the SmartLabs CEO is betting that the next research breakthrough may depend on something less glamorous: a laboratory that can change as quickly as the science.
Four Research Tools, Four Very Different Jobs
Feathery, InMoment, Dovetail, and QuestionPro all promise a clearer view of the customer. The useful question is not which one wins, but which job your team actually needs done.
Condens
Bring all your customer knowledge together, analyze it fast, and surface evidence-backed insights your team and AI agents can both act on.
Rally UXR
Rally UXR is a New York-based user research CRM that helps enterprise product and research teams talk to their users at scale. It replaces spreadsheets and disconnected tools by unifying participant management, recruitment, scheduling, incentives and governance in a single platform, letting teams run more research safely and in compliance. Founded in 2021 by Oren Friedman and Alec Robins, Rally is a Y Combinator (W22) company that raised an $11M Series A in June 2025 and has supported research with more than 10 million users across customers like Sonos, Adobe, GitLab, MongoDB and Webflow.
Askable
Askable is an Australian, AI-powered user research platform that combines a global panel of verified participants, certified human researchers, and research-specific AI into a single system meant to replace a team's whole research stack. Founded in 2017 in Brisbane, it started as recruitment software - the self-described 'Uber for user testing' - and has grown into an end-to-end product research suite used by teams at brands like Atlassian, Canva, Wise and Toyota. After roughly six years bootstrapped and profitable, the company raised a A$22M Series A led by AirTree Ventures in 2024 to expand in the US and UK and deepen its AI tooling.
SmartLabs
SmartLabs is a Boston-based life-sciences company that sells laboratory infrastructure the way cloud providers sell servers: as-a-service. Its Managed Research Centers give biotech and pharma teams private, enterprise-grade R&D and manufacturing space - fully built, operated, and staffed - without the multi-year leases and capital buildouts that normally slow science down. Companies can move into a running lab in weeks, keep full control of their intellectual property, and scale space up or down as programs change.