ux-research
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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?
John Goleby Quit University, Shipped Dozens of Duds, and Found a $22 Million Question
Before the funding round, the global offices and the AI platform, there were QUiT T-shirts, a sugar-packet patent and dozens of products that went nowhere. John Goleby’s useful habit was learning which idea to leave behind.
Lindsey Allard
Lindsey Allard is the co-founder and CEO of PlaybookUX, a video-based user research platform she launched in 2018 to make customer feedback fast, affordable, and accessible to anyone from a solo freelancer to a Fortune 500 team like Google. A former Division I lacrosse player at Dartmouth and a graduate of the first Quantic MBA class, she ran product at three startups before building PlaybookUX with her college teammate Kristen Giovanniello. The company is bootstrapped, profitable within its first year, and reached roughly $1.8M in annual revenue without spending a dollar on advertising.
Ania Rodriguez
Ania Rodriguez is the founder and CEO of JourneyTrack, a Miami-based customer journey management SaaS platform whose mission is to humanize the customer experience. An industrial engineer turned two-time founder, she spent more than two decades advising Fortune 500 companies on UX and CX through her first company, Key Lime Interactive, which she launched from a conference hallway three weeks after giving birth and being laid off. JourneyTrack, founded in 2021, raised $1.5M in seed funding and counts Google among its enterprise customers.
Lydia Hylton
Lydia Hylton is the co-founder and CEO of Strella, an AI-powered customer research platform that runs adaptive, AI-moderated interviews and synthesizes the results in hours instead of weeks. A Georgia Tech computer engineer and Stanford MBA, she moved from Facebook data science and Bain consulting into venture capital at Redpoint and Bain Capital Crypto before teaming up with her high-school friend Priya Krishnan to build Strella. After a 'Wizard of Oz' MVP and a perfect 12-for-12 design-partner conversion, the company raised a $14M Series A led by Bessemer in October 2025 and now serves Amazon, Duolingo, Chobani, Square and Apollo GraphQL.
Ariadna Bogolepova
Ariadna Bogolepova went from a curious Suno user finishing her economics degree in Russia to a UX Research Ops team member at the AI music company in Cambridge. A self-taught content creator whose Suno videos racked up millions of views, she parlayed obsessive product knowledge and a project-management background into a role studying how people actually make music with AI. She holds a Master of Science in Management Studies from Boston University's Questrom School of Business.
Anand Tharanathan
Anand Tharanathan is Group Vice President and Global Head of Product Research and Insights at ServiceNow, where he leads end-to-end user research and AI trust initiatives for one of enterprise software's fastest-growing platforms. With a Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology, an MBA from Northwestern's Kellogg School, and a career that runs from Honeywell's aerospace labs through Facebook to the frontier of enterprise AI, he bridges rigorous science and product craft at scale. His current focus on building trust in generative AI systems puts him at the intersection of human factors research and the most pressing question in enterprise technology.
Prayag Narula
Prayag Narula is the Co-Founder and CEO of Marvin (HeyMarvin), an AI-native customer insights platform that centralizes, analyzes, and shares qualitative research data for product and UX teams. A researcher-turned-entrepreneur, he previously co-founded LeadGenius (Y Combinator W2011), which raised over $30 million and grew to hundreds of employees before he stepped down to return to his roots in user-centric design. With a graduate research background spanning UC Berkeley's School of Information and Helsinki's Ubiquitous Interaction Group, Narula built Marvin alongside his brother Chirag Narula in 2020 — this time with AI baked in from the ground up. The platform now serves 4,000+ teams and 13,000+ users, including 10 Fortune 100 companies.