User Research Studio

🛠️ Bringing processes for trustworthy insights to fast-moving startup teams
🌏 Supporting EU, UK and US early stage startups
🚀 I help you improve your Discovery, and build better products

From pre-seed to scale-up, I advise early teams on optimal Customer Research and Product Discovery processes that don’t waste valuable time. 

Lean product discovery processes for product teams with limited time and staff to dedicate to research. 

A few ways I've helped startup teams:
🎁 Supported the insights-driven development of a new product. It generated 3x the profit of product #1
⭐️ Pushed a pre-product startup to drop their first MVP and launch one instead that got customer satisfaction ratings >85% and proved product market fit by rapidly reaching first 1000 paid users
💰 Helped a startup launch its first subscription fee after 3+ years of a free product. Estimated risk of lost customers and potential new ones gained before price change
🏃 Trained product teams to run 3-4x as much valuable customer discovery as before with the same time
 

I’m passionate about empowering founders and product teams to run their own trustworthy research for better products.

How I work: 
- Team advisor
- Workshop training sessions 
- 1:1 coaching

Founder, Customer Discovery Advisor

Relive

User Research Advisor

ManyPets

Clayground Ceramics Berlin

Sold in 2023. Built a highly demanded studio space and community in a craft niche. The studio was developed around lean research, identifying key insights pre-investment that enabled us to differentiate and thrive despite increasing competition and a pandemic. I used the business as a place to experiment in business model development and service design, as well as prove that customer research can make a dramatic difference for businesses of all sizes and industries.

Co-Founder

Soundtrack Your Brand

I established the User Research discipline at Soundtrack Your Brand, putting research processes in place to better inform product updates, price changes, and even a major brand transition. I've worked with the full team from Product and Customer Success to C-level to constantly challenge assumptions and find the right balance between listening to customer requests and innovating for their underlying needs.

Head of User Research

Dreams Sustainable

Led UX Research for a team pre-product. Worked with them to establish foundational understanding of a new target audience, identify first best-fit users, narrow focus to the most important customer problems to solve, and clarify potential MVP feature set.

Dreams

Led UX Research on a contract-basis for early stage fintech startup with a product but no UXR team. Helped the team define and pinpoint their best target audiences, find barriers to engagement, and prepare for risks of launching a subscription fee for the first time with minimal damage.

Later supported their first Head of UXR by providing training and mentorship to include diverse team members in research, enable more people to lead product discovery projects, and improve frequency of internal insights-sharing for full-team impact.

Fjord

Worked with large Swedish companies to innovate in their domains, and solve user problems better than their competitors. Was responsible for UX Research, Service Design, UX Design and client management for companies across banking and retail industries.

Senior Interaction Designer

North Kingdom Design & Communication AB

Led UX and testing of a browser-based game's second iteration, specifically teaching challenging game interactions to kids.

UX Designer & Information Architect

Rebel&Bird

Led design for a major consolidation of 9 internal tools used by the Stockholm healthcare system's varied workers, including many stakeholder interviews, problem statement development, various forms of testing, information architecture of the overall service and interaction design.

UX Designer

Most startups fail, and I want that to change.
But most founders and product people don’t know how to choose problems worth solving, validate ideas, and do it all fast enough to survive.

My mission is to help more startup product teams get actionable customer insights systems in place, faster - and make product-market-fit faster, too.

I use my 13 years of international work experience across User Research, Strategy, Design and founding my own business to help founders and product teams find opportunities, prioritize better, and launch products that matter. 


I typically help teams with *four* things:

> Get lean customer discovery processes in place for more frequent insights 
> Upskill for customer interviews that deliver insights you can trust and use
> Set up systems for making sure insights are actually used in product decisions
> Use me as your team's on-demand customer discovery coach / guide, to book as needed


I'm a big believer in teams owning their own research internally. 
My job is to support teams like yours to learn solid research practices, and set up the right research systems - to make myself redundant.

--

A few current/former clients: Relive, Aumio, ManyPets, Yubo, Spotify Business/Soundtrack, Dreams Nordic, Google, Scandinavian Airlines, Hemköp, Nordea, Dunkin'​ Donuts, AT&T.

If you’re great at *sharing insights* >> you’re usually great at *making impact*.
“But how can I get better at sharing insights?” - asked four of my coaching clients recently. Here’s my advice…

There are literally *NO* people making huge impact with their research who AREN’T good at sharing insights.

But have you ever felt like your findings were ignored? We’ve all been there.

When I wasn’t great at sharing insights, they went in one stakeholder ear and out the other.

When sharing research WORKS, it kind of carries on a life of its own after the share.

It’s like Product Market Fit - you know it when you feel it, but it can seem hard to replicate.

But don't let yourself believe that successful insight sharing is a fluke, impossible to achieve on command.

I've mostly systemized making an impact from my insights.  

How?

I’ve found that when I follow a set of guidelines, insights take off like a rocket internally, and so does impact.

For research sharing that consistently makes an impact, I check the following before hitting send:

💻 Location
🗓️ Schedule
🔁 Consistency
🐣 Newness
💥 Hook
📹 Format

Details on each are in the slides. 🛝

Remember: Effective insight-sharing isn't just about doing great research. It's about capturing attention and inspiring change.

What would you add to this checklist for impactful insights-sharing? 


#uxresearch #productdiscovery #ux

Caitlin Sullivan

AI for Customer Research⚡️I help product teams run good research faster | Individual + team coaching

How to Share Insights for Maximum Impact

“I don’t really ‘get’ business” - say 90% of designers and UXRs I talk to.

But low business IQ = low impact at work. Here’s a mini MBA in 4 months for $134 (not 2 years and $56,850)👇

For most of my twenties, I wondered ≈ once per year if I should go back to school.

I believed that the kind of impact I wanted to make required an ivy league MBA.

It didn't feel like enough to be "just" a designer/user researcher.
I often felt like management didn't trust me because I didn't speak their language.

But spending $56k - $150k on a two-year degree seemed, honestly, bonkers.

And it didn’t guarantee that I’d end up where I wanted to be at work afterward.

So I spent some time educating myself.
I decided to learn “business” on my own, as much as I could.

Results are hard to measure here, but I’ve done a lot of what I aimed to -

⭐️ I’ve worked with really interesting startups and scale-ups.
⭐️ I often work directly with the C-suite and founders.
⭐️ I influence big product decisions, like whether to launch in a new market, whether to develop a new product, and which user problems to create new products to solve.
⭐️ I'm respected as a speaker of truth and valued support for making the hardest product and business decisions.

Since then, I’ve lost track of how many Designers and UX Researchers admitted to me that they don’t understand business.

If that's you, then you can learn business basics faster than you think, from many of the resources I used to get me here.

Many of them are FREE.
And the books cost a total of ≈$134.

Here's how I would structure a mini MBA from these resources if I were to do this all over again 👇

MONTH 1 -
📕 Strategy
↳ Business Strategy from Wharton: Competitive Advantage (course)
↳ Zero to One (book)

📕 Economics
↳ How the Economic Machine Works (Youtube)

MONTH 2 -
📕 Accounting + Corporate Finance
↳ Financial Intelligence: A Manager’s Guide... (book)
↳Introduction to Financial Accounting from Wharton (course)
↳Corporate Finance by Aswath Damodaran at NYU (course one of the most interesting ones I have ever taken)

MONTH 3 -
📕 Leadership
↳ The Essays of Warren Buffett: Lessons for Corporate America
Marketing (book)
↳ Introduction to Marketing from Wharton (course)
↳The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing (book)

MONTH 4
📕 Experimentation
↳ Testing Business Ideas (book)

📕 Communication & Presentation
↳ Steal the Show (book)
↳ Introduction to Negotiation from Yale (course)

Plus…
If you want more options...
↳ Laurie Pickard’s No Pay MBA.

And if you really want to learn business skills to run your own business -
↳ The Personal MBA is one of my favorite books


I’m extremely grateful that free online education exists, and that people continue to put great effort into writing books from their knowledge.

〰️
Even if you don’t have the opportunity to go to business school, you can still learn from the best.
〰️

P.S. I'll paste a link to my Notion table with all the resources and links in comments.

Enjoy! ✌️

Want to make yourself impossible to replace with AI? I think we should spend more time doing this (and we’ll get better insights, too) 👇
-
There’s one type of research that I can’t imagine AI doing for us.

When I ask product teams, researchers and designers about the most impactful research they’ve ever run, it’s the very same type. 😃

Because the people who do research like this have the best stories to tell.

The kind of stories that end with, “and it completely changed how we thought about [use case]!”

That kind of revelation doesn’t often come from sitting alone in front of a screen.

It comes from meeting humans.
In person.
Where use cases happen.
In the real world.

In-person studies are some of the most valuable types of research we can run.
Seeing and experiencing the problems that come up in a real, un-staged scenario is invaluable.

I’ve been testing opportunities to use AI in customer research at various points of the process, in various types of research.

But I don’t see bots replacing us or even helping much here.

So whether you’re scared of AI or embracing an AI-supported future role, I think the skill to practice is “getting out of the building”.

If you’ve *mostly* done remote research since the pandemic (I get it, it’s so convenient, plus…so introvert-friendly 👩‍💻), try this instead:

🏢 Visit a B2B customer’s business location to observe how they work
🏖️ Spend time where your audience gathers and take time to watch use cases play out
🏪 Politely interrupt someone shopping for a competitor product in-store to ask 1 or 2 questions
🏋️‍♀️ Find a friend who fits your audience and ask to join them next time they [do that thing you’re interested in]

Shop-alongs, contextual inquiry, and simple people-watching from a park bench all give you chances to see real life insights that bots won’t catch running remote interviews for you.

If there’s one set of skills I think we should all improve, it’s observation IRL.

What do YOU think AI simply *can't* do for us? 

〰️
And if you haven't joined yet, I just launched a newsletter on AI specifically for people doing research. Let me figure out AI for you 👀👇 
〰️

Things AI will be able to do for us in research, but it probably won't get out of the building

Two weeks ago, I asked people to 💰PAY💰 for something I hadn’t built yet. 
How I tested and monetized a newsletter overnight… 👀 ⬇ 

TL;DR

If you missed it, I just launched a newsletter on AI for Customer Research.

The first edition dropped on Friday! 🎉

If you’re curious, read more here 👇

https://lnkd.in/eK94fnQk

〰️

But here’s how I tested before building…

Before I wrote a single word, I made a pitch - and asked for money. 

(One of the most nerve-wracking things I’ve ever done).

I had a feeling (based on earlier signals, not just my gut), that people doing customer research need more help navigating AI.

It was a personal problem I was feeling daily.

But I also believed that helping people understand how to better use AI for Customer Research is valuable enough that some would pay for it.

So I tested that theory. 

Here’s what happened -

🥳 I reached 75% of my end-of-month subscriber target in 1 day, with 1 post

🙀 I doubled my subscriber target within a week (still before launching!)

💞 I got messages like, “I was so excited to get this, I think I forgot to enter my email address,” and “This is what I’ve been waiting for!!”


Plus, the first edition had an open rate of 85% within 24 hours.

〰️

But no, I didn’t do this just to gain a bunch of paying subscribers.

I spent 2023 getting more anxious about AI. I wanted to find a way through that for myself and others. 

I thought, “This shouldn’t have to be so hard!” and decided to make it easier for you. 

My mission with this newsletter:

1️⃣ To do the AI testing and investigating that you don’t have time for. 

2️⃣ To clarify AI topics in a way we can all understand. 

3️⃣ To help you finally integrate AI into your daily work to make YOU better at work (not replace you with bots).


If you’re feeling the pressure of figuring out AI for customer research work, this is for you 🤗


#uxresearch #ux #productdiscovery

If you're not using AI for Customer Research, you're falling behind.
Yet there’s still no playbook for using AI *really well* in UXR work without wasting time. UNTIL NOW…😃👇

AI isn't the future of customer research. It's already here.

Are you using it? 
Seeing actual improvements?
Or just spending a ton of time trying to find the right AI tool, figure out if you can trust it, avoid feeling like you’re getting left behind…?

I’m actually #buildinginpublic here, so bear with me…

I decided to follow the signals that keep showing up for me lately.

🚀 My Research prompts for ChatGPT collection went semi-viral, downloaded by 2,699 people.

🚀 Since my last post with a list of AI tools for research, I’ve received a ton of messages, too.

I’m getting questions like -
 - What are my more detailed perspectives on these tools and types of tools?
 - Do I TRUST AI to do any of my work?
 - Are there any tools that do [X] particularly well?
 - Are there any that handle [language]?
 - What else have I tested for research in ChatGPT?

Plus, 25 AI tool founders have asked me for “feedback”.
(Sorry guys, one-off feedback is not scalable for me - but keep reading.)

There are already a ton of tools out there, and I haven’t tried them all…
BUT I PLAN TO. 🧐

And this week, something clicked…

I realized I can dive into all these tools for myself...
...or I can answer all the questions YOU have about AI.

But I said this is me building in public…
I want to test demand for this first.

And the only real way to test demand is to ask for MONEY…

I have to do what I tell every founder-client to do.

I have to ask for your cash. 🫣

If enough people sign up, you’ll get the first issue by the end of April.


I’ll do my very best to -

✅ Provide the most thorough commentary around on AI for UXR/Product
✅ Record clips of my tests so you can learn and save time 
✅ Answer your burning questions about AI 
✅ Look critically at AI and bias, plus how tools address them (or don’t) 
✅ Teach you how to prompt GPTs like a master for research outputs you can actually use
✅ Share other sources of crucial AI info, a shortlist of what you need to know
✅ Share case studies of how companies are using AI for research 

I want to help you figure out all this AI stuff - what it is, how it works, if it can be trusted. 

How to use AI to 10x yourself (and not get replaced by it).

Want to use AI better than 99% and become your team’s expert by the end of the month?

Subscribe below 🙏👇

—
If you like what I’m doing or know someone this would help, please repost ♻️
(Or just follow Caitlin Sullivan to see what I test next).

This time last year, I was getting worried about AI taking jobs. 𝗧𝗵𝗲𝗻 𝗜 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗳𝘂𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲-𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗼𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗺𝘆𝘀𝗲𝗹𝗳…

I recently re-watched an interview with Sam Altman from last year.
He was talking about what we need to do to survive the AI revolution.

The skills that will matter most in the future are (in his words):
▶ Deep familiarity with the tools
▶ Staying abreast of changes
▶ Develop a great intuition where things are going and how to make use of it
▶ Resilience and the ability to learn things fast and evolve yourself with technology

〰️

You probably know all this already. 
But honestly, 𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆 𝗳𝗲𝘄 𝗽𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝗜 𝗸𝗻𝗼𝘄 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝘂𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗔𝗜 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘀𝗶𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗹𝘆 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗶𝗿 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸 - either in exploring for themselves and at their day jobs.

They say they’re using AI, but i𝘁 𝗵𝗮𝘀𝗻’𝘁 𝘀𝘁𝘂𝗰𝗸 𝗮𝘀 𝗽𝗮𝗿𝘁 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗶𝗿 𝗱𝗮𝗶𝗹𝘆 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸𝗳𝗹𝗼𝘄𝘀.
They don't have time to test things out.
And many of them feel like they're already too late.

But it's still early days.

And right now, mastering AI tools and keeping up with changes might be the most critical skills in the world to learn.

What's interesting to me is also that most AI tools on the market exist specifically so that you DON'T need to be a total expert in something else.
They are made to be entry-level helpers.

You often just need to figure out the tool itself and you're off to the races.

〰️

𝗜 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗸 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗹𝗲𝘁𝗲 𝗯𝗲𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗻𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝘄𝗵𝗼 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝗿𝘁 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗼𝗱𝗮𝘆 𝘄𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝗯𝗲 𝗶𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘁𝗼𝗽 1-10% 𝗼𝗳 𝗔𝗜 𝘂𝘀𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗶𝗻 3-6 𝗺𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗵𝘀 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗻𝗼𝘄.

But I know that it still sounds like a lot to add on to full-time work, family commitments…

Most people don’t have time to do all the reading and hunting through tools, no less testing them all and deciding what might work for you.
It's a lot.

So I actually started a newsletter last month to do that for those of you who just don’t have time.

My idea is -
𝗗𝗲𝗱𝗶𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗲 20 𝗺𝗶𝗻𝘂𝘁𝗲𝘀 𝗽𝗲𝗿 𝗺𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗵 𝘁𝗼 𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗰𝗵 𝘂𝗽 𝗼𝗻 𝗔𝗜 → 𝗳𝘂𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲-𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗼𝗳 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿𝘀𝗲𝗹𝗳.

I want to help you keep up and know which tools to use, with minimal effort from you.

The opportunities next year will be reserved for the people who learn AI now.

〰️

If this made you think…
✌️ Follow Caitlin Sullivan for more on AI x Customer
🤝 Join the AI x Customer Research newsletter (Link in Bio)
🤗 Share with someone who needs to know it's not too late 


#uxresearch #productdiscovery #ai

3 Critical Mistakes Startups Fix Too Late...
(and you’re ~100% certain to fail if you make them all) 🛟

2024 is my 9th year of working with startups and scale-ups. 👵

I’ve seen it all: the good, the bad, and the painfully misaligned with their audience.

A founder once literally yelled at me, insisting he knew exactly what his customers needed, despite glaring evidence that he didn’t.

That startup's product plans continued as scheduled, ignoring customer feedback.

Result?
Increased churn, frustrated users, and a last-ten-seconds-countdown kind of pivot.

Is that rare? 
The yelling, yes. The misalignment with audience feedback, not so much.

Whether the cause is a founder with blinders or early team members feeling embarrassed to talk to customers…

I give a team that makes even 2 of the 3 mistakes a 75% chance of failure.
Make all three…and I truly hope you figure this out before it’s too late.


Fixing these 3 mistakes too late nearly always causes products (and whole startups) to fail -

🚨 Not zeroing in on a single target customer. 

Too many startups scatter their focus. “But we’re not building for everyone!” they say. Building for TWO people is usually still too many. 
Pinpoint the ONE audience segment that the product is for, and your chance of success gets much better.
__

🚨 Misjudging market willingness to pay. 

It’s essential to make sure the chosen audience is willing to PAY the amount that you need in order to have a viable business.

This is even more important now in a climate of less VC funding and greater need for bootstrapping to profitability.
__

🚨 Ignoring the importance of genuine excitement. 

If reactions to your solution are lukewarm, that’s a BIG red flag. 
You need real, visible excitement to sustain a new product against competition.
New users sitting on the fence won't cut it.

Making these three mistakes practically guarantees failure.
There's really no iterating to success without these key ingredients first.

〰️
Did I miss any mistakes you’ve seen startup teams address too late?
〰️

My favorite person to talk about the “numbers” side of research with has just launched a course 🎉 If you’re in need of a little quant guidance, he’s your guy!

Product Researcher & Data Translator (ex Spotify)

I'm embarrassed it took me this long! 

It must have been October/November when I stumbled over a post that asked for "quant UX courses". Since I couldn't find any I thought "how much work can it be to do one?"

Well, turns out quite a lot: Figuring out if there are more than 5 people interested, assessing what skill level potential "students" are on and what kind of information helps them the most, gathering and structuring that information up, doing dry runs, asking ChatGPT for a billion illustrative images ("draw me five kids playing tug of war with The Hulk") and then recording and editing that hot mess. 

But, at long last, here we are. My entry-level course "Counting User Experiences" is out there now and you can pick it up here: https://lnkd.in/dr-tb_74

Right now you'll simply get the roughly 1 hour video course that teaches what I consider the basic concepts of "UX numeracy". I plan on adding things like subtitles and some materials and a collection of helpful links and whatever people feel is adding more value.

I'll have more to say on this and what's next, but for now I'm just very, very relieved that I could get this to the finish line. Apologies for the massive delay and thanks so much to all the folks who showed interest - without you I would never ever have competed this! 

And if you (or someone you know) pick this up, do let me know what you found helpful and what I can improve!

Berliners! The sun is out and so are the design events you don’t want to miss! I’ll be talking about informed design decisions on June 6th 👇

Customer insights and data-informed decision-making are the backbone of value creation and impactful product design & development process. 

How will emerging technologies reshape data-driven design? 

How can we leverage them to enhance our processes and strategic decision-making? 

What ethical challenges lie ahead?

Read on because we're rebooting the 2024 season with a special edition series of 3 meetups called #DesignLedSummer, each with a distinct theme wrapped in well-known #Berlin rooftop vibes that will leave you inspired and energized in months to come🏝️

Our first meetup this summer, Data-Driven Design 🎯 in partnership with Netlight is fresh out of the press and will provide us with case studies and examples of the way we can use data to inform our strategic decision-making along the product development process and further speculate on the future landscape of data-driven design.

Together with product & UX design consultants and leaders, we'll explore how design, with its interdisciplinary nature, plays a distinctive role in connecting the dots from discovery to strategy and delivery, empowering our partners across the tech to enhance business performance and customer satisfaction.

We cannot wait to hear from our esteemed speakers on this topic
🎯 Malvika Kasliwal and Vanessa Balzer, product design consultants at Netlight
🎯 Caitlin Sullivan, UXR expert and founder of User Research Studio
🎯 Anastasia Euchermann, Head of Product Design and Research at softgarden

Special thanks to our partner Netlight for generously providing us with their venue, drinks, and nibbles for this event and supporting our vibrant community!

📆 June 6th 2024 at Netlight Berlin HQ

🎤 3 talks + QA

🍹 Rooftop networking

🎟️ Free admission as always, tickets in the comments! 

🗞️ Join the newsletter and follow Led by Design. to be the first to know about upcoming events this summer

P.S. Did someone say female speakers are hard to find?

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