I've been researching how people interact with consumer products for over 20 years — mobile, TV, tablets, smart home, internet. It's work I genuinely love, and some of my favorite moments have been collaborating closely with designers, product managers, and engineers to get it right together. I find that building strong relationships across disciplines is what turns good research into real change.

The biggest opportunity in UX research is identifying and defining the problems users actually need solved, before solutions are on the table. When it comes time to design a study, I put real effort into making sure we're asking the right questions to get there, and I hold myself to a high bar for rigor and transparency — because findings only drive meaningful direction when people trust how you got there. I care about all of it, from generative to evaluative — but that upstream work is where I've seen research make the biggest impact.

That's meant being the person who spots the gaps. At Verizon, a VP set a goal to design an experience better than our competitors — I proposed a benchmark study directly to her as a way to get there, then coordinated with multiple teams to define and carry it out. Once I started connecting the study to what each team was trying to accomplish, the questions and investment followed. There wouldn't have been a study without someone seeing the opportunity first. At Yahoo, I pushed for anticipatory search research early in the process, before it had much momentum.

I'm at my best when research shapes the decisions that matter — and I do my best work when I'm doing it alongside others.