Product and research leader with a Ph.D. in Computer Science and a proven 18-year track record of launching delightful and innovative products at hyper-growth companies used by billions of people. Known for building, coaching, and leading high-performing teams exceeding company engagement and performance benchmarks. An expert at bridging business and product strategy with user needs to accelerate company growth and customer satisfaction.

Work Experience

Director, Portfolio Research & Insights, Dropbox June 2023 - November 2024
Product launches: Dropbox, Dropbox Dash
  • Led a cross-functional research team of 12 FTEs across design, marketing, operations, and quantitative research, achieving an 83/100 employee satisfaction score—outperforming 60% of company benchmarks and 70% of design organization metrics.
  • Achieved an employee rating of 96 for connecting the team's work to the company strategy—a 30-point increase from the previous survey and 15 points above the company average—by developing a vision & strategy for the team.
  • Optimized $2M+ annual research budget, delivering $1M+ in cost savings through strategic vendor consolidation and process improvements, while maintaining research quality and team capabilities.
  • Developed a comprehensive brand positioning strategy across the Dropbox product portfolio, resulting in a significant increase in the likelihood to trial and recommend Dropbox products.
  • Architected Dropbox's first customer segmentation framework, endorsed by the CEO and executive team, which became the cornerstone of the company's GTM strategy and product prioritization.
  • Led the synthesis of past analyses and research to identify key market opportunities and challenges, directly informing executive planning and strategic initiatives.
  • Revolutionized research operations sponsoring an initiative to implement an LLM-powered insights platform, reducing analysis time from hours to seconds while maintaining 90%+ accuracy and democratizing access to customer insights.
  • Increased data accuracy and workflow efficiency for all research teams and increased the visibility of insights across the company enhancing the research project tracker and insight library using Airtable.
  • Launched innovative customer connection programs engaging executives and employees with customers, driving a 17-point increase in the company's customer-centricity metric.
  • Informed the company's international growth prioritization and strategy through a series of design and market research studies.
Director, Research, Airtable September 2020 - December 2022
Product launches: Airtable
  • Founded and scaled a high-performing research team to 21 FTEs across marketing, operations, and user research functions. Directly recruited 15 team members including 5 managers, 3 of whom were promoted. Achieved top-quartile employee engagement scores (83/100).
  • Managed a $2M+ budget and identified ways to reduce tool costs by 25%.
  • Streamlined the Research team’s workflow and increased the visibility of insights across the company creating a research ecosystem using Airtable.
  • Spearheaded a company-wide strategic pivot to focus on marketing and product operations use cases leading a qualitative and quantitative research initiative in collaboration with cross-functional partners.
  • Exceeded an annual company goal to launch 25 product improvements, 2 of which I implemented and launched myself, sponsoring an initiative that identified 75+ usability issues.
  • Informed Airtable’s flexibly connected return-to-work plan partnering with the Chief People Officer and her team to conduct employee research.
Director, Research, Uber March 2018 - June 2020
Product launches: Uber, Uber Eats, and Uber Works
  • Led a company-wide initiative that drove a $66M projected ARR increase through a redesign of the Uber app combining multiple lines of business, resulting in measurable increases in user awareness, trial, and engagement.
  • Spearheaded market research that shaped Uber Eats' successful entry into grocery delivery, defining the service strategy and core feature set with the Uber Eats leadership team.
  • Increased restaurant selection and order conversion on Uber Eats leading a team conducting foundational and evaluative research across multiple markets for a new form of food delivery.
  • Drove double-digit growth of the Uber Eats mobile app informing the redesign of the Uber Eats logo through brand research.
  • Saved an estimated 1,000 hours of work annually developing a service to automatically scrape insights, facts, and opportunities, as well as associated metadata, storing it in a repository to make insights discoverable across the entire company.
  • Automated the analysis and visualization of customer reviews training a neural network with 88% accuracy.
Head of Research, Instagram March 2014 - March 2017
Product launches: Instagram, Bolt, Boomerang, Layout, and Stories
  • Founded and led a high-performing research team of 16 researchers, developing 2 into research managers, and accelerating career growth for 25% of the team through promotions.
  • Managed a $1.6M research budget.
  • Pioneered "Rolling Research", a rapid research methodology adopted across Facebook's global research organization, while reducing costs by 80% and improving quality.
  • Established and led quarterly competitive intelligence reviews with Instagram's leadership team, directly informing product strategy.
  • Launched Instagram Stories which had 250M daily active users in the first year leading research with the Instagram leadership team.
Senior User Experience Researcher & Manager, Google July 2010 - March 2014
Product launches: Chrome, Chrome for Mobile, and Chrome OS
  • Increased performance and reduced memory consumption in Chrome and Chrome OS developing and patenting (US8341519) an algorithm to manage tabs.
  • Launched and patented (US20150052473) a tab and window manager for Chrome OS, which was empirically shown to improve the efficiency of window management over competitors, the results of which were published at CHI 2016 (14.5% acceptance rate).
  • Informed hardware and software decisions for Chrome OS and Chromebooks leading 5 cross-functional teams to gather feedback from consumers, students, and teachers across the US during the Chromebook pilot program.
User Experience Researcher, Microsoft October 2007 - June 2010
Product launches: Visio 2010 and the Global Experience Platform for Office 2010
  • Created the first process for conducting user experience research at the Microsoft Canada Development Center.
  • Saved 100+ people-hours per testing cycle by developing a service to automate the provisioning of remote usability testing.
  • Developed a social media listening tool - Sylvester - for the Office 2010 beta using the Twitter API and a sentiment classifier created by Microsoft Research.
  • Partnered with a designer to rebrand the team's research report template and integrated SharePoint to simplify report creation and retrieval.
Research Fellow, Oxford e-Research Center, University of Oxford October 2006 - September 2007
  • Published 2 technical reports to the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), as well as 1 book chapter and 2 conference papers researching collaboration and project management in e-Science.

Education

Ph.D., Computer Science, University of Bath
October 2003 - March 2007
First-class B.Sc. (Hons), Computer Science, University of Bath
October 2000 - June 2003

Achievements

  • Launched Seer—an AI-powered research repository and tool.
  • Launched Q—a conversational interface that collects data using surveying methodologies—which was used by WeWork to measure its member experience.
  • Issued 6 patents with an additional 4 pending review.
  • Published 27 peer-reviewed publications in top-tier conferences and journals that have less than a 25% acceptance rate, including 1 best paper award.
  • Over 7000 followers across platforms such as LinkedIn and Medium.
  • Invited speaker at over 20 industry events and author of more than 5 articles.
  • Start-up advisor and angel investor.