Category
Product
- ·3 min read
Celebrity Interview: Putting a Power User on Stage in Front of the Product Team
We'd read this power user's feedback in tickets for a year. Interviewing her live, in front of the whole product team, with a real audience and real follow-up questions, surfaced things a ticket never could — including how wrong we'd gotten her mental model.
- ·3 min read
Simple Ethnography: A Full Day Shadowing a Rep Through Their Pipeline
We'd studied the CRM in isolated feature sessions for years. Shadowing one rep for a full day, watching every tool she actually touched, showed how small a fraction of her real workflow the CRM was — and where the real friction lived.
- ·3 min read
Simple Ethnography: What We Saw Watching One Merchant's First Theme Setup
Onboarding analytics told us where merchants dropped off. Sitting quietly and watching one new merchant set up a theme, without steering her at all, told us why — and it wasn't where the funnel chart said to look.
- ·3 min read
Simple Ethnography: Watching a Learner Take a Course Inside Someone Else's Store
Our usability tests happened on our own staging environment, in isolation from the store the course actually lived in. Watching one real learner enroll inside a real merchant's storefront showed a context mismatch no isolated test ever would.
- ·3 min read
Appreciative Interviews: What High-Converting Merchants Do That the Theme Doesn't Ask For
Instead of studying why some storefronts convert poorly, we interviewed the merchants whose stores were already converting well — and found a set of small, unprompted customizations the theme should have been suggesting all along.
- ·3 min read
Appreciative Interviews: What the Deals That Closed Smoothly Had in Common
We usually study lost deals for lessons. This time we studied the ones that closed cleanly and fast — and found a pattern the CRM wasn't yet built to support, because nobody had ever gone looking for it.
- ·3 min read
Appreciative Interviews: Rooting New Course-Platform Ideas in What Already Works
Before scoping a new instructor-facing feature, we interviewed the instructors whose courses were already thriving — not about their problems, but about the specific moments things went right. The features that came out of it looked nothing like a typical feature-request backlog.
- ·3 min read
Discovery & Action Dialogue: Why Some Reps Never Have to Be Nagged to Log Activity
Activity-logging adoption is usually treated as a nagging problem — more reminders, more mandates. Discovery & Action Dialogue instead asks the reps who already log everything what they actually do, and the answer wasn't discipline.
- ·3 min read
Discovery & Action Dialogue: What Managers Who Approve Leave Well Already Know
Instead of designing a better approval flow from a whiteboard, we asked the managers who already handle tricky leave requests smoothly what they actually do — and found workarounds worth building into the product, not around.
- ·3 min read
Wicked Questions: Flexibility vs. Compliance in Leave Policy
Every leave-policy feature request is secretly an argument about whether the product should bend to managers' judgment or hold a hard line for legal defensibility. Wicked Questions puts that argument on the table instead of relitigating it ticket by ticket.