About
Most of my job is asking why.
I'm a UX researcher with more than eight years on technical products: security, cloud monitoring, and developer tools. My PhD is in psychology, and mostly it taught me to stay with a question longer than feels comfortable. The first version of a question is almost never the right one. Neither, usually, is the second.
I lead foundational research, the early work that decides what a product should be, in areas that change fast. I care as much about what happens after the readout as about the study itself. A study only matters if a team changes something because of it. Getting them there is where most of my time goes.
Lately I've been helping other people do research well. At IBM I support a design team of 30+, about a third of whom run their own studies, alongside some great design leaders. I was skeptical of AI in research, so I built a mentor that teaches research instead of automating it. About 40 designers, researchers, and PMs use it now. I also run a weekly critique session where people bring their study plans and we pick them apart, kindly.
There's rarely one right way to answer a research question. Hand the same question to two good researchers and you'll get two different studies, and both can be excellent. What matters is saying clearly what the data means, even when I might be wrong, so someone can check me and we both learn something. The best interviews I've run are the ones where I stopped talking early and the person told me the thing I didn't know to ask about.
Experience
2019 – 2026Lead UX Research Strategist
- Lead research for IBM’s security products (Vault, Boundary, and Radar) and use it to shape product strategy.
- Led customer research that shaped leadership’s decision on a major platform investment.
- Built Dr. Morgan, an AI research mentor in IBM Bob and Copilot, now used by about 40 designers, researchers, and PMs.
- Run the workshops that decide what gets researched, lead a weekly critique forum, and mentor junior researchers.
Senior UX Researcher
- Research lead for Cloud Observability and AI agent products. Advised Director-level leaders on long-term design direction.
- Led four researchers on a large customer survey plus in-depth interviews. The findings reshaped the Cloud Monitoring strategy around proactive, alert-first help.
- Ran foundational research on how teams build and test AI agents, which helped de-risk a new Google Cloud product.
- Earlier, as UX Researcher IV: research on a telemetry explorer redesign that users clearly preferred, and on making queries easier to build. That work was part of what led to today’s Gemini Cloud Assist.
Senior UX Researcher
- Set up the UX research practice from scratch, and doubled research capacity by teaching designers and product managers to run their own studies.
- Ran a four-week diary study with enterprise customers of Quay, Red Hat’s container registry, and found opportunities beyond the planned roadmap.
UX Researcher
- Built the research practice from scratch. Owned NPS for InsightIDR and MDR, which had the highest NPS in Rapid7's portfolio in 2020.
- Found three adoption hurdles in a new network traffic feature. Fixing them cut customer failure rates 25% and raised satisfaction 13%.
Human Behavior Researcher · PhD
- Studied how people negotiate, read each other’s personalities, and decide whom to trust. Led a team of three.
- Analyzed messy real-world data with multilevel models, ANOVAs, and regression. That’s where I learned to trust a number only as far as the study behind it.
Education
What's next