Auth0's Enterprise segment generates $400M+ in ARR, but the organization was operating without a research-grounded picture of the enterprise developer — the buyer-influencer who chooses authentication infrastructure at scale. Product, Marketing, and TAM teams were each working from a different fragment of the truth, which meant product strategy was being built on competing intuitions rather than shared evidence.

I led the foundational study to close that gap, on a timeline compressed by Q4 strategy deadlines and complicated by enterprise recruitment realities most consumer-focused researchers don't navigate.

Who is the enterprise developer making authentication decisions today, what do they actually need from an identity platform, and where does Auth0's current positioning meet or miss them?

Mixed-methods at scale, with n=960+ signals across three primary streams:

• In-depth interviews (n=20) with enterprise developers, architects, and platform leads
• Quantitative survey (n=940) covering decision criteria, tool stack, and identity pain points
• Synthesis of secondary signals — sales call notes, support tickets, community discussions, and competitive landscape

The recruitment challenge surfaced early: enterprise developers are a small, hard-to-reach population guarded by procurement and security review. I flagged recruitment blockers to leadership at the outset and proactively integrated TAM and Marketing as recruiting stakeholders — turning what could have been a six-week delay into parallel work streams.

• The persona itself — a documented enterprise developer persona spanning behavioral patterns, decision authority, and platform expectations, with segmented sub-personas for the buying committee
• Product Research Strategy — I synthesized the VP of Design and Research Manager's high-level vision with functional requirements to architect Auth0's research roadmap and product strategy. Presented to DLT.
• Auth0 Research AI Strategy — built independently. Establishes how research will use AI to accelerate time-to-insight without compromising rigor.
• Persona Agent Bot — built at the request of the VP of Design. Makes the persona research interrogable in natural language for designers, PMs, and Marketing. I crafted the plan, presented it to DLT, and stood up the working group to build governance and measure success.
• Research roadshow — presented at January Product All-Hands and October B2B MPR; four additional leadership presentations scheduled across Marketing, Design, Product, and S-Staff.

Whether the persona holds up under contact with the product roadmap — specifically, how Product Directors use it for roadmap initiatives and whether Marketing's positioning shifts as a result. The Persona Agent Bot is the canary: adoption tells us whether the research is reaching the people making decisions, not just the leaders commissioning the research.

More detail available on request — happy to walk through findings, segmentation, and downstream artifacts in conversation.

Auth0's research function was structured around landmark studies — six- to twelve-week foundational work tied to roadmap-defining questions. The function did landmark research well. What it didn't do was velocity.

Product teams under pressure to ship were facing two bad options: wait weeks for a research engagement that wouldn't make their sprint, or run informal "user feedback" with whoever was reachable. The first slowed roadmaps. The second produced findings of uneven quality that leadership had no way to validate. Both eroded the perceived value of research.

Auth0 did not have a Research Operations function. Any solution had to be designed and built by a single researcher, alongside continuing landmark work.

How do you deliver research-grade signal in a 5-day window — without compromising methodological rigor, without burning out the researcher running it, and without ResOps support to scale the function?

I designed the Rapid Research Program as a single, structured path that empowers non-researchers — designers, PMs, and other partners — to run rigorous research themselves, with guardrails that protect quality. Rather than gatekeeping research behind the researcher, the program scales the capability outward.

• Method guidance: clear, opinionated templates and method guides so non-researchers know which approach fits which question
• Quality guardrails: built-in standards — sample minimums, screener structure, and output formats — so self-run studies meet the bar
• Researcher support: a defined point of contact for critique and coaching, so participants are enabled rather than left alone

The result is velocity without a drop in rigor: teams get research-grade signal in days, and the research function scales its reach far beyond what one researcher could run directly.

• The program framework — presented to research and design leadership, secured launch commitment from research and design leadership
• Self-Service Research Mandate — formal document presented to the Design manager defining permissions, quality expectations, and the boundary between designer-led and researcher-led work
• Research Office Hours — concept developed and presented to the Research manager; designed as the support surface for designers and PMs running their own studies
• Intake form and templates — built end-to-end without ResOps support, including triage logic, output template, and the governance artifact

The program rolls out to the research team and an emerging designer cohort, with me leading enablement and quality governance. Three things I'm tracking: whether the framework holds quality under load; whether the researcher critique and coaching model stays sustainable as volume grows; and whether the program changes the perception of research velocity at the leadership level — which is the larger argument behind the whole intervention.

Full retrospective expected end of H1.

More detail available on request — happy to walk through the program design, enablement model, and quality guardrails in conversation.

Auth0 sells identity infrastructure to developers and businesses, but the people who ultimately live with those login experiences are end users — and the company's point of view on what those users actually want was largely anecdotal. To lead the CIAM conversation, Auth0 needed defensible, current data on how a global population perceives identity, authentication, and the willingness to adopt new login methods.

This is research that does double duty: it informs product and positioning internally, and it earns authority externally when published.

How do everyday users across regions perceive digital identity and login today — and what actually predicts their willingness to try new identifiers like passkeys, biometrics, and social login?

• Partnered with Qualtrics to field a 33-question survey across two macro-regions: EMEA (France & the United Kingdom) and NAMR (the United States & Canada)
• Covered personal vs. work device usage, authentication preferences, security and privacy concerns, and openness to new identifiers
• Modeled the data to identify six low-level predictors of a user's willingness to try new identifiers
• Segmented attitudes by region and demographic group to surface where adoption is fast versus cautious

• Published thought leadership — the findings became the public Auth0 article "Digital Identity: What Users Think About Devices and Logins," with a companion piece, "Demystifying Social Login," going deeper on social-connection security
• Key market insights — security and privacy emerged as the top motivations for trying new identifiers; notably, NAMR and EMEA ranked innovation as one of the lowest drivers, which reframes how Auth0 should pitch new methods
• Regional adoption map — identified which groups update devices more frequently and are more open to new identifiers, versus the more cautious EMEA and NAMR segments
• Open data — published the underlying dataset for the community to interrogate, reinforcing Auth0's credibility

Whether the "innovation is a weak driver" finding holds across future waves — if security and privacy keep beating novelty as adoption motivators, that's a durable signal for how the whole industry should frame passwordless and passkey rollouts. The survey is designed to be repeatable, so the real value compounds as it becomes a trend line rather than a snapshot.

Black girls live at the intersection of anti-Black racism, heteronormative patriarchy, and the structures that consistently read their bodies as older, more knowing, and more sexual than they are. Academic literature on girlhood and sexualization rarely centers Black girls' own voices or employs a Black feminist lens. This study was built to close that gap — to let Black girls speak for themselves about the difference between being sexual and being sexualized.

Published in Visual Arts Research (University of Illinois Press), the work sits at the intersection of UX research methods, arts-based inquiry, and Black feminist theory.

• How is sexual performance understood and embodied by Black girls?
• What are the ways Black girls create and transgress power with their sexuality?

A phenomenological pilot study grounded in Black Feminist Thought (Collins) and a womanist perspective, designed with an anti-respectability methodology that treats participants as autonomous agents rather than subjects to be interpreted.

• Participants: three Black women aged 18–21 in the southeastern United States, recruited via snowball sampling
• Instrument: tactile braiding of plastic lanyard string — an artifact of childhood — used to facilitate memory and dialogue during interviews; participants named and labeled spools by the feelings and memories each color evoked
• Collection: one focus group and one semi-structured interview (the design adapted mid-study for COVID-19), each 60–90 minutes, recorded and transcribed
• Analysis: multiple coding cycles in NVivo to surface significant statements and themes
• Positionality: as researcher/co-participant, I braided alongside the girls and shared my own girlhood — deliberately collapsing the researcher-subject power dynamic

Three thematic concepts structured the findings, tracing how the girls move from external projection to self-definition:

• My Body as… — body-acceptance and self-esteem negotiated against how society reads and monitors Black women's bodies
• They Tell Me My Body… — the societal and interpersonal projections (should be feminine, should be controlled, will be consumed) mapped onto their personhood
• My Body's Sexuality Is… — the girls' own self-definition, distinguishing being sexual (deliberate, confident, self-authored) from being sexualized (unwanted, externally imposed)

The throughline: Black girls practice self-definition and agency, curating their own girlhood in the face of structures designed to define it for them.

This is the methodological root of how I research today: centering the people closest to the problem, designing instruments that lower the power gap between researcher and participant, and treating lived experience as rigorous evidence. The discipline of phenomenological coding, the ethics of positionality, and the commitment to letting participants speak for themselves carry directly into enterprise research practice.

Google Photos wanted to let people search their own galleries the way they search Google — type what you remember, find the photo. The team was prototyping a new search experience for Android and web, and needed two things at once: a foundational understanding of how people actually navigate and retrieve their memories, and an evaluation of whether the prototype delivered on that behavior. The work also carried a business edge — search is one of the few credible paths to monetizing a photos product beyond ads.

I led the research end to end, ramping up on prior search-journey foundations and turning them into an actionable study.

• How, why, and what are people searching for when they look for their own photos?
• Does the prototype's search direction match real retrieval behavior — and is it usable, fair, and safe?

I evaluated the proposed method and inverted it: rather than interviews first, I ran a 4-day diary study, then interviews — so I'd have real behavioral context before going deep, and could select participants who used multiple search methods for the prototype deep-dive.

• Diary study: 28 participants over 4 days (including 6 Gen Z users — a critical segment), fielded in dscout. Day 1 captured general photo-app usage, Day 2 focused on Google Photos specifically, Day 3 ran scenario-based retrieval tasks (find something recent, a screenshot, a person, a place). Mixed instrumentation: Likert scales, screen recordings, short answer, multiple choice.
• Follow-up interviews: 10 one-hour sessions — 45 minutes deepening diary responses and search expectations, final 15 minutes on live prototype testing (find a favorite photo, try queries for hard-to-find content).
• Survey signal: launched an in-app HaTS survey program — 4 surveys yielding ~19,000 close-ended data points and 178 open-ended responses — to size awareness and quality at scale.

I looped engineers, PM, and design into the study-guide design and learned to address each stakeholder in their own language: syncing live with the PM (who wanted strategic direction) rather than async, demoing prototypes with engineers (who wanted functionality answers), and working with the designer on usability and placement. Aligning the study to product goals up front meant the readouts landed as decisions, not just findings.

• Two readouts from a large data set — one on the user search journey and which search tools needed refinement to build reliability and trust, one on segment perception (especially Gen Z) and the need to raise search awareness through educational cues
• Tactical signal for engineers on the label-free prototype direction, plus strategic input on overall search property direction
• Behavioral signal on how users actually search — by scrolling, by search bar, or via AI categories — making memories more findable
• A usability-baselining proposal I initiated in anticipation of the label-free release: reviewing critical user journeys both to assess usability and to act as a metric for feature efficacy going forward

The label-free, ML-driven search direction shipped into a product used by billions. Beyond the launch, the lasting contribution was methodological: proposing a usability baseline as an ongoing efficacy metric — moving research from one-time validation toward continuous measurement of whether the feature actually works for people.

For Microsoft to "empower every customer," the people building products have to actually talk to them — not just UX researchers, and not just occasionally. The challenge: customer research doesn't scale if it stays locked inside a research team. It has to become infrastructure that PMs, engineers, and designers can all use, without sacrificing rigor or compliance.

I helped run the Customer Connection programs inside Experiences & Devices (E+D) — the function that embeds customer contact into the product development cycle at both generative and evaluative stages.

Scale customer interaction and democratize customer research, measured and backed at the executive level:

• An annual survey of 4,500 responses (fielded via Qualtrics) found that over 70% of E+D employees had at least one direct customer interaction — a result tied to a CVP-level OKR
• 77% of program attendees were repeats, embedding the programs into teams' product development cycles across discover, design, and deliver phases (e.g. Surface Duo 2)
• The audience was deliberately cross-functional: PMs, engineers, UX designers, and researchers together

Meeting teams where they were — hosting both general and team-focused research programs, leading end to end:

• Operations: recruitment, screener drafting, event logistics, customer profiles
• Research: discussion guides, moderating focus groups, facilitating debriefs, presenting prototypes
• Recruitment at scale: managed third-party vendors (URI, Caleus, Experis) and panel recruitment via usertesting.com, maintaining GDPR compliance throughout

The durable contribution wasn't any single study — it was the system that made research repeatable and shareable:

• A shareable research repository ensuring insights didn't die in silos — with edited recordings, sensemaking documents, and reports stored for org-wide reuse
• Playbooks on program research methods and the rationale behind why Customer Connection programs exist
• Standardized artifacts: note-taking templates, best-practice guides, and standardized screener questions for customer profiles, with semi-annual audits alongside subject-matter experts
• Communication surfaces: a Customer Connection newsletter, program events, and a research summit to keep the function visible and growing

This is research operations and enablement at enterprise scale — the same discipline I now lead at Auth0 with the Rapid Research Program. Democratizing research without lowering its quality bar requires governance, templates, and a clear point of view on why the work matters. Getting 70% of an org to talk to customers isn't a study; it's a system, and an executive-backed cultural shift.