Streamlining User Insights

Organizing user interviews might feel burdensome for fast-paced teams. Sourcing eligible participants, emailing back and forth to find the best time, screening, and signing NDA docs with multiple candidates can easily eat away a good chunk of the calendar.

The best user research is that which does not feel like a chore, nor does it block a team from moving fast.

During my time at Ada Health, a key objective in gathering user insights was to streamline the process and minimize unnecessary effort. Rather than crafting complex or costly research studies, we embraced a straightforward approach: “Bring in the users consistently, and no matter what we show them or talk about, we’ll learn something, every week.” This philosophy allowed us to prioritize learning while avoiding the burden of over-engineered research plans.

For existing customers, the method was easy. We began with a satisfaction survey sent at various stages of their lifecycle. Within the survey, we included an opt-in question inviting them to participate in a research session. Once they accepted, we followed up with an email containing a Calendly link.

For prospective users, we relied on our sales team to identify potential research participants from their prospect calls.

Your sales team is your research team.

We used Gong to record these calls, applying filters to detect specific terms and keywords we were looking for. When triggered, Gong automatically extracted the relevant transcript segments and created a new item in a dedicated Notion database, along with the customer’s name and email address for future follow-up.

In Lenny Rachitsky’s podcast with Kevin Yien, Kevin mentioned a similar workflow with an extension of automated outreach, using Zapier to send emails automatically to each new item and its accompanying email address. Bundled with Customer.io, this approach fully closes the loop of automating the setup of research calls.