Transformative leader who turns under-used customer insights into KPI results.

Proven track record of integrating multi-disciplinary learning into product development practices — to deepen engagement with insights and drive business growth.

Ex-Amazon, Microsoft
20+ Years in Tech

Advising

Integrating Research has advised 35+ companies.

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Selected clients:

Advertising Platform

  • Business challenge
    In a market disrupted by Generative AI, the team was looking to leverage “old” research to chart a new course forward.

  • Advising Input
    Team can explore how to up-level and reframe their past insights as contemporary problems to solve, documenting insight summaries while experimenting with new internal marketing to increase their mindshare.

Insurance Firm

  • Business challenge
    Research team has the opportunity to annotate every major product development initiative with existing research, but they feel overtaxed by the scale of the effort.

  • Advising Input
    Team can make the most of their limited operational resources by prioritizing internal partner teams who make the largest contributions to their organization’s north star metric, then – as those priority partners’ start new deliverables – assign a senior researcher to mine research repositories and inject known insights into conversations.

Payment Platform

  • Business challenge
    Research team was struggling to make progress on plan to track the status of *all* their user insights in a detail-rich repository.

  • Advising input
    Team can pivot to create a shared research impact tracker to capture all wins, shifting their repository documentation to their highest-value insights – and investing more effort into targeted experiments to unlock more product value.

Financial Software Provider

  • Business challenge
    Operations team that owned a large-scale research democratization initiative had no idea what their "People Who Do Research" were learning in their customer studies.

  • Advising input
    Team can add new requirements for all colleagues who use research-enabling tools, requesting that they use a common channel to share their top three learnings from each study.

Learn more about advising offerings

Selected
Past
Positions

Board Member
ResearchOps Community | Remote | Oct 2022 - Sep 2024

Co-director of content responsible for advancing the emerging field of ResearchOps by amplifying voices in the global community.

Chose, edited, published, and promoted 70+ articles by authors in 13 countries.

Selected articles

Principal Product Manager
Alexa Customer Insights | Amazon | Seattle | Nov 2018 - Jan 2021

Led a new initiative to maximize the product value of extensive customer research investments in Alexa and Devices organizations, including UX Research, Data Science, Beta Testing, Market Research, and other sources of insight.

  • Increased product teams’ understanding of core customer needs in the Alexa customer experience (feature discovery, multimodality, proactivity), reviewing 700+ studies to distill 300+ structured insights, then activating them through executive reviews and ideation workshops.

  • Facilitated the distributed creation of 2,000+ standardized insights, onboarding 48 researchers in 16 teams from 3 Amazon divisions to usefully consolidate diverse streams of qual and quant learning.

  • Improved feature innovation and quality by informing the yearly goals of 20+ teams and delivering 100+ cross-study insight reports to PMs and designers seeking input for their own plans (70% did not have dedicated research staff).

  • Increased leadership connection to research learning by integrating updates into SVP-owned, all-Directors business review meetings; Directors’ own metrics reviews; and other venues.

  • Expanded cross-silo visibility of new customer insights – as well as new product wins that leveraged research – through weekly flash reporting (500+ opt-in recipients) and monthly summary reporting (executive tier and all PM, design, and research staff), creating a flywheel of insight use.

  • Increased usage of customer insights by training 300+ PMs and Designers on research re-discovery methods, how to use insights in their deliverables, and how to enlist the expertise of relevant research staff.

  • Enhanced researcher collaboration across deeply siloed teams through the development of shared standards, new info structures, repository contribution goals, mentorship matchmaking, new communication channels, and shared roadmapping.

Principal Product Manager
Retail Customer Insights | Amazon | Seattle | Sep 2016 - Oct 2018

Led an insight activation initiative that drove research-informed planning across the Amazon shopping experience in the Retail, Logistics, and Devices divisions.

  • Facilitated the distributed creation of 3,000+ standardized insights, consolidating streams of UX research from 18 onboarded contributors in 5 teams – supplemented with evidence from customer support and consumer analytics to make more compelling arguments for change.

  • Created standards and practices for using research that informed experiments generating $4.118 billion in annualized sales increases.

  • Owned SVP-level goals that drove experimentation to address top research-based issues, creating broad visibility of core customer needs, owning teams’ planning responses, and launched experiments.

  • Prioritized thousands of cataloged insights, identifying the “top 10” research-based customer problems in the shopping experience, while creating a shared “backlog for the customer” with specific insights assigned to individual product teams.

  • Immersed 20+ product teams in filtered views of “their” cataloged insights from across years of research, reframing their current planning efforts, highlighting additional customer problems-to-solve, and collaboratively generating solution ideas with PM and design.

  • Increased the adoption of cataloged research as a valuable input to product plans, with links to insights added as a form of currency in teams’ own goals, road maps, planning docs, design specs, and experiment reports.

  • Launched 2 new metrics for use as guardrails in A/B experiments, reducing new incidences of known types of UX issues.

  • Integrated known customer insights into 8 initiatives that informed customer focus, including employee onboarding, A/B experimentation training, customer connection classes, and the shopping human interface guidelines (design system).

View 20+ years experience on LinkedIn

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  • “Before he arrived, we were awash in a sea of research and feedback without any substantial insights or ways to connect them. When Jake came into the team, he started work with such tenacity and energy that he soon had leaders and practitioners with him on a journey to identify and prioritize customer pain points, and was able to get commitments from teams to address them.”

    — Amy Jiménez Márquez
    Currently VP of Product Design, Zillow

  • “Jake’s research spurred new product and design thinking at a team, organization, and company level… Jake worked closely with company leadership, design, product, and engineering to shine a light on customer pain points and resolve them. He’s a leader with impeccable judgment, helping teams to see possibilities, understand trade offs, and secure commitment and resourcing for key initiatives.”

    — Danielle Teska
    Currently VP of UX Design at Salesforce

  • “Jake's ability to deliver on promises, coupled with his innovative strategies and meticulous organization, has been instrumental in our community's success. His contributions have left an indelible mark, and it is clear that he possesses a rare blend of leadership, creativity, and organizational prowess.”

    Holly Cole
    Executive Director, ResearchOps Community

  • “Jake is a consummate professional who holds himself to an impossible standard in both the quality of his work product and how he goes about it. Pair this with his incredible depth of field expertise and his ability to be plugged into his constituents like no one else really is and you get a true unicorn.”

    — Calvin Nguyen
    Currently VP Product Design & Insights, Noom

  • “Jake is one of the most perceptive and meticulous UX leaders I've worked with, and is an ideal collaborator… He is the perfect combination of designer, researcher, and product manager all in one – a type of person I never thought existed.”

    Matthew Meschery,
    Currently Director of Insights & Analytics, Ford Digital Product Design

  • “His ability to dive deep and synthesize meaningful insight from customer data/observations is second-to-none. There is a certain thoroughness to his work that is difficult to replicate; rarely a stone left unturned. And beyond the high caliber craft of his research and analysis, Jake has a wonderfully elegant way of influencing the right outcomes, always driving high impact from his work.”

    — Reid Nelson
    Currently Principal UX Researcher, PayPal