From questions to clarity: How UX research drives startup success

“How fast can we get feedback on this feature?” The founder’s initial question was pragmatic and familiar—focused on speed, progress, and quick wins. Like many startup founders, he was in constant motion, juggling late nights and relentless priorities like working towards a next raise, managing all senior team members, and delivering investor updates. Research felt like a luxury he couldn’t afford—a slow detour on the highway of building fast and breaking things.

But as Amanda began asking questions about his users’ workflows, challenges, and unmet needs, a shift started to happen. He began to see his product not just as a set of features but as a tool that could seamlessly enhance and complement the established workflows of clerks and judges.

By the end of our collaboration, the founder was no longer just a skeptic of research. He introduced Amanda to his network as “my digital ethnographer,” an advocate for research as the foundation of his product’s success and a selling point to customers. The research didn’t just shape one feature—it clarified his product’s value proposition, revealed pain points he hadn’t considered, and aligned his team around a clear, actionable roadmap.

Skipping research in the early stages can feel like the faster, leaner choice, but it often leads to shaky foundations and costly mistakes. Founders who invest in understanding their users deeply—from day-to-day frustrations to aspirational goals—find not just answers, but clarity and focus. This is the story of how research transformed one founder’s vision, and how it can transform yours, too.

Amanda drives end-to-end research for early-stage startups, shaping visionary products with actionable insights. Mel coaches founders to build with purpose, ensuring they ask the right questions and conduct the right research at the right time. Together, we’ve seen how startups thrive when they make research a priority.

In this piece, we’ll share our experience, offering questions to guide founders on the hows and whys of research for startups.

We often see startup founders gravitate toward fast and low-cost research methods. Surveys and unmoderated usability tests are especially common approaches. Platforms that offer pre-recruited participants make these methods fast and easy to execute.

This approach has its merits: it’s quick, cheap, and produces visible results. For example, “Prototype A performs better than Prototype B.” or “Feature X is rated as more useful than Feature Y.”  They can be completed in days and create a sense of immediate progress. But it has a major downside. This transactional approach often avoids the deeper questions that challenge a product’s core assumptions, value, or purpose.

While pragmatic in certain situations, transactional research can feel like a checkbox activity: founders can claim they’ve done “user research” and gather clean, quantifiable data. This approach makes sense when resources are limited, and teams need fast wins to show momentum.

But this kind of research doesn’t reveal the deeper insights that drive innovation or long-term success.

Relational research focuses on understanding users at a foundational level. It delivers long-term gains while also uncovering quick wins through focused, actionable insights—a balance that’s key to driving immediate and lasting success. While the results might not be overnight, they are transformative. Founders who invest in relational research gain clarity on user needs, avoid costly missteps, and reduce the risk of building the wrong thing. This type of research answers big, existential questions:

Relational research provides a richer understanding of the jobs users are trying to get done. It aligns the product’s value proposition with real user needs, paving the way for product-market fit.

Skipping relational research can lead to:

Startups that embrace relational research don’t just gather data—they build relationships with their users. This investment creates clarity, de-risks decisions, and ensures the product evolves in the right direction.

Amanda teamed up with Learned Hand, a startup building AI tools for the US court system. This has been a relational research effort that shaped the product, generating strategic clarity all the while earning the founder’s trust.

Learned Hand prioritized relational research from the outset, focusing on deeply understanding federal clerks’ and judges’ workflows before diving into product development. This meant conducting in-depth interviews to map out their daily tasks, pain points, and decision-making processes, and observing how they interacted with existing tools to identify gaps and opportunities. Without this step, we risked building tools that might add complexity instead of simplifying their work—tools that failed to align with their needs, or worse, disrupted their established workflows. By taking this phased approach, we ensured that every feature we developed addressed real problems, resulting in tools that seamlessly integrated into their routines and delivered meaningful value.

We began with deep-dive interviews to understand the day-to-day experiences of clerks and judges. For example, we didn’t just ask, “What’s your biggest pain point?” (a typical transactional research question). Instead, we asked them to walk us through a recent case, step by step, noting when they felt efficient and when frustrations arose.

This approach revealed detailed insights, like how clerks often spend hours manually formatting legal documents because existing tools fail to adapt to the nuances of different court systems. It also uncovered hidden bottlenecks, such as judges struggling to quickly retrieve prior rulings on niche topics due to poorly indexed systems. By layering follow-up questions around their workarounds: 

While tapping into unmet needs: 

We moved beyond surface-level feedback into uncovering hidden opportunities and product requirements.

Unlike transactional research—which might focus on usability or preferences (e.g., “Do you like Tool A or Tool B better?”)—our foundational approach provided context, patterns, and systemic issues. This allowed us to design solutions that addressed root problems rather than patching superficial ones, ensuring our tools seamlessly fit into their workflows and added real value.

From these conversations, we created a journey map and identified key pain points, like the overwhelming task of synthesizing case law under tight deadlines. These insights didn’t just live in a report—they became highlight videos, onboarding materials, and a "Top 10 Insights" document that the team could use immediately. Let’s make it clear: As a result, our work was thoughtful. But its intentionality didn’t come from how long it took for us to do it or how resource-heavy it was. As the images show, our work wasn’t polished, but it brought key insights that offered clarity on how to move forward for our early-stage startup. 

Research alone doesn’t drive action—it’s the bridge between understanding and strategy, ensuring that insights lead to focused, impactful decisions. To make this connection at Learned Hand, we ran workshops with the founder, CTO, and chief of staff to align on the company’s “why,” set decision-making criteria, and draft a six-month roadmap.

Creating a strategic vision for Learned Hand required a carefully structured workshop that integrated the founders’ aspirations with the rich data gathered from user research. The process combined reflective exercises with actionable frameworks to align the team on mission, vision, and product direction. Here's how the workshop unfolded:

To begin, we immersed participants in the founders’ vision by conducting an Amazon-style reading of multiple manifestos written by the founder. Each participant engaged deeply with these documents, highlighting key phrases and ideas that reflected mission, vision, and product foundations. This exercise sparked meaningful discussions, helping to distill the company’s core purpose and guiding principles.

The next step was to connect this vision to real-world insights from over 15 hours of interviews and 100+ pages of transcripts with current and former clerks, district and appellate judges, mediators, and arbitrators. To synthesize these findings, we created highlight videos showcasing recurring pain points and opportunities. During the workshop, participants practiced “first principles processing” by analyzing these clips and recording their notes and observations on post-its. This hands-on activity allowed the team to draw direct connections between user needs and potential product solutions.

With a strong foundation of insights, we moved into a collaborative product pyramid exercise. Participants carried over their post-its from the highlight video analysis, using them to populate each layer of the pyramid: mission, vision, strategic focus areas, and key product features. This framework helped the team prioritize features that aligned with Learned Hand’s overarching goals while remaining grounded in user pain points and areas of opportunity.

Finally, we set the stage for product prioritization by asking participants to come prepared to the next workshop with their top 3-5 features, ready to defend them with evidence from the research findings. We also established criteria for decision-making, focusing on impact, feasibility, and alignment with the strategic vision. By grounding prioritization in both user data and business values, the team ensured that every feature idea served a clear purpose in achieving its goals.

With the strategic vision in place, the next step was translating it into actionable product requirements. This is where my role shifted into leading the process of writing product requirement documents (PRDs) in close collaboration with the founder and CTO. The founder, drawing on his deep understanding of the legal landscape, keen intuition, and sharp intellect, brought a wealth of ideas and a clear vision for the product's potential.

Through some late-night chats and voice notes, Amanda was able to capture this deep understanding and use it to iron out the inputs and outputs required for our users. However, he relied on her to transform that vision into discrete, implementable features that reflected the insights from our research. Leveraging the rich context she had gathered from interviews, Amanda broke down complex workflows into structured requirements, ensuring every feature aligned with the user needs we uncovered. This collaboration wasn’t just about capturing ideas; it was about prioritizing and organizing them into a cohesive roadmap that balanced ambition with user-centered design. As the bridge between strategy and execution, she ensured the product was both visionary and grounded in real-world usability.

Using an activity-first agenda—focused on hands-on collaboration rather than passive discussion—she facilitated multiple workshops with the founder, CTO, and key team members. Each session built upon the last, progressing from clarifying the company’s mission and vision to aligning on strategy, and finally to prioritizing features. Early workshops were foundational, designed to connect user insights to strategic decision-making. These sessions included exercises like “first principles processing” to extract key takeaways from user research and identify opportunities.

As we transitioned into feature prioritization, the focus shifted to concrete decision-making. We used empathy maps to deeply understand user motivations and needs, followed by an impact-effort prioritization game to evaluate potential features based on feasibility and their ability to deliver value. These final workshops were pivotal, marking the point where strategy crystallized into an actionable roadmap.

What set this process apart was the way user insights shaped every step. Our standout feature ideas were not simply brainstormed in a vacuum—they were rooted in real-world needs and workflows uncovered during research. This approach ensured the features we prioritized had already resonated with clerks and judges, many of whom had co-created and validated these concepts during earlier stages. By the time we reached these prioritization workshops, we weren’t just defining features; we were bringing to life solutions that users themselves had helped shape.

This layered, iterative approach made it possible to translate abstract strategic goals into tangible product decisions. The workshops weren’t isolated exercises—they were the culmination of weeks of foundational work and collaboration, ensuring the roadmap was both visionary and deeply grounded in user reality. 

Collaborating with the team designer, Amanda co-created a scrappy prototype of the top feature, allowing us to validate the feature’s value before committing to full development. This iterative approach kept us nimble, ensuring the product evolved alongside user feedback.

Throughout the process, we prioritized imperfection over inaction. By launching an alpha version and partnering with users for feedback, we embraced the idea that great products are co-created, not just built. This iterative mindset made clerks and courtrooms feel like collaborators, not just end-users.

As the project evolved, I shifted from a researcher’s perspective to a product strategists’, crafting a roadmap that tied disparate features into a cohesive user experience. The founder’s trust grew so deeply that he introduced me as “my digital ethnographer” to key contacts, underscoring how research had become integral to the company’s DNA.

Investing in UX research is not a luxury for startups—it’s a strategic advantage. When we move beyond fast, transactional research, such as surveys and unmoderated usability tests, and embrace relational research, such as deep-dive interviews and ethnography, we minimize risk and drive innovation. By focusing on foundational insights, aligning teams through actionable workshops, and involving users as co-creators, startups like Learned Hand demonstrate how research can transform a product’s trajectory. The takeaway is simple yet powerful: building with users at the center isn’t just good practice—it’s the cornerstone of lasting success. Make research your superpower, and watch it align your vision with impact.