Deep user understanding means clear insights and better product decisions
I’m Kristina, a product design researcher with 10+ years of experience helping product teams make better, data-backed decisions.
I’ve worked with
Most product teams don’t have a research problem. They have a clarity problem.
They’re sitting on customer data, usability findings, and stakeholder opinions—but none of it adds up to a decision. The roadmap is a negotiation. Feature priorities shift with whoever spoke last. And the people actually using the product remain surprisingly abstract.
I’m Kristina, and that’s the work I do. I run rigorous qualitative research that helps product teams stop debating and start deciding. I'm especially good at taking messy, complex problem spaces and making them legible—finding the structure in chaos, naming the user distinctions that actually matter, and reframing what a product is for in ways that make the next move obvious.
What I can help with
You have ideas and opinions, but not enough evidence to prioritize.
Your team has no shortage of features ideas. What’s missing is a clear, research-backed lens for deciding which ones matter most right now. What do users really need right now and how does your product evolve from MVP to future vision?
Product Strategy Research
Personas, user journeys, jobs to be done, and other durable artifacts that give your team a clear understanding of who you're building for and help align on a shared vision.
You’re designing for “the user,” but the details are vague.
You’re building a user-centric vision, but it feels like everyone is working from an incomplete, or slightly different picture. Alignment, and product decisions that come from it, gets easier you have a deep understanding of users, their context, and their needs. You need to open up the aperture beyond a single feature or prototype, and build rich context, stories and examples that equal true understanding.
Discovery & Foundational Research
In-depth interviews, contextual inquiry, diary studies, cross-study synthesis go beyond surface-level insights or prototype feedback, to build a rich understanding of who you're building for.
The product is strong, but growth isn’t reflecting that.
People aren’t signing up the way you'd expect, or they sign up and don't stay. You know your product is solid, but something about how its' value is being communicated, interpreted, discovered or trialed isn’t connecting. From comprehension to activation, identify where your marketing funnel is broken.
Product Marketing Research
Value proposition and messaging research, first-time use and churn studies, understanding perceived barriers to signup, adoption and retention.
Your team is ready for research, but they need a stronger starting point.
The interest is there, but the team needs to know what to do. and what not to do, when interviewing users. They need guidance on anything from how to scope a study, what methods work for getting the best data, who to recruit (and why it matters), to how to interpret the data and what to do with the findings. You want to build a customer-centric culture and enable your product and design teams for impactful, continuous discovery.
Research Mentorship & Coaching
Study design, tools strategy, and moderation feedback for teams building their own research practice.
Insights with Impact
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Flexible, expert advice when you need it. Book hourly support across a range of topics—from planning to problem-solving. This focused consultation will help clarify your goals, map out next steps, and identify opportunities for growth.
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Going beyond surface-level insights to uncover users' unspoken needs that reframe how your team thinks about your products or services.
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Uncovering key opportunites to innovate and improve end-to-end experiences—from product marketing to conversion and retention.
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Illustrating and communicating insights through visual frameworks and video storytelling that creates alignment within teams around a shared vision of your products' future.
“We worked with Kristina in the earliest days of Temple. Her in-depth qual research was instrumental in providing us with clear insights that ultimately defined our medium-term roadmap. In a matter of weeks, we proved (and disproved) loads of hypotheses about our target users’ pain points—saving us a ton of wasted dev time. Most importantly, it helped to align the entire company around a very clear problem/solution narrative. Couldn’t recommend her more!”
Omar Ismail
Former Co-founder & CEO, Temple
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Kristina is hands-down one of the most skilled researchers I've worked with.
She has an amazing ability to quickly understand the business context and develop creative methods for uncovering deep and actionable insights. She excels at synthesizing complex data into clear customer problems, personas, journeys, and other frameworks that drive stakeholder alignment. I wholeheartedly recommend her to anyone looking to gain strategic customer insights to improve their product strategy.
Crystal Heithaus
UX Research Manager, Intuit -
The insightful research Kristina leddirectly informed strategic decisions, eliminating decision paralysis
Within weeks of joining our team, Kristina facilitated workshops across departments, fostering collaboration and active listening while coaching us on how to ask impactful questions.
Her coaching refined our research hypotheses and built a learning space that improved our communication skills as a team. The insightful research she led in her first month directly informed strategic decisions, eliminating decision paralysis and enabling us to deliver a product MVP in just eight weeks.
Kristina's ability to quickly understand complex landscapes, coach teams, and deliver actionable insights is invaluable. Her work helped us move fast and confidently. I highly recommend Kristina to any team looking to unlock valuable insights from existing or new markets and inform their strategy.
Laren Agius
Director of Product, Beatport -
Kristina helped us turn a dense set of research findings into something our entire leadership team could feel, not just review.
She organized a ninety minute “popcorn time” session to bring our CEO, CMO, CPO, CFO, and cross functional partners into the same room to hear directly from our customers through curated clips embedded in a structured readout.
This format solved a common problem: research tends to die in silos. Decks and summaries prove work happened but rarely generate the urgency or alignment needed for real change.
By grounding the discussion in our strategy and selecting a wide spectrum of users across tenure and experience, Kristina made the insights impossible to dismiss or ignore.
Leaders were able to interrogate what they heard, reflect back their interpretations, and immediately start identifying quick wins and roadmap adjustments.
The empathy built in that room materially strengthened our 2025 plan, influenced marketing messaging, expanded our research budget, and drove higher engagement and revenue. Our President’s involvement reinforced the importance of treating research as a shared asset, not a handoff, and the viewing session made that shift possible.
Miguel Senquiz
Product Lead, DistroKid -
She didn't just bring insights to the team, she genuinely shifted their perspective.
Kristina has been pure joy to work with. She didn't just bring insights to the team, she genuinely shifted their perspective. People started making decisions with a lot more user empathy and asking questions they normally wouldn't have thought to ask.
Her ramp-up was something else. She joined what felt like a Monday and kicked off her first research on a Wednesday. I was really impressed by how quickly she onboarded to our tools and to the product itself, which frankly isn't a simple one.
The energy she brought was amazing. She did a great job communicating insights on the go, and her final presentations were engaging in a way that looped the whole team in and made the information accessible to everyone. She also helped us build ties with other teams who were working on related projects and running similar research, which was incredibly valuable.
After only a few months of working together, she also took on onboarding our full-time user researchers. I can highly recommend her to anyone looking for a hands-on user researcher with real leadership chops.
Roxane Hassler
Group Product Manager, Grammarly mobile -
Kristina raised the bar for UX Research at Bolt.
Kristina led user research on the Driver side of our biggest Vertical, Ride-hailing.
This domain could not be bigger, more complex, or more critical to the business. The challenge is clear: before any user researcher can contribute meaningfully, they must first get up to speed on the domain itself. Kristina jumped in headfirst—unfazed, patient, and resilient.
In such complex domains, countless potential research questions arise, each of which could take weeks to explore. Kristina brings an exceptional ability to define what scope will truly pay off, and what the right user research looks like for that team, at that specific stage of their product development. Her deep experience shines here, helping the team focus on what matters most.
Of course, research is only as powerful as the trust it earns. Kristina quickly built strong relationships with key stakeholders through her collaborative approach, direct communication style, and absolute reliability. She gained the confidence of GPMs, PMs, and Designers alike—no small feat in a high-pace, high-stakes environment.
Hire Kristina for the difficult things your business depends on!
Steffen Kehr
UX Research Manager, Bolt -
Kristina delivered research that went well beyond our expectations.
Kristina is one of those rare people who makes an immediate impression—not just through the quality of her work, but through who she is as a person.
When she joined us, we had very limited insight into how our users were experiencing our mobile product. She turned that around remarkably quickly, delivering research that went well beyond our expectations.
Superhuman/Grammarly is a large, complex organisation, and Kristina navigated it with real skill — connecting the right people, joining the dots across teams, and always knowing who to bring into the conversation.
She was also genuinely creative in her methods and tools, which kept the work sharp and effective. All of this while collaborating across time zones with a US-based UX team without missing a beat.
She's the kind of researcher designers and product people rarely get to work with. Everyone who crossed paths with her wanted to keep her around — and we'd welcome her back in a heartbeat. I can't recommend her highly enough.
Ed Silva
Lead Designer, Grammarly mobile -
Kristina is an exceptional multi-method researcher and a deeply strategic product partner.
She and I were the two Lead Researchers supporting Bolt’s ride-hailing business, the company’s core revenue-driving vertical. The complexity of the space she led was enormous, spanning market contexts that varied by country and city, operational realities beyond the product itself, and service questions that required both speed and rigor.
What stood out most to me was her ability to identify the real decision underneath the noise and shape research that helped teams make better product choices.
I especially valued her expertise in unmoderated research, where her methodological instincts are both rigorous and innovative. She also brought tremendous strategic value through her ability to synthesize years of prior learning into clear, highly usable artifacts for new teams, helping them connect themes, build on existing knowledge, and focus their efforts on the most meaningful opportunities.
Edward Euclide
Staff UX Researcher, Bolt -
Kristina is a true multiplier for any product team.
Kristina is both a phenomenal researcher and a generous coach. She dove into the complex field of driver research and, within months, developed a deep understanding of nuanced cohorts.
She has a rare ability to weave fragmented issues into clear, actionable insights. In one competitive, benchmark-setting study, she reframed scattered problems into a critical "experience break point(s)" for drivers, with insights so compelling it shaped leadership discussions and drove strategic alignment.
What sets Kristina apart is her generosity in practice. She doesn't just conduct and deliver research; she builds others' ability to do it too. Even while managing multiple high-priority studies, she co-created a prototype study with our designer and me. She crafted a clear interview flow, shared preparatory tips that gave us confidence in moderating sessions for someone doing this formally for the first time (such as myself), and sat in on sessions to gently steer us in the right direction when we slipped into leading questions or lost focus. With her coaching, our team, consisting of myself as a PM and our designer, were able to run interviews ourselves and still produce rigorous results.
Kristina combines deep empathy for users with extraordinary adaptability. She is quick on her feet in live conversations, able to pivot smoothly and uncover unexpected insights without missing a beat. Her presence makes research both rigorous and empowering, making her a true multiplier for any product team.
Vanessa Tai
Senior Product Manager, Bolt DriverX