Welcome! I am Xenia.

My mission is to help leaders and organizations optimize the impact of their research. By impact, I do not just mean the outputs alone; better products that work for your business and the user. I also believe that the process of research itself should foster clarity, creativity, and critical thinking in your teams. Collaboration and this holistic view of impact are guiding principles of my practice.

I have worked as an applied researcher for the past 12 years and have a rich tech background spanning policy, media, health tech, gaming, and e-commerce. I've had the privilege of building strategic teams, leading organizations, and executing projects as a staff and senior researcher. My generalist and mixed-method approach allows me to guide leaders and organizations in meeting complexity with pragmatism and out-of-the-box thinking.

I can't wait to help you with that. Let's talk!

Xenia

What they say

  • "Xenia worked with us as an independent consultant on several projects. She is easily in the top 5% of the user researchers I worked with anywhere. She is skilled and observant but also has the rare ability to understand the needs of those who will use the research and get to the heart of the questions that need to be answered. She is good at making the work impactful and excellent at leading the teams to make decisions with the data she delivers.”

    Maria Stone, Director of Insights, Spotify

  • “Xenia is an exceptional researcher talent. Having joined a team working in a complex space, I was amazed by her speed and astuteness in identifying our core challenges - across product, business, and organizational areas. Her extensive experience and people skills meant she was able to quickly and effectively influence senior leadership to make progress in sensitive topics. For me, Xenia was also a great sounding board bounce and always provided new and valuable feedback.”

    Sarah Vigrass, Director of Insights, Spotify

  • “Xenia is extremely perceptive, empathetic, articulate, and excels at bringing clarity to messy problems and breaking them down into solvable chunks. She is a leader who is not afraid of challenging the status quo, asking difficult questions, and tackling thorny problems. She built the first proper research function at our company and lifted the quality of how we do research through setting up processes, frameworks, and most importantly through demonstrating what good research looks like by doing top-notch research work.”

    Yeevon Ooi, Staff Designer, Docker

  • “My time as one of Xenia’s direct reports has been the most powerful period of professional growth in my career. She shows up as a committed and attentive coach who earnestly invests in the development of individuals by guiding them to understand and shape their goals and actively creating learning opportunities based on those goals. As someone who is learning to lead, I am grateful that I was able to observe Xenia's thoughtful approaches to leadership and to receive coaching from her on this topic. She proactively fosters environments for impact at many different levels, driven by strong intuition and empathy.”

    Lauren Coetzer, Senior UXR, Gumtree