My Services

It all starts with the specific problems your team and organization are looking to solve.

I provide a variety of consulting services from workshops, customized research projects, and part or full-time fractional research leadership.

Below are some ideas of how we could collaborate.

Let’s explore together!

Applied Research

Explore new market opportunities or user segments, find out what matters to your existing users, innovate your product offering, or evaluate usability and performance.

Fractional Consultancy

Unlock progress on company or organizational goals, shape and optimize your insights, build your team, or get strategic support for executives and leaders in key projects.

Speaking & Training

Level up your team’s stakeholder, communication, and strategic skills. Advance your research & insight practice, and improve cross-functional collaboration

What they say

  • "I had the pleasure of partnering with Xenia during our time at Kry, where she built a world-class user research team for Europe's largest digital healthcare company. She has an innate sense of where to focus her team's energy and highly specialized skill -- the strategic exploration at both macro and micro levels that could inform the direction we would take to deliver on our company vision. She understands the need to marry the quantitive, the qualitative, and the interpretation of the work of her peers in data science to create robust insights. This approach ensured that our product strategy was data-driven and provided a well-rounded humanistic view. would work with her again in a heartbeat and am thankful for the growth she inspired for me in my own leadership."

    Jess Forbes, Founder & VP of Product, ex KRY/Spotify

  • “Working with Xenia had a lasting impact on my team and wider organization! Her wisdom, analytic skills, and user-centered mindset kept us very focused on key problems while there was much noise around the problems we tried to solve. She distilled clarity from complexity, and quickly adapted to new contexts, and business challenges. She deeply transformed how we interact with stakeholders, improving our collaboration and efficiency. Xenia is a thought leader who challenges the status quo, bringing fresh perspectives supported by rich examples and solid reasonings.”

    Xinming Wang, Sr Data Scientist, Spotify

  • “Xenia is a very special one-of-a-kind researcher who understands the incredible complexity of the business, the product, the technology, and how they all come together. It is rare for researchers to have such a 360 point of view, be able to think so deeply about the strategy and how the user fits into it, and ultimately understand an ambiguous problem space while seamlessly building stakeholder trust.”

    Zachary Heinemann, Director of Research, Intercom

  • “Xenia is a brilliant colleague and leader. She’s built an amazing research team at Kry by not only putting proper frameworks into place but also making sure that research is an integrated part of the product development process. Outside of building her own org, she’s also been acting as a mentor to me, and many others in the company. I’ve learned so much about what good leadership actually looks like from her, and for that I’m very grateful!”

    Arvid Janson, Director of Product, Mentimeter

Applied research

Exploration & foresight: tap into new opportunities, disrupt, innovate your domain

Uncover new problem spaces or audiences that your team is uniquely positioned to serve. I design studies that integrate user, market, and competitor research, allowing you to explore technical, product, and user dimensions in depth, connect the dots between market value and product-market fit, and make informed decisions.

Foundational research: understand users, solve the right problems, scale insights

Gain a deep understanding of your target audience's unique needs and insights into the current market gaps in meeting them. These insights will help you prioritize investment across the product suite, educate your workforce on your customers in a scalable way, and unlock creativity and impact at a team and company level.

Evaluation & usability: iterate, reduce clutter, measure performance

Evaluate areas of your experience that do not meet your users' expectations and create critical friction in your product. We combine quantitative data with usability testing to identify what is not working and why. A mixed-method approach to your performance and usability allows teams to understand how user experience impacts business outcomes.

Product discovery: ideate, prioritize, level up your product

Translate user needs into product solutions and prioritize features that meet your customers' expectations. I partner with product teams to ideate, test, and prioritize their concepts. Product discovery enables your teams to iterate effectively on product ideas, minimize risks, save engineering time, and amplify the impact on user experience and business outcomes.

Fractional consultancy

Research leadership: build the right team, scale, and align with product strategy

I provide support and guidance in various areas, including hiring the right talent, establishing a research or discovery practice within your organization, fostering a learning culture, and developing a research program that aligns with and drives your product strategy.

Insight coaching: evaluate & improve insight practices, shift your focus, transform mindsets

I partner with your insight and product teams to optimize and transform your research practice to achieve new goals. We evaluate the types of research you invest in, adapt collaboration and planning practices, and explore how insights fit into your business and product strategy.

Staff researcher: tackle complexity, bring organizations closer, shape product strategy

As a fractional staff researcher, I help your team identify and tackle complex problem spaces that might affect you across your teams and organizations, support researchers in finding the right methodology and approach, and advise senior stakeholders on product strategy across user, technical, and product dimensions.

Speaking & training

Level up your team’s stakeholder, communication, and strategic skills

  • Working with stakeholders: building relationships and balancing short- and long-term impact

  • Nonviolent communication and the art of difficult conversations

  • Amplify your impact with secondary research

  • Moving beyond measuring impact to working on improving it with your team

Advanced research & insight practice, improve cross-functional collaboration

  • Introduction to user research methods

  • The compounding value of investing in foundational and strategic research

  • Insights beyond silos: how to combine market, data, and UXR practices

  • From "like" to "need": how to gauge the hierarchy of user needs with advanced concept testing