All of our User research articles

How to Know if Your Idea’s the Right One — A Founder’s Guide for Successful Early-Stage Customer Discovery

Jeanette Mellinger, BetterUp's Head of UXR and former Head of UXR for Uber Eats, unpacks her approachable three-step playbook for early-stage customer discovery so founders can build something users really want.

The Rounds’ Path to Product-Market Fit: Accelerating the Eco-Friendly Delivery Startup through Gut Intuition

In this post in our “Paths to Product-Market Fit” series, The Rounds’ Alex Torrey sits down with First Round partner Todd Jackson to tell the story of how he came up with the idea for his eco-friendly delivery service, and what signals guided him along the way.

Binti’s Path to Product-Market Fit — Lessons in Immersive User Research

In this post in our “Paths to Product-Market Fit” series, Binti’s co-founder and CEO Felicia Curcuru sits down with First Round partner Todd Jackson to tell the story of how her time spent shadowing family social workers in San Francisco empowered her to build a product.

Finding Language/Market Fit: How to Make Customers Feel Like You’ve Read Their Minds

After more than a decade of running B2B growth teams at PayPal and investing at 500 Startups, Matt Lerner now spends his days helping early-stage startups with growth. He's seen firsthand how changes in a handful of words can yield jaw-dropping differences in conversion.

A UX Research Crash Course for Founders — Customer Discovery Tips from Zoom, Zapier & Dropbox

Zoom’s Jane Davis answers all of your tricky customer development questions, creating a highly tactical guide for founders flying solo on UX research as they explore startup ideas, validate concepts, iterate on prototypes, and troubleshoot common product problems.

8 Product Hurdles Every Founder Must Clear — This PM-Turned-Founder Shares His Playbooks

Repeat PM turned first-time founder Ryan Glasgow addresses the tough product questions every founder faces, from segmenting the market and iterating on early MVPs, to finding product/market fit and spinning up a second product.

Don’t Serve Burnt Pizza (And Other Lessons in Building Minimum Lovable Products)

Product builders should aim for lovable, not just viable. Jiaona Zhang (product leader at Dropbox, Airbnb, WeWork and lecturer at Stanford) shares her tactics for building MLPs that win users' hearts.

Ready, Set, Hypergrowth: How Duo's Product Design Lead Primed Her Team for Momentum

Sally Carson joined Duo as its first product design leader, just as the security startup was ratcheting into hypergrowth. Carson shares her roadmap for scaling the product design function, from advocating for design in an engineering-centric org, to setting up her team for success during rapid growt

The 6 Decision-Making Frameworks That Help Startup Leaders Tackle Tough Calls

Startup leaders make tough calls every day. We spoke with 6 top operators to gather the tactics and strategies they use to make smart decisions under pressure, garner trust with stakeholders and execute with conviction.