Ancedotes Drove Decisions
Product decisions were often shaped by isolated signals:
A CEO sees one tweet
A Product Manager has a persuasive customer call
Product Marketing reacts to a competitor's flashy release
All of these inputs are valid, but they are incomplete.
At scale, product teams were surrounded by thousands of daily signals - support tickets, Discord threads, GitHub issues, survey responses, call notes - yet there was no systematic way to synthesize them.
Insight was anecdotal. Empathy existed - but it did not scale.
Voice of the User Program
I approached this problem in two layers:
1. Keep UX deeply human.
2. Operationalize empathy across the organization.
Layer 1: Human Proximity
To keep my team close to real users, we launched a structured customer call program:
Open booking access for customers to speak with each team member
2-3 calls per week per person
Standardized surveys to track themes and longitudinal shifts
Over time, this created pattern recognition - not just anecdotes.
But this still only scaled empathy within UX. The larger opportunity was broader.
Layer 2: Scale empathy across the company
To extend voice-of-the-user insight beyond UX, I partnered with Data & Analytics to design an internal signal intelligence tool: CloudSpeaker.
CloudSpeaker
User & Product AI Insights
Feature Release
Sentiment rose after a launch shipped a highly requested workflow improvement.
Outtage
A service disruption triggered a short sentiment dip and increased support volume.
Blog Post
A clarifying product post reduced confusion and improved conversation quality.
Discord Chat
Community chatter surfaced a recurring issue, revealing an emerging friction point.
It unified structured and unstructured feedback across surfaces, including:
Support tickets
Developer forums
Social channels
Survey responses
Product telemetry
99% Efficency gain - 3 months -> 5 min
This created empathy at scale.
I did not replace direct customer connection.
I amplified it.
Instead of reacting to isolated incidents, leaders had access to:
Pattern-level insight
Emerging trend detection
Cross-functional signal visibility
The result:
Reduced time spent on reactive UXR cycles
More informed and defensible product decisions
Adoption beyond Product - Marketing, Support, and Leadership leveraged the system
Voice of the user became institutional knowledge - not individual memory.