The Problem & Context: Granted a budget and executive mandate to redesign an external customer reporting platform to increase adoption, the product and design teams lacked clear user requirements and behavioral data due to telemetry tracking constraints.

The Method & Collaboration: Partnered closely with designers to define required discovery inputs, co-designed visual concept artifacts for probing, and executed 30+ contextual interviews with diverse enterprise customer personas at an annual conference in Orlando.

The Strategic Pivot: Invalidated the team's core hypothesis that low adoption was caused by navigation friction. Uncovered that customers didn't want faster template browsing—they struggled to understand template value and demanded instant, automated business insights.

The Outcome: Stopped the design team from spending resources on surface-level UI redesigns, pivoting the multi-quarter product roadmap toward automated insight generation, clear persona models, and AI-assisted data synthesis.