Case studies

Eight studies, each written the same way: what was at stake, what the team got, and then the work in enough detail to judge it. The first three are the ones to start with.

All eight

  1. Hearthy Foods: the customers behind 30% growth

    Hearthy Foods. Ethnography, survey, personas, journey mapping

    Stakeholder ethnography, a survey of more than 100 customers and three personas reframed a food manufacturer as an e-commerce brand: 30% revenue growth in 2020 and coverage in Bon Appétit.

  2. Two valid ways to release software

    JPMorgan Chase. Contextual inquiry, segmentation, prototype tests

    Journey maps across four tools and a 50-person survey found two legitimate release strategies on a JPMorgan Chase engineering platform, and ended a product–engineering deadlock.

  3. Understand the business. Understand the customers. Then let AI bridge the gap.

    Precious-metals dealer. Contextual inquiry, personas, AI agents, governance

    Research into how a precious-metals dealer actually runs and who its customers are, then five AI agents that bridge the gap between the two.

  4. Evaluating AI beyond correct-looking answers

    SANS, 2026. Evaluation design, error classification

    Study design for a SANS-published comparison of two AI models on an expert firewall migration: a 90% vs. 68% first-pass gap, and why the model with fewer syntax errors made the more consequential ones.

  5. Are we grading engineers?

    JPMorgan Chase. Focus groups, sentiment and terminology analysis

    Three focus groups on a developer-activity dashboard, and the decision about what it was for: engineers read it as a grade, so its purpose and its words had to change before its features did.

  6. Measuring developer productivity without breaking trust

    JPMorgan Chase. Focus groups, interviews, concept tests, research strategy

    The synthesis of four studies on measuring engineers, beginning with the one above, and the practices that held up against SPACE, DevEx, DORA and DX Core 4.

  7. What makes an AI assistant useful

    JPMorgan Chase. Prototype tests, focus group, feasibility triage

    Research behind version 1 of LLM Suite: an assistant for developers and a sales-enablement tool for salespeople. Prototype tests, a focus group and feasibility triage gave the team a realistic roadmap and a shared bar for "useful."

  8. Built for resellers, used by manufacturers

    Depository Works. In-context interviews, usability testing

    In-context interviews and onboarding tests for an inventory platform before launch found a customer the product wasn't built for, and shaped a manufacturer add-on.

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