One product, and only analysts could use it.
NetBase Enterprise could process billions of posts and slice sentiment a hundred ways — and that was exactly the problem. It was so dense that the analysts who ran it couldn’t hand anything off. Every marketer, PR lead, or executive who wanted a number routed it back through the analyst, every time.
Between “too simple” and Enterprise sat a whole product.
We first shipped the far extreme — Instant Search, one Google-style box that returned basic analytics with no learning curve. Users validated the idea and then told us, specifically, it was too simple: they wanted to share Enterprise-grade data across a team and see it in modern visualizations. Somewhere between that box and the full Enterprise suite was the product we actually needed.
How research turned “make it simpler” into a shipped product.
Thirteen participants across five companies, five personas, and one hard-won lesson — plus the stakeholder politics of getting access to users at all. Every feature Pro shipped traced back to what these users told us they needed.
The full research story — sample design, personas, competitive analysis, and what it bought:
Read more about the ResearchA modular card system that scaled with the product.
From a skunkworks search box to a full dashboard — I designed the card concept, filter and search, and the Compare view, taking Pro idea-to-launch as lead designer. The craft was in a surface that stayed approachable for non-analysts while leaving room to grow for years.
The design story — the dashboard, the modular cards, the wireframe-to-final progression:
Read more about the DesignWhen a user says “make it simpler,” don’t sprint to the extreme. The product lives in the middle.
A skunkworks search box became a shipping, still-selling mid-tier product — through a large-scale beta with three Fortune 500 companies — because we found the middle instead of sprinting to the extreme.