Insights Unlocked

Episode web page: https://bit.ly/3V1gzkD

Episode summary:

In this episode of Insights Unlocked, Lija Hogan, principal experience research consultant at Auros, chats with Meg Roebling, director at Citi, where she leads user experience for consumer credit cards across the bank’s retail partners, about AI in UX research and why human judgment still matters as research gets faster. Drawing on more than 20 years in digital design, much of it in financial services, Meg shares what has changed about research since the dot-com boom and which battles researchers are still fighting.

Meg explains that the case for research has been won in principle but still loses to competing priorities, and why tying it to the funder's own goal, such as risk mitigation at a bank, is "usually a winning argument." She walks through her start-small approach: answer a simple question quickly, show the win, become the go-to person, then tell the story with a verbatim clip that makes a user's struggle real for stakeholders. She also lays out where AI synthesis falls short. It surfaces themes but misses nuance, contradictions, body language and important outliers, flattens results and still hallucinates.

The conversation also touches on designing trustworthy AI experiences in financial services, from chatbots that paper over poor information architecture to why screens still matter for complex, multi-step flows. Meg makes the case for transparency and enhanced security as people hand purchases to AI agents, explains the personalization bargain most customers accept, and argues that teams need to start designing for agents now. Lija and Meg also discuss keeping humans in the loop at every gate of an AI-driven product development lifecycle, the central agent registry at Citi, and Meg's updated advice for leaders: match your approach to your organization's research maturity and invest in measurement and rapid research.

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Episode web page: https://bit.ly/4yCmSZK

Episode summary: What makes a great AI experience? It's about more than getting the right answer.

In this episode of Insights Unlocked, guest host Mike Mace talks with Sara Logel and Kira Orlova from Auros’ Professional Services about why traditional measures of software quality aren't enough to evaluate AI experiences. They introduce ARQ (AI Relationship Quality), a new research framework designed to help companies understand how people experience AI and build products that earn trust, drive adoption, and keep customers coming back.

Sara and Kira explore five essential elements of a successful AI experience: trust, understanding, control, outcome, and affinity. They explain how these factors work together, why trust in AI needs to be calibrated rather than maximized, and what happens when AI delivers impressive results but leaves users feeling confused, powerless, or disconnected.

The conversation also explores how ARQ combines quantitative benchmarking with qualitative human insights to help product and UX teams identify opportunities for improvement, compare experiences against competitors, and demonstrate the business value of better AI experiences.

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Episode web page: https://bit.ly/4zzktjl

Episode summary:

In this episode of Insights Unlocked, Nathan Isaacs chats with Caitlin Sullivan, founder of AI Customer Research, about how product, UX, and research teams can move beyond one-off AI prompts to build reliable, repeatable workflows that deliver meaningful customer insights. Drawing on more than 15 years of experience in customer research, Caitlin shares practical advice for identifying where AI can add value, measuring its impact, and building workflows teams can actually trust.

Caitlin explains why the rush to automate everything can undermine productivity and how starting small, documenting processes, and testing AI outputs against established research findings can help teams achieve better results. She also explores how to experiment responsibly with sensitive customer data, collaborate on AI workflows using tools like GitHub, and demonstrate the value of AI investments.

The conversation also tackles a bigger question: What shouldn't we automate? Caitlin makes the case for preserving critical thinking, human empathy, and the joy of discovery, reminding researchers and product teams that efficiency shouldn't come at the expense of the human skills that make customer insights valuable.

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Episode web page: https://bit.ly/4hyuZBr

Episode summary: 

In this episode of Insights Unlocked, UserTesting’s Mike Mace talks with Julia Barham, product executive, longtime product leader and author of The Product Management Playbook, about what it takes to build products customers actually value—and how the role of product management is changing as AI accelerates the product development lifecycle.

Julia argues that great product managers are ultimately managers of value: connecting customer needs and business goals while developing enough fluency across design, data and technology to make better decisions. She shares why strong PMs don’t need to be experts in everything, but do need curiosity, judgment and the ability to synthesize insights and work effectively across functions. 

The conversation explores why continuous discovery and experimentation are becoming even more important as AI makes it easier to build and ship quickly. Julia explains why teams should embrace “strong opinions, loosely held,” increase their learning velocity and resist the temptation to turn faster development into an excuse to ship everything in the backlog. Instead, teams need to validate ideas, learn quickly and stay focused on the customer experience.

Julia and Mike also discuss how AI could reshape the product manager’s role. As AI takes on more delivery and coordination work, Julia sees greater value shifting toward strategic thinking, discovery and human judgment. She also shares lessons from the cross-functional leaders she interviewed for her book—including why partners want PMs to bring them into the process early, provide business context and start with the problem rather than arriving with a predetermined solution. 

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Episode web page: https://bit.ly/4ddeZlN

Episode summary

In this episode of Insights Unlocked, Nathan Isaacs talks with media futurist and author Jack Myers about how leaders can embrace AI without outsourcing the distinctly human qualities that drive better decisions, stronger customer relationships, and meaningful experiences. Drawing from his book Your Third Brain, Jack explores how human intelligence and machine intelligence can work together to expand what people are capable of—not replace human thinking.

Jack argues that one of the biggest risks of AI isn’t simply that machines are getting smarter, but that people may begin outsourcing judgment, curiosity, creativity, memory, and discernment to them. He explains the concept of the “third brain”: an intelligence that emerges when human experience, intuition, values, empathy, and imagination combine with AI’s speed, scale, knowledge, and ability to recognize patterns.

The conversation also explores what the media industry’s decades of technological disruption can teach today’s product, marketing, UX, and CX leaders. Jack warns against gaining efficiency at the expense of the customer relationship, particularly as organizations increasingly turn to AI, synthetic research, and automated customer interactions.

Nathan and Jack discuss why real human feedback remains essential even as AI becomes better at predicting behavior. Synthetic customers can help explore possibilities and prepare better questions, Jack says, but real people provide the context, emotion, contradictions, and unexpected insights that can reveal whether an organization is solving the right problem in the first place.

Finally, they explore empathy as a practical leadership skill and how organizations can reinvest the time AI saves into listening, curiosity, creativity, and deeper human understanding. Jack encourages leaders to define the human outcome before choosing the technology—and to measure not only productivity, but also trust, well-being, and whether technology is strengthening or diminishing human capabilities.

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Episode web page: https://bit.ly/4hjhw0g

Episode summary

In this special episode of Insights Unlocked, host Nathan Isaacs sits down with CEO Eric Johnson and Chief Marketing Officer Johann Wrede to introduce Auros, the new parent brand for UserTesting, and explore why the company is expanding its focus as AI reshapes how products and experiences are built.

Eric and Johann explain why the UserTesting name no longer captured the full scope of the company’s ambitions. While UserTesting and User Interviews will continue serving the research, UX, and insights communities, Auros reflects a broader mission: bringing human intelligence into the development, training, testing, and evaluation of AI. They also share the story behind the Auros name and why the company believes its network of more than 7.5 million people can play a larger role in an AI-enabled world.

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Episode web page: https://bit.ly/4AkBzTc

Episode summary:

In this episode of Insights Unlocked, host Jennifer Artabane talks with Ranjitha Kumar, UserTesting’s Chief Scientist, and Jason Giles, UserTesting’s Vice President of Customer Intelligence, about a question that becomes more important as AI makes it easier for anyone to create: How do you know whether what you’ve created is actually good?

Ranjitha and Jason explore the increasingly important role of human expertise, taste, craft, and judgment in an AI-powered workplace. They discuss why powerful AI tools can produce very different results depending on the expertise of the person using them, and why knowing how to interrogate, critique, and improve AI-generated work matters as much as knowing how to generate it.

The conversation also examines AI’s ability to quickly get teams from zero to 80%—and why the remaining 20% may become a critical source of differentiation. Ranjitha and Jason share how leaders can help the next generation develop judgment without using AI to bypass the experiences that build expertise, and why curiosity, critique, experimentation, and uniquely human perspectives will remain essential as AI reshapes how we work.

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Episode web page: https://bit.ly/4ywaHhh

Episode summary

In this episode of Insights Unlocked, Mike Mace, Director of Solution Marketing at UserTesting, talks with veteran product leader, author, and executive coach Rich Mironov about what AI-powered development really means for product teams—and why dramatically faster coding doesn’t automatically translate into better products, happier customers, or more revenue.

Rich argues that as AI removes engineering constraints, the bigger challenge becomes deciding what is actually worth building. He explores the risks of “cognitive surrender,” where teams equate faster output with better outcomes, and explains why product management, UX research, customer discovery, business judgment, and taste become more important—not less—as organizations gain the ability to build at unprecedented speed. He also challenges the growing enthusiasm for synthetic users, warning that plausible AI-generated feedback can reinforce what teams already believe rather than uncover the unexpected insights that emerge from conversations with real customers.

The conversation also examines why “10x coding speed” won’t produce 10x revenue, how AI shifts bottlenecks from engineering toward customer adoption and go-to-market execution, and why product managers may need to become more “barbell shaped”—spending more time understanding meaningful customer problems at the front end and turning products into business results at the other. Rich also shares ideas from his book Money Stories, including why product teams need to communicate the financial value of their work in language executives understand.

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Episode web page: https://bit.ly/4cqygzK

Episode summary: 

In this episode of Insights Unlocked, host Jason Giles talks with Roger Wong, former Head of Design at BuildOps and an independent design consultant whose career spans Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, and startups, about what AI is (and isn’t) changing about product design. 

Roger says that while AI can dramatically accelerate how teams research, prototype, and build, the fundamentals remain the same: understand the customer, solve the right problem, and use strong judgment to turn insights into better outcomes.

Drawing on his work at BuildOps, Roger shares how his team stays close to commercial contractors and field technicians to uncover problems AI alone can’t see. He describes how observing technicians in their real working environments led to an AI-powered visit summaries feature that lets technicians dictate notes after a job, reducing the burden of typing after a long day in the field. The lesson: customers may not be asking for AI—they want reliable products that solve real problems, and trust has to be earned before teams introduce more ambitious AI experiences.

Roger and Jason also explore how AI is reshaping the design process itself. Faster prototyping can tighten customer feedback loops and improve collaboration with engineers, but generating more output doesn’t necessarily create a better product. Roger discusses why teams need to measure outcomes rather than velocity, why people must take ownership of AI-generated work, and why craft, empathy, systems thinking, and judgment are becoming even more important as AI tools become widely available.

The conversation closes with a challenge for design and product leaders: treat AI as a new design material and experiment with it firsthand without abandoning the foundational skills that make great designers great. Roger also raises an emerging concern for the profession—how junior designers will develop those skills and judgment if AI increasingly takes over the “grunt work” that traditionally helped early-career designers learn their craft.

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Episode web page: https://bit.ly/4gt1TTy

Episode summary:

In this episode of Insights Unlocked, Nathan Isaacs sits down with UserTesting Chief Scientist Ranjitha Kumar and Vice President of Customer Intelligence Jason Giles to explore how AI is reshaping the product development lifecycle—and what happens when the traditional boundaries between designers, engineers, and product teams begin to blur.

Ranjitha and Jason discuss how AI is making it easier for people to move beyond their functional lanes, from designers building working prototypes to engineers taking a more active role in design. But greater access to the tools doesn’t eliminate the need for expertise. As building becomes faster and cheaper, they argue that craft, judgment, decision-making, and understanding what customers actually need may become even more valuable.

The conversation also explores how teams can use AI to accelerate experimentation and learning without simply creating more things, why human feedback remains critical as organizations test new AI experiences, and where AI still falls short. Ranjitha and Jason also weigh in on AI slop, agentic AI and guardrails, and why teams should stay mindful about where AI genuinely improves their work—and where it may actually slow them down.

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