My small business clients have questions they need answered in order to improve on what they've got, to figure out what comes next, and to get to the heart of what makes their customers and markets tick. Ordinary market & design research firms work with too much overhead for small businesses to afford. At MaaxaLabs, I prioritize supporting businesses I believe in and offer heavily discounted pricing and for local, startup, and small businesses.

MaaxaLabs used a comprehensive mixed methods process - a big survey to fieldwork with VR googles and back to a targeted survey - to help Seattle SoundTransit redesign impactful signage for customers with disabilities, non-English speakers, elders and more.

I’ve had the opportunity to work with 72 enterprise and SME FP&A leaders to document and fix their pain points, blockers, cross-functional communication, and other issues they encounter. What I learned not only impacted their success, but can help illuminate other organizational processes that need a tune-up.

Drawing from five years of leading research for AI product teams at AWS, New Relic, and Anaplan, MaaxaLabs offers an assessment, strategic values statement, journey map and stakeholder workshop for responsible AI adoption and governance.

By training she is an anthropologist with degrees in media studies and folklore, though she has spent the last six years working in-house for software-as-a-service companies using AI. Her recently launched consulting firm, Maaxa Labs, works on research and strategy surrounding AI, user experience and human aspects of technology.

A journey map offers your team a way to identify how your product will change your users’ worlds. Document their pain points and fix them. And it doesn’t have to be a heavy lift. This journey mapping process gets you the results you need in one afternoon.

Conventional personas were built for consumer products decades ago; your users are complicated, hard-to-find, overlapping, part of a team, or guided by supervisors. These three approaches offer alternative ways to approach the question of WHO in your product or marketing strategy.

Market studies, analytics, UX research, R&D, domain knowledge, sales stories from the field, feedback, support calls, social media, user stories, customer councils and online forums, and more: a fractional CXO can help you targets synthesize, and act on a mixed bag of customer insights, with confidence.

Each week, we’ll have an engineer, product leader, or someone else who helped MAKE emerging technology tell us more about what they’ve made and what they are trying to make, what they hope it will do in the world, and how they’re bound by the LIMITS of what the tech is capable of.

When you can’t bring a new researcher in-house, need targeted support for a new product or organizational change, or want to raise the bar on your team’s (or your) skills, MaaxaLabs has your back.

Your markets and users - and their needs - are changing, fast. We measure customer satisfaction with current offerings, and uncover new opportunities, by synthesizing existing or new data (surveys, analytics, feedback) around compelling customer stories. MaaxaLabs offers coordinated insights that align sales, marketing, and product around a common goal: meeting customers where they are, with product that takes them where they need to go. Research, workshops, customer councils, consulting.

Conventional customer councils call on a select group of folks who are opinionated about your product. A council formalizes your engagement with buyers and users, but how can you avoid the bias that comes with working with power customers and squeaky wheels? How to get a sense of what your broader pool of current and future users might really need? How to turn over insights quickly, as ideas arise and reprioritize? You need actionable results from representative customers, now. We’ve got this.

The resources your team had to produce conventional research have dried up, fast. You don’t have the budget to hire a heavyweight market consultant. Or your startup simply doesn’t have the time or funding. Keep those belts tight: here are some tools you can use now.

Amidst the shifting sands of cloud transformation, workforce reductions, market disruption, and new AI and SaaS tooling, change management is one of the toughest problem business leaders need to solve. This approach maps your current state, identifies friction, and promises alignment.

As the industry and nonprofit sands shift beneath our feet, we need partners with whom to think through how we navigate the question of vocation throughout our lives. Jobs are important, but they are rarely permanent and even less often fulfill the callings that led us to give our everything over to academia.

We often think of AI as a single tool in our toolbox - but it also changes our process, the people involved, and the scope of the work we do. Check out our proprietary SAiAF (Strategic AI Adoption Framework) to identify risk and get proactive.

When the US National Parks needed to re-platform their entire campsite selection and reservation experience, they called on us. Listen to how we tuned in to the real experiences and attitudes of campers from all walks of life.

Customer-centricity doesn’t have to be a heavy lift. Make data-driven decisions with UX research and targeted product feedback that get you results, fast.

In the real-life world of product strategy and developments there are no real waterfalls. We need to discover while we build. Here are a few ways we approach that challenge at MaaxaLabs.