Suzy Live — Unified Mixed-Method Research Platform

Background

Suzy possessed two powerful but disconnected assets:

• CrowdTap, a large-scale participant community

• Suzy Core, an enterprise management portal

What Suzy lacked was the bridge between them—a product that allowed enterprise teams to directly conduct research with Suzy’s own participants. In a fragmented market where competitors offered either quantitative or qualitative tools and relied on external recruitment, Suzy had a rare opportunity to build an integrated, defensible insight platform grounded in its own ecosystem.

Outcome & Impact

Outcome

• Designed and launched Suzy’s first unified quant + qual research platform

• Created a single workflow integrating recruitment, scheduling, live moderation, and insights

• Launched June 2022

Impact

• Achieved 267% YoY annualized growth within one month

• Generated $2.38M ARR, covering 35% of the following year’s revenue target

• By 2025, Suzy reached $68.7M in annual revenue

• Adopted by enterprise clients including Microsoft, Amazon, American Express, and Coca-Cola

My Role & Leadership

• Product Design Lead

• Led a team of 7 designers

• Partnered closely with Product, Engineering, QA, Marketing, and Research

• Owned:

  • End-to-end experience for Suzy Live Focus Group

  • Mixed-method workflow design

  • Usability testing and iteration

  • Design validation against business and technical constraints

Today’s problem

Enterprise research workflows were deeply fragmented:

• Quantitative surveys and qualitative interviews lived in separate tools

• Recruitment relied on external panels

• Insights arrived late and disconnected from decision-making

This fragmentation made research slow, costly, and difficult to operationalize.

Strategic Opportunities

Suzy’s unique advantage was CrowdTap—its own participant ecosystem.

By unifying quant + qual + recruitment into a continuous workflow, Suzy could offer an end-to-end research platform that competitors could not replicate.

Key Design Decisions

Decision 1 — The Continuous Insight Loop

• Strategic Move: Rejected the industry standard of "siloed tools" in favor of a Continuous Workflow that integrates recruitment, quantitative surveys, and qualitative interviews into one sequence.

• Outcome: Created a unique market position where teams move from "the what" (data) to "the why" (interviews) without leaving the ecosystem.

Decision 2 — Role-Based Permission Architecture

• Strategic Move: Architected a multi-layered experience for "Invisible Roles," managing the complex interactions between Moderators, Participants, Note-takers, and Observers (Backroom).

• Outcome: Preserved research rigor and legal privacy (observers watching without being seen) while maintaining a low cognitive load for the moderator.

Decision 3 — Real-Time "Live" Governance

• Strategic Move: Designed a real-time moderation dashboard that surfaces insights during the session, rather than as a post-session report.

• Outcome: Shortened the enterprise decision cycle from weeks to hours, making research an agile part of the product development process.

Experience Highlights

Live Moderated Focus Groups

• Participant flow management

• Backroom collaboration

• Real-time moderation controls

Thank You!