Product Management & User Research Partner for Hire with the Experience You Need

We understand that if you lead a product or marketing team, you're being asked to do more with less. PH1 is the senior product management and user research partner built to fill in whatever gaps your time has.

Trusted by Spotify, Microsoft, Hims & Her, Dell, Mozilla, and 50 more past clients — we have worked on almost every type of engagement that you need. PH1 is the senior-level partner that adapts to how you work and delivers results that your team immediately understand and can act on.

The bonus is that we have spent the last three years deeply entrenched in AI thanks to our work with major clients and our podcast. We're the partner that's been hired by Microsoft and global agencies to guide them in their AI feature planning and testing.

Doing more with less is the job now

The pressure is real, and it is not a temporary spike. Teams are shipping against the same ambitions with smaller crews, tighter budgets, and more scrutiny on every dollar. Layoffs and departures have thinned the ranks of exactly the senior people who used to run discovery, pressure-test a roadmap, or catch the flaw in a design before it reached production. We wrote a whole playbook for knowledge workers navigating this shift, because it is reshaping how good work gets staffed.

Bringing in PH1 is not the same as opening a role. You get senior practitioners immediately, for the specific stretch of work that needs them, without the cost or the commitment of a permanent hire. When the pressure eases, the engagement ends. When it returns, we are a call away.

AI is the biggest opportunity and the clearest picture of your debt

AI is the most significant opportunity most teams will get this decade, and it is also holding up a mirror. The moment you try to build something genuinely useful on top of your product, the organizational and technical debt you have been deferring becomes impossible to ignore: fragmented data, workflows nobody has mapped in years, assumptions about customers that were never quite tested.

We understand both the possibility and the reality. We have helped a company as sophisticated as Microsoft work out which AI features people will actually trust and which ones quietly get rejected, and we test AI the way people really use it rather than the way it demos — looking for the silent failures that dashboards reward and users abandon. Our framework for measuring and improving AI products exists because most teams track usage and mistake it for value. Just as often, the honest finding is that the highest-value move is not a new model at all, but fixing the foundation the AI would have to stand on. We will tell you which one you are looking at.

The partner busy teams rely on when the work has to be right

When a decision is too important to guess on, teams building serious products bring us in. A few examples of the work:

• Microsoft — research and concept testing for AI-native mobile devices, identifying which features users would adopt and which would trigger the trust concerns that kill a rollout.

• Spotify — UX research and a redesigned analytics and decision-support model for the Spotify for Artists creator tools.

• BC Ferries — a network-wide Customer Experience Master Plan spanning terminals, vessels, and digital.

• TELUS — a self-service transformation run in one-week sprints, shipping a deployable fix for a live call driver every week.

• Mozilla — support-experience research across a 786-person study, producing a North Star strategy for SUMO.

• Dell — a product assessment and roadmap grounded in a survey of 1,500 IT professionals.

• TransLink — system-wide journey mapping to shape the 2026–2030 Customer Experience Action Plan.

• Hims & Hers — improving conversion on the primary acquisition flow, and shaping new AI capabilities to deepen customer relationships.

• National Football League — discovery research and go-to-market working as an internal resource across the alpha and beta phases.

• Search Atlas — AI UX research and product evaluation of a new agentic, AI-powered SEO platform's core product.

The range is wider than any one case study shows

Those are the projects we can talk about by name. Most of our work sits under NDA, so the examples below are described by the shape of the problem rather than the logo. Across more than 70 engagements, the same rigor has produced:

• A moderated usability benchmark of a major North American bank's mobile app against ten US competitors, pairing task-success observation with a quantified usability score and a trust-and-emotion attribute battery.

• A visitor-experience strategy for a major destination marketing organization, built from 557 participants and 45 stakeholder interviews, with cruise and convention satisfaction both scoring in the low 80s NPS.

• A redesigned digital service for a provincial legal-aid organization that tested dramatically easier and more helpful than the existing site (ease of use 8.6 versus 6.7 out of ten).

• A voice-of-customer program for a major commercial insurer, across 46 adjuster and customer interviews, translated into behavioral service standards.

• A lead-generation overhaul for a leading real-estate search portal, turning 944 survey responses into segment models, journey maps, and a lead-scoring matrix.

• A donor-experience study for a major environmental nonprofit, across 961 survey responses and 16 interviews, producing four donor personas and a communications roadmap.

• A digital-banking diagnosis for a major credit union, pairing 20 in-depth interviews each with a comparative usability test against digital-first competitors.

• A website and information-architecture redesign for a health-profession regulator, validated across four rounds of testing that lifted measured usability by nearly two points out of ten.

• Nutrition-label research for a provincial public-health authority, across 671 respondents in six regions, that reset the channel strategy before a rollout.

The industries change; the discipline does not. Banking, insurance, telecom, healthcare, higher education, transit, tourism, retail, energy, government, and nonprofit have all had the same question at the center: what do people actually do, and what should we change because of it.

We understand the challenges you're facing

Most teams hire us with a version of one of these problems. If any of them sound like your week, we have solved it before:

• You are about to build a product or feature and need to know it will land before you commit the engineering.

• A redesign or re-platform keeps slipping, and you need evidence to get the next phase funded.

• Conversion, adoption, or retention numbers are stuck and no one can say exactly why.

• Customers can't find what they need — search, navigation, and information architecture are working against you.

• Support volume is high and your self-service tools aren't deflecting it.

• Your roadmap has more ideas than evidence, and you need a defensible way to prioritize.

• Your personas or segments no longer match how customers actually behave.

• An AI feature demos beautifully but isn't sticking with real users.

• Your physical and digital experiences feel like two different companies.

• A decision matters and your team is split, with no research to settle it.

• You simply don't have the people right now to run the research the moment calls for.

Across industries and methodologies

Fourteen years and 70-plus engagements mean we rarely start from zero. The work spans more than 20 industries — banking, insurance, and telecom through healthcare, higher education, transit, tourism, retail, energy, government, and nonprofit — and draws on the full research toolkit:

• Moderated usability and prototype testing, often iterative and scored

• In-depth qualitative interviews and ethnographic research, routinely dozens per study

• Large-scale surveys, from a few hundred to over a thousand respondents

• Journey mapping and service design

• Behavioral segmentation, personas, and jobs-to-be-done

• Information architecture, tree testing, and content strategy

• Competitive benchmarking and concept testing, including for AI features

• Co-design, measurement-framework design, and strategic foresight

The range is the advantage. A trust problem in digital banking often rhymes with a trust problem in AI features; a findability failure on a support site behaves like one on a university website. We bring the pattern with us — and we think hard about where the discipline is heading, including where AI leaves the user research role.

We adapt to how you work

You should not have to reshape your team around a vendor's process. We fit into yours, in whichever model suits the work:

• Sprint-based — a focused, time-boxed engagement that delivers development-ready results in weeks, ideal for prototype testing or a specific research question.

• Embedded — we work inside your team, alongside your PMs, designers, and researchers, as an extra set of senior hands for the duration of a project.

• Fractional — ongoing senior research and product capacity at a fraction of a full-time hire, for teams that need the expertise regularly but not permanently.

• Fixed-term — a defined engagement with clear scope and deliverables, for a launch, a redesign, or a transformation phase.

• Open-ended discovery — for the ambiguous problems where the first job is figuring out what the real question is before anyone can answer it.

Featured resources we've written

We publish the thinking behind the work. A sample, by focus:

Measuring and improving AI products

• Strategy for Measuring & Improving AI Products — the PH1 Bullseye, our framework for scoring any AI product on the four dimensions that predict value: Power, Speed, Impact, and Joy.

• Why Your AI Product Will Fail — the failure patterns we see most often, and how to design around them before launch.

• AI Silent Failures Killing Your Product Adoption — the seven failure patterns dashboards miss, grounded in research on 100,000 real AI conversations.

User research in the AI era

• The UX Researcher's Guide to Claude, Claude Cowork, and Claude Code — a practical guide to which AI tool fits which stage of the research workflow, how to set each up, and the data-privacy risks vendors don't mention.

• The Future of UX Researchers — a two-year forecast for the role and the three postures toward AI that decide your place in it.

• The Cognitive Shift Every UX Researcher Needs to Make — why the tools are the easy part, and the five approaches that actually produce value.

• The End of UX & Service Design as We Know It — how AI is reshaping the craft, and what stays essential.

CX, journey mapping, and adoption

• How to Build the Ideal CX Master Plan for the AI Era — what a modern CX strategy has to account for now.

• Journey Mapping That Actually Works — how teams use journey mapping to drive ROI and AI-ready services rather than wall art.

• How to Close the Gap Between AI Adoption and Monetization — why usage doesn't equal revenue, and what does.

Podcast

• Why Your AI Metrics Are Lying to You — an episode of our Product Impact Podcast on why usage numbers mislead product teams.

Our clients

A partial list of the organizations we have worked with, across more than 20 industries — most of our engagements are under NDA:

• Platform & consumer tech: Microsoft, Mozilla, Dell Technologies

• Observability & analytics: New Relic, Search Atlas

• Media, streaming & sports: Spotify, The Weather Network, National Football League

• Telecommunications: TELUS, Bell

• Healthcare & telehealth: Hims & Hers, TELUS Health, MD Anderson

• Banking & investing: Vancity, Questrade, Canadian Western Bank

• Insurance & lending: Northbridge Financial, Farm Credit Canada

• Consumer & retail brands: Under Armour, Indigo, Tentree

• Energy & industrial: Schneider Electric, Trans Mountain

• Higher education: Simon Fraser University, University of Waterloo, Thompson Rivers University

• Transportation & transit: BC Ferries, TransLink

• Government & public sector: Government of Canada, Ontario Provincial Police

• Tourism & travel: Tourism Vancouver, ToursByLocals, Fresh Tracks Canada

• Non-profit & public health: David Suzuki Foundation, STARS Lottery, BC Centre for Disease Control

When you're ready

None of this has to be urgent to be worth a conversation. If something on your side fits — a launch you can't get wrong, a team stretched too thin, a decision that needs evidence — we are ready to help. If not, keep us in mind for when it lands on your desk.

Tell us what you're facing, and we'll tell you honestly whether we're the right partner for it, and exactly how we'd approach it.

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