As Project Lead, I owned the engagement end to end and ran it in two phases, directing the research from design through synthesis. It began with a deep secondary scan to map the category, the competitive landscape, and the forces shaping demand, which sharpened the questions worth asking. From there I designed and led two phases of primary research, taking the emerging picture back into the field to test it, deepen it, and pressure-test the assumptions the team was carrying. Throughout, I worked directly with the founders to translate what we were learning into decisions, and kept the research tied to the choices in front of them rather than to interesting but idle findings.

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The value was less in any single finding and more in the shift from a founder's conviction to a shared, evidence-based view of the market. The research separated the needs that were real and urgent from the ones that only sounded compelling, clarified who the product was genuinely for, and gave the team a defensible basis for where to focus first.