Main Stage

Building a product within a product: How research saved Lookback from a long, painful death .


You can build a “great product”, packed with powerful features and tech, but if it’s not informed by users - it will likely fail. Similarly, you can build a “great company”, packed with smart people and ideas, but if it’s not informed by it’s users (employees) - it will likely fail too. Both fail in ways that are hard to notice.

In this talk, we’ll share how research became a core strategy in every area of our business—whether the customer’s experience of our product, or with our own employee’s experience of our company.

Kacie Wise.

Head of Experience, Lookback


 

Kacie leads the Experience team at Lookback. She focuses on programs to get to know our customers in more meaningful ways, and ensures Lookback aims to address their research needs. With her deep background in strategy and user research, customer/user/attendee experience has been a constant throughout her career - whether planning weddings way back when (yes), management consulting, at agencies, and most recently leading User Research at eBay Classifieds. When she’s not chatting it up with customers at Lookback, you can find her on the tennis courts, in a pool, or trying out a fun restaurant with her family in Portland, Oregon.


Henrik Mattsson.

CEO, Lookback


 

Henrik was born and raised in Sweden, where he started his career in academia, but has lived in Canada since 2005. Shortly after finishing his PhD in economics he realized, however, that it’s much more fun helping tech companies with strategy and change management. Ten years and 300 entrepreneurs of consulting work later he was looking for an opportunity to have more long-term impact at a startup with a meaningful mission. In 2015, Lookback came knocking and introduced Henrik to what UX research can do to product building and that was it. Now he spends his days with a wonderful team trying to support the UX revolution and the UX research community. When he is not working, he spends his time in Montréal or in the boreal forest with his wife and two kids.