Principal Product Researcher & Coach · Copenhagen
I'm an anthropologist turned product researcher and coach. I help organisations build the research infrastructure, team habits, and discovery practices to make customer-centred decisions — continuously.
By the numbers
At Milestone Systems, I help product teams understand the needs of customers who rely on video technology to keep people safe, work smarter, and enable the responsible use of video data. I use research to uncover the real challenges behind the stated ones — and work with teams to find creative solutions that address them.
I head up research operations, leading the development and implementation of our research enablement tooling. I coach product teams in research methods, outcomes, opportunity identification, testing, experimentation, and continuous discovery.
I'm committed to building a culture of data-driven decision-making and continuous learning — so that product organisations can keep delivering innovative, impactful solutions that make a genuine difference.
Before moving into product, I spent years in applied anthropology and B2B product management — bringing fieldwork rigour, behavioural curiosity, and a grounding in how people actually work into everything I do.
Much of my work sits inside technically complex, regulated product domains — where customers are not just end users but partners, installers, system integrators, and operators, each with a different mental model of the same product. Research in these contexts demands a particular kind of fluency: translating between technical depth and human experience, navigating privacy and ethical constraints, and earning the trust of sophisticated audiences who can smell a superficial question from a mile away.
Designing and conducting global research programmes — interviews, ethnographic studies, usability sessions — that surface genuine customer insight and translate directly into product decisions.
Building the systems that make research scalable: participant panels, insight repositories, toolstack governance, GDPR-compliant recruitment pipelines, and team upskilling programmes.
Coaching product teams to embed weekly discovery habits — defining measurable outcomes, building opportunity solution trees, and running interviews that generate real learning, not confirmation.
Using AI tooling to scale research rigour — from synthesis automation in Dovetail to coaching agents that help product managers write better outcomes and opportunity statements.
Conducting research in regulated, high-stakes technical contexts — video technology, AI, computer vision, privacy — where participants are sophisticated, products are complex, and the research has to earn its credibility before it earns its seat at the table.
Bringing research into early-stage business model development — defining the questions, running the studies, and helping leadership understand what customers need before committing to a direction.
A foundational specialism from B2B product management: designing for behaviour change in workplace tools, with published research on gamification at scale in enterprise contexts.
Research Operations
Built Milestone's research panel from the ground up — defining recruitment pipelines, participant governance, screening criteria, consent management, and incentive structures. The panel now supports continuous qualitative and quantitative research across the ecosystem of partners, installers, and end users.
Strategic Research
Led qualitative research supporting early-stage exploration of a new platform business model in the computer vision space. Helped shape the strategic direction by understanding customer and partner needs before major investment decisions were made.
Discovery Infrastructure
Designed and configured an integrated discovery system across five tools — enabling product teams to manage outcomes, map opportunities, and synthesise interview insights without researcher dependency. Paired with workshops and coaching to drive adoption.
AI Tooling
Built AI coaching agents to support product managers in writing measurable product outcomes and HMW opportunity statements — grounded in continuous discovery methodology, with few-shot examples and structured prompts that reinforce good thinking rather than replace it.
Research Operations
Established Milestone's centralised insight repository — defining tagging taxonomies, synthesis workflows, data governance standards, and documentation practices so that research findings are findable, reusable, and trusted across product teams.
B2B Product & Behaviour Design
As Product Manager at Orchard MBC, led the design of behaviour change and gamification mechanics for B2B web and mobile applications — combining qualitative fieldwork with concept development to drive adoption of new workflows in enterprise contexts.
Product coaching isn't about teaching a framework. It's about building the habits, language, and shared confidence that let a product manager, designer, and engineer make better decisions together — week after week, without needing a coach in the room.
I work with product teams on the fundamentals of continuous discovery: setting outcomes that are genuinely measurable, building opportunity trees grounded in interview evidence, and developing the discipline to test assumptions before committing to solutions.
A significant part of my coaching work is with highly technical product teams — where the challenge isn't just discovery, it's helping engineers and PMs translate deep technical capability into customer outcomes that are meaningful to the people who actually use the product.
Central to how I coach is outcome definition — helping teams articulate measurable changes in customer behaviour or sentiment that indicate their product is delivering value, and connecting those outcomes to the business results that matter to leadership.
My coaching is grounded in Teresa Torres's Continuous Discovery Habits and adapted for the real organisational constraints product teams navigate every day.
01
Helping teams set outcomes that are measurable, product-influenced, and tied to real customer behaviour — not output metrics dressed up as goals.
02
Building opportunity solution trees that reflect the genuine landscape of customer needs, grounded in interview evidence rather than team assumption.
03
Coaching PMs and designers to run weekly customer interviews that generate real insight — not confirmation of what the team already believes.
04
Designing lightweight experiments that reduce risk before committing to a solution — and building the team muscle to do this as a regular practice.
05
Upskilling product teams to run rigorous discovery themselves — with the right methods, tools, and guardrails so that quality doesn't depend on researcher availability.
2015
Published in the Proceedings of The International Gamification for Business Conference, Aston University, Birmingham. An empirical study of gamification mechanics applied to knowledge-sharing behaviour in a large enterprise context.
2013
A pilot study for Visit Denmark, examining the experience and unmet needs of Chinese-speaking tourists in Copenhagen — part of a broader research project on tourist-driven innovation in the city.
Whether you're building a research practice, coaching product teams through continuous discovery, or trying to connect research to the outcomes leadership actually cares about — I'm happy to talk.
Get in touchLocation
Copenhagen, Denmark
Currently
Principal Product Researcher & Research Operations Lead, Milestone Systems
Open to
Coaching engagements, speaking, and advisory work
linkedin.com/in/longtimothy