I uncover the signals behind customer behavior and turn insights into stronger relationships and smarter products.
Through continuous discovery, strategic research, AI workflows, and journey analysis, I help teams understand what’s shifting in the market, align around opportunity, and make confident decisions that create durable human-centered connections.
—Story Safford
Services
Brand Experience Strategy
I help organizations build relationships with customers by transforming behavior, motivations, and unmet needs into business advantage. Through Agile qualitative research, continuous discovery, and journey analysis, I uncover the patterns and signals that help organizations see what’s changing in their market, reduce uncertainty, and make decisions with confidence.
Rapid Research Sprints
Stop letting traditional research cycles stall your velocity. I design and facilitate collaborative workspaces where your users drive project-specific breakthroughs in days, not months. By blending 10+ years of strategic rigor with the speed of AI-native synthesis, I create customized feedback loops that allow your team to bypass assumptions and solve their most urgent challenges with evidence.
Launch Readiness Audit
Is your MVP actually ready to ship?
I provide a high-impact diagnostic of your product before you spend another dollar on design and engineering. I identify critical user friction, trust gaps, and technical hurdles, providing a Go/No-Go report and a prioritized list of must-fixes to ensure your launch doesn't require expensive do-overs.
Case Studies
Netflix: Franchise Product Strategy & Multi-Channel Ecosystem
Role: Brand Experience Strategy, Research Lead, Concept Generation
Architected the growth strategy for a flagship Netflix franchise, transforming a single entertainment property into a connected, multi-channel brand ecosystem that extended audience engagement beyond the core viewing experience. By combining brand strategy, audience research, and product thinking, I defined the vision and roadmap for a unified fan experience spanning digital platforms, live activations, broadcast, social, and out-of-home channels. The strategy centered on understanding how audiences connect with stories, communities, and cultural moments—and translating those insights into scalable experiences that deepened loyalty and expanded the brand’s reach.
Strategic Impact:
Experience Ecosystem Strategy: Designed the end-to-end framework for extending audience engagement across multiple channels, creating a cohesive brand experience that strengthened retention and fan participation.
Audience-Centered Growth: Leveraged research and behavioral insights to identify opportunities for deeper audience connection, transforming a television property into a broader cultural and commercial platform.
Cross-Channel Experience Alignment: Unified disparate brand, marketing, and product initiatives under a shared experience strategy, ensuring consistency across physical, digital, and media touchpoints.
Insight-Driven Brand Expansion: Built the strategic foundation that enabled the franchise to evolve from a single-format entertainment property into a scalable multimedia ecosystem, earning a Clio Bronze Award for brand transformation and integrated audience engagement.
Regeneron: Strategic Trade-offs & Market Velocity
Role: Research Lead, Service Design, Product Development
Navigated the tension between regulatory compliance, organizational risk, and the need for market responsiveness within a highly regulated healthcare environment. By combining service design, product strategy, and human-centered research, I developed a lean discovery-to-delivery framework that helped teams make confident investment decisions faster, balancing governance requirements with customer needs and business objectives. The approach created a continuous feedback loop between users, stakeholders, and product teams, enabling innovation to move forward without sacrificing compliance, quality, or long-term scalability.
Key Strategic Impact:
Experience-Informed Product Velocity: Designed a lean validation framework that accelerated learning cycles, allowing teams to test assumptions, gather evidence, and deliver value faster while reducing unnecessary investment risk.
Strategic Trade-Off Management: Helped stakeholders navigate competing priorities between speed, scalability, compliance, and customer experience, creating alignment around informed product and business decisions.
Human-Centered Governance: Integrated customer and stakeholder insights into decision-making processes, ensuring regulatory requirements were met while preserving usability, adoption, and operational effectiveness.
Continuous Insight for Smarter Investment: Established an evidence-based approach to prioritization that connected user needs, market realities, and business goals, enabling leadership to act with greater confidence in a rapidly evolving environment.
HireRight: Enterprise Analytics & Monetization Strategy
Role: Research Lead, Service Design, Product Development, Experience Strategy
Spearheaded a high-velocity strategic discovery and rapid research sprint for Tier-1 global accounts, including Amazon, Microsoft, and Uber. The primary objective was to pivot HireRight’s background screening analytics from a freeware reporting package into a high-value, premium paid service. By moving beyond standard data visualization to uncover Universal Truths across global accounts, I led the transformation of raw data into a scalable diagnostic engine. This work not only justified new tiered revenue streams but also neutralized critical RFP threats by shifting the focus from passive reporting to actionable, high-utility intelligence.
Strategic Impact:
Monetization & Value Reframe: Successfully shifted the product value proposition from commodity raw data to a diagnostic Next Best Action engine. By identifying specific analytical outcomes that Tier-1 clients valued, we converted a freeware cost center into a revenue-generating premium tool.
AI-Augmented Research Velocity: Integrated an LLM-based human-in-the-loop system to synthesize 800+ global data points and 150+ user queries. This AI-augmented workflow accelerated the thematic mapping phase, allowing a complex global discovery to be completed within a 3-week rapid research sprint.
Global Scalability & Standardization: Neutralized the Customization Trap by developing a standardized architecture based on universal diagnostic behaviors. This included a scalable framework with universal filters and personalized nomenclature, such as My Company’s Speed, eliminating the need for expensive, bespoke dashboards for individual accounts.
Retention & Risk Mitigation: Directly addressed analysis fatigue and customer churn by transforming abstract industry jargon into high-utility drill-downs that connected abstract metrics to the underlying candidate story. This strategic pivot resulted in a 95% reduction in analysis fatigue and 100% retention of high-value accounts previously threatening to leave.
Cigna: Telehealth Product Strategy & Digital Care Experience
Role: Research Lead, Service Design, Product Development, Experience Strategy
Led the evolution of Cigna’s national telehealth experience, helping the organization navigate a fundamental shift in how patients access care before, during, and after the pandemic. By combining market research, service design, and product strategy, I helped transform telehealth from a transactional service into a connected care ecosystem that strengthened relationships between patients and providers. Through continuous discovery and behavioral insight, I identified changing patient expectations, uncovered barriers to adoption, and translated those signals into strategic product investments that improved access, engagement, and long-term care continuity.
Strategic Impact:
Experience-Led Product Strategy: Defined the vision and roadmap for digital care experiences, using mixed-method research to guide investment decisions, improve retention, and support scalable telehealth adoption.
Continuous Human Insight System: Created a Voice-of-Customer ecosystem that transformed fragmented patient feedback into an ongoing stream of actionable insights, enabling teams to respond quickly to evolving healthcare needs and behaviors.
Journey Transformation & Service Design: Identified friction across the patient care journey and redesigned digital access pathways that improved care coordination, reduced barriers to engagement, and strengthened provider-patient connections.
Evidence-Driven Growth & Alignment: Connected patient needs, business objectives, and operational realities into a shared decision-making framework that helped leadership prioritize initiatives with confidence and measurable impact.
Comic-Con HQ: Scaling Cultural Experience into Digital Product Strategy
Role: Research & Discovery, Brand Experience Strategy, Concept Generation
Architected the MVP and long-term experience strategy for Comic-Con HQ, transforming a four-day cultural event into a year-round digital subscription ecosystem designed to deepen fan connection and extend brand engagement beyond the convention floor. Blending product strategy, behavioral research, and brand experience design, I defined the foundational roadmap for translating the emotional intensity and community-driven energy of Comic-Con into a scalable digital platform that sustained audience loyalty between live events.
Strategic Impact:
Experience-Led Product Strategy: Defined the core product vision, feature prioritization, and experience architecture for launch, balancing immediate subscriber value with long-term platform scalability.
Brand-to-Digital Translation: Developed strategic frameworks that transformed the lightning-in-a-bottle energy of the live Comic-Con experience into an always-on digital engagement ecosystem rooted in fandom, identity, and community participation.
Human Insight & Stakeholder Alignment: Leveraged behavioral research and audience analysis to resolve competing stakeholder assumptions, align teams around customer needs, and shape a cohesive platform strategy.
Evidence-Driven Growth Roadmap: Built a continuous insight pipeline that informed investment prioritization, audience engagement strategy, and future product evolution while balancing passionate fan expectations with business growth objectives.
North American Launch
Softbank Robotics
I defined the product-market fit strategy for Softbank Robotics’ Pepper, leading the high-stakes discovery phase to navigate deep-seated consumer friction and societal ambiguity. By translating complex human patterns and signals into a clear, actionable product trajectory, I resolved critical uncertainty regarding the robot's place in the market, directly driving a landmark go-to-market launch.
Zyrtec “Parks Unleashed”
Owned the behavioral strategy and product discovery for Zyrtec’s digital ecosystem, identifying high-intent customer triggers to integrate brand value into daily user routines. Spearheaded the cross-functional execution of "Parks Unleashed," a non-linear digital experience recognized by Mashable as one of YouTube’s "Most Impactful" campaigns for its innovative approach to market awareness and engagement.
Architected the product vision and full business requirements for Zyrtec.com, designing a dynamic personalization engine and information architecture that utilized implicit and explicit inputs to scale traffic to 50,000+ unique monthly visitors. This strategy included the development of an integrated loyalty platform, bridging marketing objectives with a high-conversion user experience.
