Organizational Effectiveness · Strategic Facilitation | Cross-functional Alignment

Tbilisi / remote / relocate • linkedin • [email protected]

🎯 Summary

I find the weak spots in how a company actually works by talking to everyone involved, from the founders to the people doing the work. Then I design and facilitate the sessions where those people reach real agreement, build a plan they actually own, and I stay with them through the messy part where they have to make it real. Months later I go back and ask the people whether anything changed, and look at the metrics they were aiming at.

Efficiency on its own doesn't interest me; what a group of people can do together does. If a company has already restructured around AI and the work isn't running the way it was supposed to, working out what actually broke there is the same job as any other, and it's work I'd take. I'll also tell a decision-maker when I think they're wrong, which has cost me a project before now.

Most of my work has been with digital teams of ten to a hundred people. Formally it pointed outward, at users, and it never stayed there — what people said about the product kept leading back to the bottleneck inside the company that made it, and I'd follow it there. Sometimes that became the whole job: the sales department at Huntflow, four studies of Drive's own internal processes, a nonprofit whose research had stopped reaching its own teams, and two years rebuilding how a design studio sold and delivered work. They changed their sales process, and the presale and workshop structure I built is still what they run.

Seven years, 50+ projects, and a growing pull toward climate and the regenerative economy.

👩🏻‍💻 Experience

**Independent Research & Strategy Consultant

Remote (Contract)** June 2024 — Present

I run my own registered practice in Georgia (individual entrepreneur) and contract internationally. Most of the work since June 2024 has come through two research agencies: Cloud Research, where I lead research and strategy across 20+ B2B and B2C projects, and Glasgow Research, where I've run four. Fintech, crypto, ecommerce, edtech, adtech.

• Own the full research cycle: intake, methodology, recruiting, fieldwork, synthesis, recommendations
• Work with product, design and analytics teams to turn business questions into hypotheses that can actually be tested
• When users drop out of a funnel, dig into why alongside the analytics team and design the research that tells the product team what to change, not just where the drop is
• Present findings with the trade-offs stated plainly, including when the answer isn't the one the team was hoping for

Client names sit under agency agreements, so I don't list them here — happy to talk through the work itself.

Impact Research Lead (Volunteer) at Work on Climate

Remote (San Francisco, CA) April 2025 – August 2025

Work on Climate is a non-profit that helps people move into climate work. I joined to run the community's biannual impact survey and ended up looking into why the survey wasn't working.

• Led a volunteer team of researchers.
• Rewrote the questionnaire so that it answered what the organisation actually needed to know, while keeping the results comparable with previous waves. Some questions had stopped answering anything useful — NPS, for one, measures community satisfaction poorly.
• Worked out why response rates were so low: 68% of community members are inactive, and the survey went out untargeted, with no segmentation of who was being asked what.
• Found the deeper problem underneath the survey. Research sat apart from every other team and existed to produce reports, so teams barely used the findings to change their programs, while what those teams themselves learned about members accumulated nowhere.
• Worked with stakeholders to decide which impact questions were worth researching at all, and rebuilt the instrument while the organisation was shifting its mission, so it measured what the new direction needed.
• The survey I designed was fielded after my volunteer term and published as Work on Climate's 2025 Community Impact Report. I built the instrument; the analysis and report were done by the team after me.

**Research Lead → Head of Research & CBDO at Pragmatica Design Studio

Remote (Full Time)** May 2022 – May 2024

Research Team Lead from May 2022, then Head of Research and Chief Business Development Officer from December 2022

I came in without a task list. The job was to embed a product-centric approach without breaking anything or adding load to people who were already overloaded, so I started by asking everyone what was making their work harder and built from their answers rather than from my own idea of what should change. The CEO pointed at low sales and slow lead processing. The real problem was that projects had no strategic foundation, which is why they drowned in rework and in discovery nobody was paying for.

What I found

• Collect the data by sitting in on the managers' daily meetings, walked the pre-sale process end to end, and talked with designers and managers about what they needed at the start of a project and what broke later.
• Rewrote the brief and the whole briefing process so that the client's business goals, their stakeholders, and the people who actually make the decisions surfaced at the start rather than mid-project.
• Mapped where work broke between teams with service blueprints, and facilitated the internal workshops where those teams worked it out together.

What I built

• Turned that unpaid discovery phase into a paid product of its own: a strategic week with deliverables the client could actually use, their own stakeholders aligned, a scope and timeline that held up, and material they could take to their management to justify the budget.
• The stage that had cost the studio money on every project started paying for itself, and average project value rose about 20%.
• Ran 15 in-depth interviews with design and art directors at major companies to test the model against the market rather than trusting what I'd seen inside one studio, and we published the findings.
• Filtered clients on whether we could actually help, turning down projects where nobody could say what business problem we were solving.
• Ran a full market validation for launching research as a standalone business unit — unit economics, competitor analysis, expert and potential-client interviews — and recommended against it, because the demand wasn't there.

The team

• Built the research function from zero and hired three researchers, none of them with research experience. I hired for how they thought, not for their CVs, and grew them. One is now a mid-level researcher at a major tech company, another leads research at the studio today.
• Brought in and led freelance researchers on projects, and kept running research on client projects myself.
• Automated research operations with AI (transcription, tagging, synthesis), built custom GPTs for JTBD, and trained the team on them.
• Ran 20+ external mentoring sessions on product research and strategy, published articles, hosted broadcasts on research methods for designers, and spoke at industry conferences on AI in research

• Product Researcher January 2020 — March 2022

• Marketing Specialist and CustDev at Huntflow February 2019 — December 2019