“Ask questions others don’t.”

Hey, I’m Adam Valerio!

I’ve been a PhD trained researcher for 15+ years (eg, Head of UX Research, Senior UX Researcher). I’ve worked in healthcare, FinTech, PropTech, CharityTech, and higher education.

My philosophy as a UX researcher is to help my product team land safely when we try daring things. I collect and analyze data to identify the drop zone, provide us with a parachute, and steer us safely to the ground.

Adam Skydiving
I’m obsessed with chess. Let’s play!

I’ve never been afraid to ask the tough questions and help the team be methodical and user-centered in our approach. I’ve learned through experience that critiques should always include alternative paths forward or a “How might we…?” to help us ideate together.

My Story

I didn’t always work in UX research. I was a healthcare researcher for 3.5 years before entering a PhD program to become a professor.

As a professor, I conducted complex academic research and taught 2,200 university students over the course of a decade. I even taught a course on UX research for startups. There are many things I suck at, but teaching wasn’t one of them. My courses always had massive waitlists because I ran highly interactive student-centered courses that I tailored to the needs of my students. How did I know what they needed? I asked them! It’s my teaching experience, more than anything else, that has made me great at facilitating cross-functional teams, mentoring, and evangelizing research insights.

My academic research was primarily in the intersection of Buddhism and the psychological sciences, especially mindfulness studies. My biggest impact was in pioneering the use of a new quantitative method—bibliometrics–in mindfulness research by applying statistical analysis to large bibliographic datasets to test several assumptions made by my fellow mindfulness researchers. This made me a go-to expert and research reviewer for academic journals. Please get them to stop emailing me!

Oh, and I moved to Tokyo! Living in Japan and conducting interviews and long-term ethnographic fieldwork with Japanese psychotherapists and neuroscientists was an amazing experience that challenged my conceptions of what aspects of humans and societies are universal versus cultural constructs. 日本語でもいい!

I loved being a professor, but it was finally time for me to scratch an itch. Acting on an idea that I had many years prior, I decided to co-found a tech startup to make charitable giving more impactful, trustful, and rewarding. So, I recruited two co-founders and got to work. Over 2.5 years, I led 20+ major product improvements by building a UX program from scratch, doing everything from training and supervising the team to guiding prototype design to leading 60+ usability testing sessions. I learned a lot from our successes and failures. I wouldn’t be the leader I am today without this amazing adventure.

From there, I joined a mid-stage PropTech startup as a Senior UX Researcher, serving as Research Lead for our Landlord Financial Tools team. In this position, I employed a great many methodologies and ultimately transformed the approach of 15+ designers and product managers by running a Voice of the Customer program that shifted product perception for 70% of employees and illuminated a previously unknown use case that accounted for 25% of all product use. Everyone at this 180 employee company knew me, largely due to my influential monthly Voice of the Customer newsletters which garnered significant engagement, including from the CEO who was a regular reader and encouraged all managers to promote the newsletter to their teams.

Now, I’m on the lookout for my next opportunity.

I’m interested in any role where I can support a great mission, interact with nice people, and solve difficult problems.

Let’s connect! Feel free to reach out anytime through LinkedIn!