Rene Zelaya

Founder and product leadApr 2025 to present

• Specified and shipped three products end to end, owning scope, prioritization, build sequence, and pricing: Skycritter, a generative game-asset pipeline live on the App Store with paying users in the US and France; WhisperPad, a speech-to-text tool built on Whisper ASR and maintained across nine releases; and Moogle in the Machine, a suite of UX research tools.
• Ran the discovery, concept testing, and funnel analysis on each as sole researcher and operator, including a human-in-the-loop review gate designed so review cost stays fixed per character while generated output scales.

Senior UX ResearcherOct 2021 to Apr 2024

• Led a cross-functional journey mapping initiative with Product, Operations, Legal, Design, and Fulfillment to align roadmap priorities across three user groups: clients, financial advisors, and fulfillment staff.
• Delivered research that shaped the digital self-service strategy for life insurance, including notification preferences, proactive status updates, and omnichannel support options.
• Established the team's first structured framework for generative and evaluative research, and mentored junior researchers and designers into it.

UX Researcher (Contract)May 2021 to Oct 2021

• Led a six-month, multi-phase research program for the Spectrum News app: remote contextual interviews with participant-captured photos, a large behavioral survey, prototype evaluation, and taxonomy research with journalists.
• Research moved the app past ZIP-code segmentation, defined the features it shipped with, and set the channel rollout order. Connected TV launched in 2022; by 2024 it grew +146% year over year, and the app reached 5M unique mobile visitors.

UX Researcher, Customer ExperienceFeb 2019 to May 2021

• Co-owned a Voice of Customer program covering 21 products. Program outcomes: +15% CSAT and a 12% reduction in support call volume.
• Led a three-week field study at the Costa Rica support center directing three researchers, and authored the classification ontology behind Clarabridge from that research, tying how customers described a problem to how agents diagnosed it.
• Designed the VOC dashboards so product teams could drill from global NPS down to their own product's issues without a researcher in the room.

CX ResearcherMar 2017 to Feb 2019

• Reduced support requests by 10% through qualitative pain-point analysis and targeted UX changes.

Customer Care RepresentativeOct 2015 to Mar 2017

• Frontline technical support. Consistently in the top five for NPS on the whole support floor, with high first-call resolution, and escalated recurring customer pain points into product and UX work.