In Ramp’s early days, strong instincts from the founders led to solid product decisions. But as the company grew, the intuition didn't stretch to every team or user journey. We needed a systematic way to understand users, not just rely on gut feeling.

At that point, Ramp had no structured user research. I knew building a full program would require trust and quick wins, so I started small with onboarding interviews.

Many new employees had never used Ramp before joining. Some, even after months on the job, still didn’t fully understand the product. That alone revealed a deeper issue. I teamed up with the People team and added live research sessions to onboarding. New hires completed their first transaction while thinking out loud. It was simple, but the patterns we uncovered got leadership’s attention and opened the door to a proper research practice.

At the same time, I started reviewing hundreds of session recordings using Hotjar. There was some early resistance, especially from engineering and early team members, who were concerned about performance and user privacy. But once they saw the insights, the hesitation disappeared. We uncovered dozens of edge cases we didn’t even know existed. On their own, these issues seemed small. But stacked together, they had a serious impact on conversion. Fixing them led to the most successful quarter in the company’s history in terms of conversion gains.