Lizzy Palmquist
Senior Manager, Product Design & Research at Roo. 10+ years building teams, infrastructure, and products where the obvious solution is rarely the first one you think of.
The short version.
Grew the design team from 1 to 5. Hired every designer. Built a feedback culture, a review practice, and a hiring bar before any of those things officially existed at Roo.
People & Team
Built a three-tier research practice from scratch: generative, evaluative, and continuous VOC. The research intelligence system is the most recent layer.
Research as Infrastructure
I sit at the PM and Data tables, not just present — contributing. The double-blind mechanic in R&R, the Q2 strategy shaped by PLIT research.
Cross-Functional Influence
When the team hits a wall, I start with what's actually true — not what the brief says or what was tried before. The rating system problem looked like a UX problem. It was a trust problem. That reframe changed everything downstream.
First Principles
Two case studies.
One shows what I ship, the other shows how I build the infrastructure that makes shipping smarter.
Password Protected
Replacing a broken 5-star system with something that told the truth about how shifts were actually going.
Ratings & Reviews
Password Protected
Building the infrastructure that turned thousands of support tickets into things squads could actually use.
Intelligence System
Resume.
Senior Manager, Product Design & Research with 10+ years building design-led products and the teams that ship them. Scaled a design function from 1 to 5, built a research practice from scratch, and shipped cross-platform systems for five distinct user types in a two-sided marketplace. Most comfortable at the intersection of people leadership, research infrastructure, and feedback system design.
Roo
Scaled the design function from solo contributor to a 5-person team over 4 years, and authored Roo's Experience and Product Principles — org-wide frameworks still used to resolve tradeoffs without escalation. Built Roo's first structured research practice (three-tier model: continuous discovery, project-based, and strategic) and drove cross-functional alignment on a double-blind rating architecture by connecting UX rationale to data quality and marketplace health.
Senior Manager, Product Design & Research
Cloudbees
Big Spaceship
Code & Theory
AnalogFolk
MCD Partners
Prior experience
Education
Cornell University — B.S. Communication & Technology
The work I care most about isn't any single feature.
It's the systems underneath them — the frameworks the team uses to decide what to build, how we evaluate it, and what we're actually optimizing for.