You don't need a full-time research lead. You need the right one, part of the time.
80 Watts is the consultancy of Matt Wallens, an Atlanta-based experience strategist with 25 years of experience helping organizations understand their customers, their employees, and their operations before they build the wrong thing. My methods range from in-depth contextual inquiry to AI-enabled synthesis.
Most teams are making important decisions without enough information.
They're moving fast, guessing at what their customers need, and finding out they were wrong after they've already committed.
That's where I come in.
I work with product and service teams as an embedded strategic partner, whether that means leading a research program, mapping a complex service experience, facilitating alignment across stakeholders, or building research capability inside your team. Every engagement is scoped around what you actually need.
Ways I can help
Discovery Research
Experience Lead
Sprint Advisory
Research & Strategy Training
What clients say
“I’ve worked with plenty of researchers over the years. I’ve learned it’s something that’s easy for people to do... poorly. It’s incredibly hard to do it well, and no one exhibits mastery of the domain as much as Matt does. He’s truly at the top of his craft and it shows up in the outcomes.”
“Matt is great to work with. He is a good listener, quick study and valued partner. He was able to quickly get up to speed on the customer problem and work with us to develop the right approach and questions.
He does a great job making customers feel comfortable during user testing. And I was most grateful that when under a tight deadline, he was able to synthesize the customer feedback in a short period of time so we could immediately act on the results.”
“I recently worked on a rather complex research and design project where Matt Wallens was contracted with User Insight to be our researcher to run interviews on a prototype that was very complex and industry-specific.
Matt took the time to really review and understand the designs and ask lots of questions in advance of the interviews to be sure he understood everything correctly. He is very thorough, detail-oriented, flexible, and easy to work with. I would be happy to work with Matt again any time.”
“We engaged Matt and 80 Watts to help us with early stage clickable prototype and alpha application testing for a new product. 80 Watts served as a one stop shop for us, allowing me to hand off large parts of the coordination, all of the scripting and the hosting of the testing.
During testing, Matt was amazing at working with the users. His questions elicited thought out responses, his patience in working with the users and the tools (they were alpha too!) was saint-like.
All in all, I couldn’t ask for a better research partner and I hope that we can continue our relationship with Matt and 80 Watts in the years to come.”
A few of the teams I've worked with
