Today we happily welcome back Michele Hansen. Michele is the co-founder of the Software-as-a-Service company Geocodio – a SaaS that provides hassle free geocoding. Prior to being an entrepreneur, Michele was a product manager in financial publishing and a project manager for a web development agency.

Michele is the author of an excellent book on customer interviewing which I recommend everywhere I go “Deploy Empathy”. That’s the one with the yellow duck. Aaand after something like a two year break she’s again the co-host of the Software Social Podcast.

Today we will dive into the topic of AI in customer research. I want to add a few numbers from a Qualtrics trend report, just to kind of highlight the relevance of the topic if that’s needed at all. So in the 2025 trend report 69% of respondents say that they have used synthetic responses in their research, 83% plan to increase their AI investment and 73% agree that within 3 years synthetic data will make up more than half of the data they use. So, there’s definitively something going on here. Let’s dive in!

Links to sources: deployempathy.com

Paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4551487

Our guest today, Steven Weissenburger, is director of strategy and innovation at Vanderbilt University Medical Center. They are an inter consultancy that helps their company generate strategies and innovations to navigate complex, novel, and ambiguous situations.

We will be discussing the Estuarine Framework which is 1 of the three major frameworks in the Cynefin ecosystem which we have discussed on this podcast in past episodes namely with Tom Kerwin, Steven Bartlett or Kyle Godbey.

Steven has a lot of practical experience using this framework and we will talk about how it works in practice. The framework is used mostly in the context of dealing with complex situations within an organization or community, but I am sure it can bring super useful insights to listeners in the product and services innovation space, so I am hoping we can make a connection there.dsa