When I first heard about User Research a decade ago, the first image that showed up in my mind was that of ‘cultural anthropologists’ – people who travel to new countries and continents to learn about the building blocks of a community of people.
The goal is to understand why people do what they do – how people think, act, create, find meaning from their lives and work, and connect with one another.
A few years later, heading User Research at Atlan gave me the opportunity to see this in action.
Below is a slide I use as a part of our internal ‘shows’ about signals we captured from the field.
One of my favourite values at Atlan is Problem First, Solution Second – no matter what you think, what the situation is, or how process-oriented you are, nothing matters until you’re working towards solving the real problem the end user is facing.
For a remote organization like Atlan, embracing this value is quintessential. When you clearly define the problem, the entire organization aligns with it. So, even when your company scales and evolves, it doesn’t change focus to chase shiny distractions. Instead, the focus is on constantly building solutions that address the problem at every stage of the company’s growth.
This value lies at the heart of Atlan’s story and shapes how we solve problems as an organization.
Before we wrote the first line of code, our founders Prukalpa and Varun interviewed more than 200 data leaders in a two-week window. The signals captured and patterns noticed helped us validate the challenges we faced as a data team and laid the foundation for Atlan in 2019.
Five years and hundreds of user interviews later, we’re still designing for humans of data, asking ourselves how to help them achieve more. From day one, our focus has remained around the following problem statement:
“How might we design for customer value so that humans of data can do more together?”
Over the past year, we’ve seen that as an organization’s data culture grows, its data teams become more diverse, and its governance needs evolve. This diversity isn’t new to us, but we’ve recognized the value of connecting more closely with data teams to better understand the signals and patterns emerging from their work.
This required a ‘re-discovery’ of the relationships within data teams, the tools they rely on, and how they create value.
Some of the key signals we observed were:
- Data teams are no longer just composed of humans of data—they now include humans of data and AI.
- Data itself has evolved as an asset, with organizations treating it like an API to their LLMs. This has fundamentally shifted expectations.
- Conversations about AI are no longer just technical—they’ve become boardroom discussions about business impact.
Faced with these signals of diverse and dynamic cultures, evolving business needs, and the rising prominence of AI, we knew it was time for a rediscovery.
It was time to step out of Zoom calls and meet humans of data in their natural environments. The story of anthropologists observing humans in context came to life—it was a call to action to deeply understand this new world of data and AI.
The rediscovery began with an experiment that Dhruv (our Customer Success leader) and I started designing (learn more about this below), aimed at meeting our customers where they are by spending an entire day with their data teams.
What began as a small experiment quickly grew into a full-fledged European Roadshow, thanks to seamless collaboration across our CX, Engineering, Product, and Design teams. Together, we realigned on the problem statement and officially launched the roadshow in October 2024. When we first put together all the places and data teams we will meet, this is how that looked on the map. This was insane!
Over the course of the roadshow, we engaged with customers across six European cities. We designed each hour of the day to be packed with energy, open conversations, and meaningful discoveries. This is us after a full day visit at our customer in Berlin 🙂
Our goal was to capture signals at every level—business strategy, team dynamics, supporting processes, and the technology and products that power these teams. Curious about how we designed the roadshow? Read all about it here.
How did that go? Let’s hear from our customers and Atlan’s product team.
Anthropologists meticulously document their findings, often with notebooks in hand to record their discoveries. In our modern approach to field notes, we created short <15-minute videos after each roadshow to capture the insights we gathered. We shared these videos with our teams internally, helping them align priorities and guide design and product investments. All of us worked in a tight sync.
We also wanted to share these learnings with the broader community. So, we created the Data In Transit series on LinkedIn, showcasing the stories of the incredible data teams we met. As these stories went live, we started getting heartfelt messages from our customers and prospects about how they felt so seen. For many, it was the first time in years they were hearing directly from people like them – peers who understood their challenges and journeys.
For many, it was the first time in years they were hearing directly from people like them – peers who understood their challenges and journeys.
Read about these stories here → Hamburg | Geneva | Lausanne | Brno | Berlin | Paris
What did we do with this discovery? These roadshows have directly shaped our product investments and the roadmap for 2025.
For instance, we noticed the struggle data leaders face in identifying the right people to hire and the right processes to create. To address this, we’ve launched a program to help leaders build and evolve the maturity of their governance practices.
We also noticed that data teams can really use help in refining their own problem statement, which inspired us to introduce new Atlan University courses.
And there’s more! Building on the success of our EU roadshow, we’re gearing up for our next one—this time in the USA—to discover the similarities and differences among data teams across geographies. More on that very soon!
An anthropologist’s job is to deeply immerse themselves into a new world, discover the unknown, articulate the unseen, and share their observations to help others understand the nuances of that world and its ecosystem.
When I first read about anthropologists years ago, I never imagined I’d one day have the privilege to step into that role. Now, having experienced the incredible power of discovery, we are committed to continuing this journey.
It’s a privilege to have customers who openly collaborate with us, a team driven by relentless curiosity to uncover deeper truths, and leadership that champions bold experiments like this. The journey of discovery is ongoing, and we’re just getting started!
Curious about the experiment and how we ran it? Read all about it here.
If you are a first principles thinker–you love creating structure and have unlimited curiosity, please reach out. We are always hiring for people at these intersections in our User Research practice. We hire people for their superpowers and find a way to nurture them 🙂
