I'm Anna, a UX researcher and Research Ops person with over a decade in the field. I run qualitative research and build the systems that let your team do research well, in English, German or Russian.

What I do
I can cover the whole research cycle, from the question to the decision. My focus and my favourite part is qualitative work: talking to real people and turning what they say into insights your team can act on.

Research

• Framing the real question behind the request

• Study design: interviews, usability tests, evaluative and generative research

• Recruiting the right participants, including hard-to-reach audiences

• Running sessions, then analysis and synthesis

• Turning findings into decisions your team actually makes

Research Operations

• Setting up research ops from scratch: processes, tools and guidelines

• Building and running participant panels and recruiting workflows

• Consent, GDPR and privacy-friendly research practices

• Templates and automated participant communication, so the boring stuff runs itself

• Enablement programmes that teach designers, PMs and engineers to run solid research on their own

• Interactive workshops and training (I'm a certified workshop facilitator)

How I work
Sometimes I work solo. Sometimes a project needs more than one brain, so I bring in researchers I trust.

My go-to partner is Trang Doan of Narrative Architects. We're partners in crime and research. Trang is brilliant at turning research into insights teams can act on, and I set up the systems that let a company run research well and at scale. Together we can run the study, train your team and build the research infrastructure in one go.

We share one rule: if a project only answers a surface-level request and ignores the real business and product needs underneath, we'll say so. Sometimes the honest answer is "you don't need us for this".

Languages
I work in English, German and Russian. I can run interviews, facilitate sessions and do analysis in all three, so your participants can speak in the language they think in.

Experience highlights

• Senior Research Operations Manager at Babbel (May 2022 to Nov 2025). I was Babbel's first Research Ops manager. I built the enablement programme, ran the user panel, brought GDPR principles into research, and worked across product, academic and market research teams.

• Research enablement at scale. I designed a six-session programme that trained product trios to run evaluative research themselves, and I wrote about it on the Babbel Design blog.

• Speaker. I led the enablement workshop at User Interviews' Research Ops Appreciation Week 2024, and I'm featured in their Definitive Guide to Participant Management and Recruitment.

• Research Operations Manager at diffferent (formerly USEEDS°) (Jul 2018 to Aug 2021). This was agency work for clients in banking, publishing, education and government.

• Freelance with Pollo Digital since 2026. I run research and design interactive research workshops and training., with my latest client Yazio.

Testimonial

"If you want to conduct rapid, high-quality research, Anna is the research operations manager you want on your team! She has built our user research panel from scratch… and can even step in to do user interviews herself in German and English when you need support."
Luisa Koch

Who it's for

• Product teams with a research question that needs a real answer, not just a report

• Companies without a research team that need senior research without a full-time hire

• Growing research teams that need ops: panels, recruiting, consent, tooling and templates

• Organisations that want designers, PMs and engineers to get better at talking to users

• Teams researching users in English-, German- or Russian-speaking markets