Client Testimonials
Spencer Hewitt, Founder / CEO, RADAR
“Tamara was the product rock of RADAR that got us moving in the right direction. When building a fundamentally new technology it can be applied to zillions of things and Tamara helped us focus on what was important and what would actually deliver value to THE USER. Beyond that Tamara was an invaluable mentor and even sometimes mediator for the founding team. She is a unicorn.”
Ken Seiff, Managing Partner, Blockchange Ventures
“Tamara is our go to consultant for anything User Experience and Product related. I have never done my own start-up without her. As a founder, she was a secret weapon for me.
Tamara is the best product person I know.”
John Tarpey, Director, United Nations / WIPO Communications
“Working with Tamara was an inspiration. With her exceptional blend of strategic, technical and personal qualities, she effortlessly bridged the 5,000+ miles which separated our offices. The personas she helped us create were invaluable in building a shared understanding of our users’ needs, which then drove the development of a new architecture and design for our website. The feedback on the new site – both internally and externally - has been overwhelmingly positive. And a year later, our personas are still alive and kicking – our colleagues are using them as a reference in various other efforts to better respond to our stakeholders. Tamara was a pleasure to work with – and much more fun than most international web experts.”
Rich Barton, Zillow Group
“We've had immense luck with Personas at Zillow for everything from Development to Design to Sales to Marketing to ops. When we adopted it as an outside consultant project [in 2006], I never would have guessed it would become so embedded. I literally think there is never a meeting at Zillow where one of the personas is not cited by name.”
Andrew CM, Cent.co
“Working with Tamara has given our team a sense of relief. when it came to pursuing company business goals, our executive team thought we were on the same page, and yet we found ourselves running in circles. working with tamara revealed the small but consequential differences in understanding between our executive members.”
Suzanne Boyd, Anthro-Tech / University of Washington
“Tamara is an exceptional, forward-thinking, motivational speaker, thought leader, trainer, and consultant. I have seen Tamara in action many years, as a workshop leader in my class at UW Department of Human-centered Design and Engineering, as a keynote speaker at national industry events in user experience, and as a seasoned consultant aligning executives to remove organizational obstacles that impede their product’s customer experience.
Her approach is dynamic and engaging; her message confident, convincing and most of all memorable. She is the real deal – a UX veteran with years of practical experience helping improve customer experiences for Fortune 500 companies to scrappy early startups.”
Jess Scheibach, Amazon.com
“I worked with Tamara at Amazon.com, where she quickly became one of the most respected customer advocates in the company. Tamara is a great person to bring in to your product development efforts. She not only champions user-centered design processes and persona development, but knows how to take concepts and principles and turn them into real results for your customers.”
Margo Schneider, Seattle Children’s Hospital
“Tamara is fantastic. Healthcare is complex with a myriad of different audiences with wildly different needs. Tamara did an amazing job of helping our large group of business owners work together to identify our users' needs and then prioritize them. Her expertise and humor were much appreciated by all involved.”
Derek Brown, CEO, Bunches
“Tamara has been an absolute godsend to our team as we work towards our goal of bringing web3 tech to the masses. From our very first conversation, she has understood our vision and has helped us translate that into a comprehensive and effective strategy. Not only is she a skilled and knowledgeable design and product strategist, she’s also an incredible sounding board for our ideas and questions.
What truly sets Tamara apart as a partner is her combination of intuition, intelligence, sense of humor, and her general approach to clients. Simply put: she's an immense pleasure to work with and will bring a ton of value to any team fortunate enough to work with her. I can't recommend her enough to anyone looking for an experienced, down to earth design partner.”
Evgeny Ponomarev, Co-Founder, Fluence Labs
Sessions with Tamara were super valuable for us … we aligned on business goals, positioning, audiences, described and prioritized target personas and discussed user acquisition strategy. It helped product, marketing and bizdev, and improved our internal conversations regarding product/marketing efforts.
Paul Thomas, Co-Founder & CTO, Blue.fi
“Working with Tamara was a game changer for our startup. From the moment we engaged with her, we knew we were in good hands. Her deep knowledge and experience in strategic consulting allowed her to quickly pinpoint the details that mattered and toss out the details that didn’t.
Tamara has a unique ability to ask the right questions, even the most primitive ones, that shed light on areas that needed further exploration and resolution. Her questioning approach helped us to challenge our own assumptions and think more deeply about our business. This resulted in a better understanding of our strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, and allowed us to refine our strategy to align with our goals.
Throughout our engagement, Tamara consistently exceeded our expectations with her positive attitude, exceptional communication skills, and unwavering commitment to excellence. Her contributions were invaluable and have had a lasting impact on our company.
The end result of our collaboration with Tamara was a clear and well-defined product strategy that we felt confident in pursuing. We couldn't have asked for a better outcome and are truly grateful for Tamara's help.”
Jennifer Statham, CMO, WSECU
“Tamara is an amazing resource for companies that need shape and discipline in their pursuit to keep the customer at the center of their work. She lead my organization through a series of conversations to shape enterprise personas that created a way for the organization to rally around consumers needs and priorities.
She believes in anchoring this work at the senior leadership level to create prioritization and tie to enterprise goals. In our case, we developed a persona framework that was unique to ways other companies thought about personas and absolutely spoke to how consumers move between persona states.
Not only was Tamara a terrific resource in shaping our persona strategy and deployment within our organization, she also took on additional consulting work to develop and transform our UX team into an effective partner with marketing, product development and the agile teams. I would recommend Tamara to any organization that cares about putting consumers first and struggles to making that focus a clearly articulated reality in their company.”