Kurt McCulloch
Research Leadership — San Francisco

I'm Kurt. I build systems that help product teams discover the right problems to solve and how to solve them right.

Kurt McCulloch

About

I'm a systems-minded research leader with over 15 years of experience building product teams' capacity to look ahead. My superpower is building the practices and infrastructure that routinely reveal the next opportunity and translate it into a winning product strategy.

Product teams that over-index on behavioral data generated by existing products are building a rearview theory of their customer—seeing opportunities through a tiny, backward-looking window. Teams that have mastered the discipline of turning novel insights into successful outcomes see the landscape in front of them, overcome the weight of the past, and deliver the next engine for growth.

My work reveals new information from outside the organization that challenges the team's existing assumptions—long before the market does this for them. Great research doesn't deliver insights. It builds the organization's capacity for product discovery.

Core Competencies

Leadership

  • People leadership

    Hiring and interview-process design, performance management and turnaround, coaching researchers from execution toward organizational influence, and the team conditions that make candor normal.

  • Executive partnership

    Standing with product and design leadership, insight-driven POVs that enter roadmap planning, and collaboration models across product, design, PMM and market research.

Systems

  • Leading AI transformation

    Organizational design for AI-enabled R&D teams: how information is stored and shared, decisions made, roles and work structured, a shared context layer that discovery, delivery and learning agents read and write across the product development lifecycle, and the tested operating principles around it.

  • Research enablement

    Programs for PMs and Designers, research playbook development, strategic workshop design and facilitation, 0-to-1 team & practice formation, roadmap allocation, and AI evaluation rubrics and quality benchmarks for AI-generated product experiences.

Craft

  • Product discovery

    Jobs-to-be-done research, problem framing and opportunity definition, concept evaluation ahead of roadmap commitment, discovery workshops with product teams.

  • Strategic foresight

    Horizon scanning and signal analysis, driving forces and uncertainty ranking, scenario development, implications for strategy and roadmap.

  • Mixed-methods research

    Triangulating qualitative research with behavioral cohorts, experiment results and survey data; cross-surface synthesis; leading in-product survey and benchmarking programs; perceptual and experiential success metrics alongside engagement metrics.

Contact

Drop me a line.