About Me

I research. I design. I write.
Always with people at the centre.

Hi, I'm Meghana — a Senior UX Researcher and service designer who brought over six years of experience from India to Amsterdam. With a foundation in Cognitive Science and Social Sciences, I look at products through a deeply human lens — helping teams turn complex user problems into clear, well-designed experiences across B2B SaaS and B2C products.

Right now I'm focused on AI-driven research — finding faster, smarter ways to synthesise insights without losing the human in the process. I use ChatGPT, Claude, NotebookLM, custom GPTs, and Dovetail AI tagging day-to-day, and have built chatbots and research agents to scale desk research and synthesis.

Meghana Gautam
🇳🇱 Based in Amsterdam
Research Philosophy

Three things I won't compromise on.

Every project is different. These three convictions aren't. They shape how I enter a brief, choose a method, and decide when the work is done.

🔒
Privacy First
Ethical research starts before recruitment — consent and data ownership are built in.
🌐
Cultural Intelligence
Localisation is strategic — research adapts to cultural nuance, not just language.
🧠
Research as Strategy
Research informs direction early, preventing wrong turns and unnecessary work.
Research Process

The three questions I ask before anything else.

Before any method, any tool, any session — I ask these. In this order. The answers change everything that follows.

01
🔍

What question is actually worth answering?

I start by separating the question being asked from the question worth answering. A brief that says "why aren't users adopting this feature?" often hides something more interesting: "what does adoption actually cost someone in their daily workflow?" Getting that reframe right changes everything downstream — the methods, the participants, the insights, the outcome.

02
⚖️

What kind of uncertainty am I trying to reduce?

Method choice is driven by the type of uncertainty on the table. Quant tells me where and how much — qual tells me why and what to do about it. I mix them when the problem has both a scale question and a meaning question, which it usually does. The method follows the question. Never the other way around.

03
🎯

Did the finding actually change a decision?

A finding that doesn't change a decision didn't do its job. I track research influence, not just research output. That means staying in the room after the readout — in roadmap sessions, design reviews, stakeholder conversations — because that's when research either lands or gets quietly set aside.

The Full Picture

Six years. Across classrooms, campaigns, and companies. One throughline.

From lecture halls to enterprise software, from a political campaign to UX agencies — every context kept surfacing the same question: how do you make research actually change what gets built?

Education Role Community
TISS
2014 – 2017 TISS · Hyderabad B.A. Social Sciences
IIT Gandhinagar
2017 – 2019 IIT Gandhinagar M.Sc. Cognitive Science
Cognizant
2020 – 2021 Cognizant Qualitative Researcher
I-PAC
2021 – 2022 I-PAC · Hyderabad UX Researcher
Thence
2022 – 2023 Thence · Bangalore UX Researcher
Microsoft
2023 – 2024 Microsoft Sr. UX Researcher · Contract
Principal Financial Group
2024 Principal Financial Sr. UX Researcher · Contract
Verizon
2024 – 2026 Verizon UX Research Consultant
Ladies that UX Amsterdam
Jan 2026 – now Ladies that UX AMS Event Coordinator
UX Camp Amsterdam
Feb 2026 – now UX Camp Amsterdam Website Collaborator
UX Rotterdam
Mar – Apr 2026 UX Rotterdam Portfolio Reviewer
🌱

20+ Researchers Mentored

Across Thence, Tech Mahindra, and the Ladies that UX community — fostering a culture of qualitative rigour, design thinking, and psychological safety in research practice.

✦ A little side project

I build things that teach research.

Two browser-based games I designed and built using AI. Because the best way to understand a method is to use it under pressure — even fake pressure.

Beyond the Screen

The researcher doesn't clock off.

Patience, pattern recognition, and the ability to sit with uncertainty — these show up in how I run, draw, and move through the world. Not by design. Just how it works out.

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Marathon Running
Patient, persistent, and focused on the long game. Running mirrors my approach to research — consistent effort over time yields the deepest insights.
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Mandala Art
I find balance in the intricate geometry of drawing mandalas. A meditative practice that sharpens spatial thinking and brings calm to complex weeks.
Coffee Chat Series
Meeting professionals across Europe to understand cultural nuances in product growth. Part networking, part fieldwork — I never stop collecting data.
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Home Organisation
A clear space leads to a clear mind. Organisation at home is a direct extension of how I structure research — everything intentional, everything with purpose.
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The Study of My Move — A Mini Research Project

After relocating to Amsterdam, I turned my own experience into a study. 20+ coffee chats with professionals across Europe, synthesised into cultural observations on growth, career mobility, and design culture. Read it on Medium →

Let's Connect

Let's find the right question together.

Whether it's a research challenge, a role you think I'd be right for, or just curiosity about how I work — I'm easy to reach and always happy to talk.