Your team ships features nobody asked for. I fix that.

I help product and UX teams stop guessing what users need. Through interviews, field studies, and stakeholder sessions, I find the real problems behind the surface requests, then turn those findings into product decisions, roadmap priorities, and design direction your team can act on.

Troy Effner|Research + Product Design|Divergent Networks

This is water

Every product in this portfolio started by noticing something that was already there. A self-guided path through the story, the products, and the frameworks underneath. Find yourself in the work.

Organic Design

This is the method behind the work. Four stages, each producing concrete outputs that feed the next round.

Trace

Start where the person is. Observe what they actually do: the behaviors, decisions, frustrations, and workarounds. Document before interpreting.

Root

Follow the pattern to the real constraint. Not the surface complaint or the feature request. The deeper need or structural gap that produces the visible behavior.

Re-soilhow research changes your roadmap

Feed findings back into roadmap decisions, positioning, and prioritization. Research outputs become working inputs your team uses to make decisions, not a report that sits in a shared drive.

Regrowhow new product directions emerge

Act on what the research revealed. Features get reprioritized. Positioning gets rewritten. New product directions emerge that competitive analysis alone could not have surfaced.

Each engagement produces reusable interview protocols, synthesis templates, and structured findings. The next project starts from those assets, not from scratch. Research gets faster. Decisions get sharper.

Built on a tree metaphor: raw observations are ether, compressed knowledge is soil, live work is the trunk, and what the world sees are leaves. Three components feed each other so every project strengthens the next: research infrastructure, applied research, and structured work distribution.

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Work

Live Projects

Products in active development. Each started from research with real users and is being built based on what that research uncovered.

Separates three questions every buyer conflates: what can I afford, what can I sustain, and what supports the life I want. Research revealed these are different problems with different data shapes.

Finds where small business workflows break down and applies service design fixes in the operator's own language. Built from mapping where handoffs drop, steps stall, and decisions get stuck.

A photo-native community board where local information is discovered, not broadcast. Moderation and governance are designed into the product from the start, not added when problems appear.

A 90-minute workshop teaching people to write a 5-minute story from their own lived experience. Grew from Pride Tales queer storytelling events. Improv hangouts and shared home space extend the practice into ongoing community.

Case Studies

Products in the research and design phase, documented as they develop.

A self-reflection app that compresses photos and video into one-second moments and compiles them into a continuous film over time. Nine frameworks traced. The most fully developed case study in the portfolio.

Seeds

Early-stage ideas backed by a clear thesis but not yet in development. Each includes the design thinking completed so far. If one of these fits a problem you are working on, reach out.

Home swap coordination that honors existing trust between friends instead of replacing it with platform guarantees, deposits, and reviews.

Physical buttons placed in real locations to capture in-context feedback at the moment it happens. Custom labels, real-time counting, zero friction for the respondent. No app, no survey, no recall bias.

A tool for building personal color palettes grounded in what you actually wear, not abstract color theory. Starts from the garment, not the color wheel.

A layer that turns LinkedIn activity (posts, comments, reactions) into structured research data rather than social content. Observation only, no automation of social behavior.

If your team is building on assumptions instead of evidence, if research findings sit in decks nobody reads, or if you keep relearning the same things every quarter, that is what I fix.

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