The UserTesting CMO tells Tim Healey why customer data often misses the human context, how AI is speeding up execution without replacing judgment and why faster marketing makes real feedback more important, not less.
You started out in technology before moving into marketing leadership. How did that journey lead you to UserTesting?
I have been around technology my entire life. I started coding at six years old and by the time I graduated from university, I was building database applications.
Early in my career, I was working in an IT department when I had the opportunity to implement a CRM system. I was then recruited by the same CRM vendor to join its pre-sales team, to help customers implement the system and use it effectively.
That led me into the go-to-market world. I joined SAP helping bring Business ByDesign to market and learned a tremendous amount about product launches.
As SAP expanded its cloud portfolio, I worked across a range of cloud products in marketing and quickly realised how much I enjoyed it. I found marketing had a blend of science, creativity, design, video, analytics and storytelling. So I took the leap and moved into product marketing full time.
I spent 15 years at SAP, progressing from an individual contributor to leading major global functions.
Eventually, I was drawn to the challenge of becoming a CMO. I accepted my first CMO role at Acquia. After some time, I moved to Inriver and then finally to UserTesting, where I work today.
How do you think customer understanding has changed? What are the biggest shifts you’ve seen?
We still don’t fully understand our customers.
There has always been a tension between budget constraints and customer understanding. In B2B, salespeople spend far more time speaking directly with customers than marketers do. Marketers may meet customers at conferences, festivals, or events, but they rarely have the same level of ongoing interaction.
So the fundamental truth remains: we still don’t know exactly what customers are thinking. What has changed is our ability to get closer to that understanding than we ever have before. We can now capture significantly more unstructured data and gain deeper insight into customer sentiment. The analytical tools available today are also far more sophisticated, allowing us to extract meaningful signals from conversations, feedback, video, and audio.
The challenge is that this creates a flywheel effect. As customer experiences become more personalized, customer expectations increase. Once people become accustomed to tailored experiences, generic ones stand out immediately. The more we know about our customers, the more they expect us to know about them. In turn, the gap between expectations and understanding continues to evolve.
What is the offer at UserTesting?
We deliver the human insights that help builders and creators make better decisions, faster.
Our network includes more than seven million participants from around the world, ranging from everyday consumers to highly specialized audiences. We combine that network with technology that allows organizations to collect insights at scale. Customers can distribute questions, gather reactions, test concepts, or even ask people to provide feedback while interacting with products and services in real-world environments.
Our AI platform then analyses the resulting video, audio, and survey data, bringing qualitative and quantitative insights together in one place. It surfaces the findings that help organizations make decisions about everything from marketing messages to products and customer experiences. In many cases, insights are delivered in less than 24 hours.
The pace of business has increased dramatically, and traditional focus groups or conventional research methodologies simply cannot keep up. My favorite part of the platform is that I can use it myself: whether I’m evaluating campaign messaging, creative assets, or even a company mission statement, I can gather feedback almost instantly and make better-informed decisions before anything goes to market in my function.
What’s your career taught you about building and defending a marketing budget?
It’s taught me that it’s always a battle. Like many marketers, I’ve learned that the best defense is strong performance backed by solid data. Walking into a conversation with a CFO armed only with assumptions or predictions based on vague data will not get you very far. Having a clear, concrete plan that demonstrates the expected return on different investment categories is critical.
Fundamentally, finance leaders understand the concept of making investments to achieve outcomes. When you explain how brand investment and demand generation work together in a multiplicative way, they understand it. It becomes much easier to justify brand spending when it’s presented as part of a broader system. Demonstrating how different investments interact to produce results is key to building support and defending budgets.
You’ve said that the usual collaboration tools dilute accountability, and an integrated operating model does it better. What broke with the old way?
Let’s say you’re cooking dinner at home. When everything is relaxed, having your partner in the kitchen is wonderful. You’re moving around each other, working together, and everything feels easy. But when the guests are about to arrive, the timeline is shrinking, and the pace is picking up, there’s a tendency to say, “Why don’t you go set the table? I’ve got this.”
That’s the fundamental flaw with collaboration: it’s optional. In moments of high pressure and high friction, it’s easy to cut people out and decide to take ownership yourself. You tell yourself it will be faster if you just do it alone.
The result is often a poorer outcome. It creates alienation, uneven workloads, and situations where certain people take on too much because they believe they’re the fastest or most capable person to get the work done.
My philosophy has always been to build a marketing organization more like a commercial kitchen, where the stations are highly integrated, and everyone understands their role in getting the plates out. In that environment, when pressure increases, the system continues to function. Teams can absorb the busiest periods and still produce high-quality outcomes because the process is designed to work under stress.
Do you think there’s such a thing as an AI versus human sweet spot?
Absolutely. There are certain things AI does exceptionally well – particularly research, information processing, summarizing and synthesis preparation. Humans can do these things too, but nowhere near as fast. But humans are not constrained by training data. We bring context, judgment, experience, and intuition. Throughout my career, I’ve accumulated knowledge and perspectives that don’t exist on the public internet. I understand my business in ways that AI simply cannot, regardless of how much context I’ve provided.
Humans should own the thinking, the narrative, the messaging, and the strategic framework. Then AI can help accelerate execution. Everything happens much faster, but the direction still comes from the human. For me, that’s the sweet spot.
Tell us about a UserTesting discovery that you have made that you found surprising.
One of the most surprising discoveries is how much context we lose through methods such as A/B testing. A/B testing tells us which version performed better, but it rarely tells us why. We know the outcome, but not the reasoning behind it.
For example, when someone looks at a message or creative asset, they might lean in, squint slightly, and say, “I like it”. On paper, that’s positive feedback. But when you observe the body language, the tone, and the hesitation, you often see something different. The person wasn’t immediately convinced. There was uncertainty in their response.
That context changes everything. It tells me that while the outcome was positive, the journey to get there wasn’t effortless. That’s valuable information because it suggests there’s still room for improvement.
That’s exactly what UserTesting does. It provides that context before launch. It helps us understand the reactions, emotions, and motivations that sit behind the data, which ultimately leads to better creative work and better customer experiences.
Could you tell us about a challenge you’re facing right now, how you’re dealing with it, and what advice you would give to other marketers facing the same challenge?
Software development cycles have compressed dramatically. That’s putting pressure on our core buying audience of product organizations and UX research teams. What used to be a month-long sprint can now become a one-week sprint and teams no longer have time to talk to users or test ideas with customers. They’re under constant pressure to ship. This compression impacts everything from renewal rates to expansion opportunities.
The same challenge exists in marketing. There’s enormous pressure to do more with less and to use AI-powered tools to create and launch campaigns at speed. But this approach introduces a significant amount of brand risk, particularly in the era of AI slop.
At UserTesting, we are helping teams to make the case for why customer feedback remains essential, even when timelines are reduced. Before launching something into the market, it’s vital to take the time to understand how people will react to it, and we need to remind organizations to factor this into timelines.
For us, that’s been an important shift. We’ve moved away from talking exclusively about our product and towards championing the importance of staying connected to customers before flooding the market with content, campaigns, or experiences.
Drawing on your leadership experience, what has your career taught you about building a great team?
Three things: First, you need diversity of thought. Second, people must feel psychologically safe enough to express their opinions. Third, the team needs to view failure as a teacher rather than something that should be punished.
I’ve always believed in diversity of thought. Great teams work because individuals complement one another’s strengths and weaknesses. They bring different perspectives to challenges and opportunities, and those differences make the team stronger.
It’s equally important to create an environment where people genuinely listen to one another. Team members shouldn’t dismiss or criticize someone because they hold a different view. They should seek to understand it, debate it constructively, and use that discussion to arrive at the best possible decision. Healthy disagreement is often a sign of a strong team, what’s important is that everyone feels they were heard. Once a decision is made, the team commits to it together.
The goal isn’t universal agreement. The goal is creating an environment where people feel comfortable challenging ideas and contributing different perspectives.
What question would you like me to ask the next senior marketer I interview?
I’ve been thinking a lot about human value in the context of AI. With that in mind, I would ask: What is human value? In my view, there isn’t a right or wrong answer. It’s an intentionally open question, and people can interpret value in many different ways. The most interesting insight comes not from the answer itself, but from the reasoning behind it.
Your question from the last senior marketer I interviewed was: Why do you think marketing is generally perceived as such a low-self-esteem discipline?
I don’t believe marketing is seen as a low self-esteem discipline. The reality is that everybody thinks they’re a marketer.
Professions such as accounting or software engineering are recognized as specialized disciplines. If you’re not an accountant, you don’t typically tell accountants how to do their jobs. You don’t offer tax strategies to a finance team.
Marketing is different. Almost everyone believes they can have a great marketing idea without fully understanding the expertise required to turn that idea into a meaningful business outcome. But marketing is every bit as specialized as finance, legal, engineering, or any other professional discipline.
The challenge is perception. Marketing is often viewed as easy, superficial, or fluffy. In reality, marketing is about understanding markets, understanding people, understanding how organizations are perceived, and applying psychology to influence behavior. It’s a highly specialized skill set.
If there’s one thing you know about marketing, it is…?
Marketing is constantly evolving. Every time you think you’ve figured it out, it changes. That’s part of what makes it so rewarding. No two days are ever the same, and there’s always something new to learn.
This interview is brought to you in partnership with Worth Your While — an independent creative agency based in Copenhagen, working globally. Named one of The Drum’s Indie Agency Top 100, WYW exists on the belief that time is humanity’s most valuable resource, and that the only ideas
worth making are ones that earn it. You might die tomorrow. Make today worth your while. https://wyw.agency/
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