jordan beck, phd

I have experience doing evaluative and strategic research with a wide range of methods, including: competitive analysis, concept testing, contextual inquiry, data analysis, diary studies, ethnography, eye-tracking, focus groups, human-centered workshop facilitation, interviews, literature reviews, surveys, and usability testing.

The work I’ve done at Amazon, Renaissance, and The Juice Learning is proprietary. I have engaged directly with business leadership — all the way up to the C-level — to share research insights, make tactical and strategic recommendations, and drive actions. Some choice projects include:

Creating Inclusive AI Experiences surveys research on AI-driven experiences and people with disabilities, and investigates chat experiences through accessibility and usability lenses.

Methods: lit review, usability testing

Innovating the (new) cloud computing customer experience identifies the new (and prospective) customer experiences as a valuable area of investment, dives deep into new customer workflows, mental models, and pain points, and models the new customer experience in terms of the most common tasks.

Methods: design thinking workshops, interviews, analytics, surveys

Accelerating cloud service adoption evaluates a new type of technical content, tests hypotheses about customer decision-making, and proposes a mechanism to enable rapid, iterative development of additional new content types.

Methods: concept testing, interviews, design thinking workshop(s)

Improving the student login experience examines the login process for a suite of educational technology (ed tech) products from the student, teacher, and product administrator perspectives and identifies opportunities to reduce the time it takes to login and unify the login experiences across the product suite.

Methods: klm analysis, eye-tracking, interviews, intercept survey(s)

Increasing research impact at AWS aims to ensure that product and design decisions are grounded in the most important customer research insights.

Methods: contextual inquiry, interviews, workshops, concept testing

strategy

I’ve obtained certificates in Business Strategy, Growth Strategy, and Advanced Strategy, and Strategic Planning and Execution from UVA Darden School of Business.

I also completed the Disruptive Strategy course through Harvard Business School Online.

Darden’s certificate program is heavy on learning-by-doing, and I produced a number of documents that reflect the format and content of a strategic memos.

In each memo, I deploy a different set of strategic analysis tools and make a data-driven recommendation to the executive team at Harley-Davidson (H-D). I chose to work with H-D throughout the course so that I could expand my domain knowledge and examine a company in the midst of rolling out a new strategy; I was eager to compare its strategic plan (“The Hardwire“) against my own analysis and data-driven recommendations.

• H-D Business Strategy (analysis of environment, five forces, competitor analysis)
• H-D Growth Strategy (scenario analysis, game theory analysis)
• H-D Strategy Execution (business model canvas, hypothesis test, 4A model)
• H-D Competitive Position Analysis (competitive lifecycle, internationalization, diversification, and stakeholder analyses)