About

Dave's Research Co. was founded in Porto, in 2020.

I (Dave Hora) am a product strategist and research builder based in Porto, Portugal. I consult with product leaders and their teams as Dave's Research Company. I write a newsletter about product strategy on this site, I'm learning to make wine — my 2021 vintage was finally released in 2026 — and I'm a practicing brown belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu.

In-house to Consulting

Out of school I spent a terrible year as a database technician, maintaining financial records for the Administrative Office of the US Federal Courts. I believed technology should help people, but I was helping a federal contractor overcharge the government to manually fix rounding errors.

I got connected to the field of User Experience in 2010, and left for San Francisco to work as a designer at a family safety mobile startup. That went fine, but my motivation was rooted in the people we were building for and what they really needed, which we didn’t understand, to my vocal dismay. The company offered me the chance to become their first UX Researcher, and I spent a year and a half building a research practice there. I went on to establish research programs as the first researcher inside four other product companies in San Francisco, including Instacart and PlanGrid, and then at the scientific social network ResearchGate, in Berlin.

I had to learn how the larger engine of product development worked, in order to adapt and improve it as a researcher. I saw many product teams fall into a recurring pattern of problem: ignoring the critical points of relationship between their product’s surface area and users’ existing behaviors. In 2020, I left Berlin for Portugal to build a consulting practice around that larger scope of problem.

Influence and impetus

My work and thinking pulls on an academic background of cognitive science and Human-Computer Interaction, the arduous and gratifying process of learning Brazilian jiu-jitsu (I'm currently at brown belt, training no-gi), wide-ranging reading, and the architect Christopher Alexander's structural approach to complexity.

With the tradeoff of certainty, consulting offers a benefit I was unable to achieve in-house: scheduled discretionary time. Each year I take a 4–6 week sabbatical like the wine harvest, sake season, or a very long walk. Since 2020, I've walked four Caminos de Santiago: the Portuguese, the Primitivo, the Invierno, and most recently, the Camino del Norte — about 840km during five weeks of walking.

Problems and questions

See how we can work together. If you have a product problem in an interesting shape, or you need a solid wine recommendation, drop me a line: dave@davesresearch.com.

Talk and Workshop Index:

Chanterelles: apply heat and butter

Great! You’ve successfully signed up.

Welcome back! You've successfully signed in.

You've successfully subscribed to Dave's Research Co..

Your link has expired.

Success! Check your email for magic link to sign-in.

Success! Your billing info has been updated.

Your billing was not updated.