About

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

I (Dave Hora) am a product consultant and research builder based in Porto, Portugal, working 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 and a half as a database technician, maintaining financial records for the Administrative Office of the US Federal Courts. I wanted to work in technology to help people, but I was helping a federal contractor overcharge the government by manually fixing rounding errors. I was strongly encouraged to stop writing workflow automation because it reduced our billable hours.

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. My motivation was rooted in the people we were building for and what they really needed — which we didn’t understand well, to my vocal dismay. A smart product leader offered me the chance to become their first UX Researcher, and I spent another year and a half learning how to inform better product decisions. I went on to establish research programs as the first researcher at four other product companies in San Francisco, including Instacart and PlanGrid, and then at the scientific network ResearchGate in Berlin.

To adapt and improve each organization, I had to learn how the larger engine of product development worked. Over a decade, I saw product teams fall into a recurring pattern of problem, ignoring the critical relationship between product surface area and users’ existing behaviors. In 2020, I left Berlin for Portugal to build a consulting practice around that larger scope of problem. (See more about my work.)

Influence and impetus

My work and writing 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.

Talk and Workshop Index:

Chanterelles: apply heat and butter

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