Research that sharpens your product decisions.

I'm Sam Hankins. I work with founders on product strategy and design, grounded in user research. A decade of shipping products across publishing, content moderation, and compliance.

or hello@samhankins.co

The kind of
work I do

Most of the founders I work with are somewhere in the middle of building a product. Their product is in market. They have users. They're making decisions that matter. And they have questions that the tools they've been using, surveys, feedback channels, analytics dashboards, aren't quite answering.

The questions tend to look like:

01 What do our users actually want from us next, beyond what the loudest ones are asking for?
02 Why is this part of our product working and this part isn't?
03 Should we commit to this direction, or is there a better one we haven't seen yet?
04 Who are the users we should be listening to more carefully than we have been?

If those are the kinds of questions you're holding, we should talk.

Two places
to start

Both are grounded in user research. Which one fits depends on whether you're holding a specific question or building a longer-term practice.

Product Clarity

A full research engagement for founders and startup teams holding real questions about their product and their users. I talk with your stakeholders, run 8 to 15 interviews with the people actually using (and not using) your product, and synthesize what emerges into a working document and a live conversation.

You come away with a grounded read on who your users actually are, what they're asking for (and not asking for), and how that sits against the direction you've been planning.

3 – 4 weeks $8,000 – $12,000

Research Practice

A shorter engagement for teams that want to move from reacting to incoming feedback to prioritizing what they actually do next.

I audit what you're currently doing, build a listening playbook (interviews, surveys, pattern review) that fits how your team actually operates, and run a first round with you so you can see how it works. You come away with a playbook you can keep running.

1 – 2 weeks $3,500 – $5,000

Background

Before I found design, I was in a lot of other places: art direction, waiting tables, law school, higher education. Each of those chapters shaped how I listen, what I pay attention to, and what I think good work looks like. A decade of product design later, the through-line is still the same: careful listening to people whose needs are often misunderstood, then work that holds up when the stakes are real.

2015 – 2023

Coral

Mozilla, then Vox Media · Founding & Principal Designer

Open-source commenting and community platform. Scaled to 120+ newsrooms in 18 countries, built on a research foundation of 300+ interviews across 150+ newsrooms in 30 countries before we shipped a line of code. The Toxic Comments nudge I designed (the first Perspective API integration in commenting) produced a 36 to 40% self-edit rate among warned commenters.

2021 – 2023

SB Nation

Vox Media · Principal Product Designer

Led product discovery across 250+ NFL fan communities. The work surfaced a pattern ("completionist readers") that reshaped how the community team thought about engagement and informed product strategy for the network.

2023 – now

Independent product work

rssHQ · advisory engagements

Built rssHQ, a workforce management platform, end-to-end using AI coding tools. Also consulted on a wage compliance tool for tipped restaurant workers, where the work needed both product design and regulatory understanding.

Training

Legal training

JD · Gonzaga Law School

Legal training shapes how I read evidence, hold tradeoffs, and write plainly under pressure.

Training

Higher education

Student affairs · program design

Built and ran programs for students from underrepresented populations. The work was grounded in academic and student life policy, and in listening carefully to students whose needs often weren't reflected in institutional defaults.

Teaching

Design education

UX & user research methods · bootcamp

Taught UX design, including user research methods. Teaching research methodology sharpened how I explain what I do, and reinforced that the practice is as much about helping teams ask better questions as it is about finding answers.

If any of this resonated, book a 30-minute call.

I'll ask about what you're working on and the questions you're sitting with, and share what I've learned from similar work. No pitch, no pressure.

or hello@samhankins.co · replies in ~2 business days

P.S. Also open to short-term contract and fractional engagements. Mention it in your email.