Touching grass at scale: How Headway scales the voice of the user
Editor's note: This article is an automated speech-to-text transcription, edited lightly for clarity. For the full session, please watch the recording.
During a session in the September 24, 2026, Quirk’s Virtual Sessions – DIY Research series, speakers from Headway and Listen Labs spoke about using AI-moderated interviews to keep in touch with consumers regularly.
Lexi Breitz, Ph.D., director of research at Headway, and Ria Shah, head of growth at Listen Labs, described the problems the six-person team was facing and how they overcame them.
At Headway, building with the voice of the user is a CEO mandate: every employee, not just researchers, stays in real contact with the patients and providers the company serves. But with a small research team, conflicting schedules and busy personal lives doing this posed a challenge.
So, the team turned to AI-moderated interviews, leading to candid clinician interviews, participation from hard-to-reach parents and quick data to insights.
Session transcript
Joe Rydholm
Hey everybody, and welcome to our session, “Touching grass at scale: How Headway scales the voice of the user.” I'm Quirks Editor, Joe Rydholm.
Before we get started, let's quickly go over the ways you can participate in today's discussion. You can use the chat tab to interact with other attendees during the session, and you can use the Q&A tab to submit questions for the presenters during the session, and we'll answer as many questions as we have time for during the Q&A portion at the end.
Ria, take it away.
Ria Shah
Great, thank you. Hi everyone. My name is Ria Shah. I am one of the heads of enterprise at Listen Labs, based here in New York, and we're super excited to be hosting Lexi, the director of research at Headway.
Lexi, I'll hand it over to you for an intro.
Lexi Breitz
Hi everyone. Really excited to be here.
As Ria mentioned, I am Lexi Breitz, Ph.D. in social psychology, and lead research at Headway. We'll tell you a little bit more about what Headway actually is, but I previously led research and data science teams at Workday, Meta and Nielsen. Excited to jump in here. We'll start with a little bit about what Headway actually is in case you haven't heard of us.
Headway is a Series D startup, and our mission is to build a better mental healthcare system that everyone can access. We do that through technology in a multi-sided marketplace.
So, what that means is that we build for people who are looking for mental health care. We help them find providers who are a good fit for them, who also take their insurance, and then we support them throughout their mental healthcare journey.
On the provider side of the business, we support providers in billing and working with insurance companies. What that means is that we provide tooling, support and backend support for their business. Our providers are therapists, psychologists and psychiatrists who deliver mental health care.
So, because we're a multi-sided marketplace, there are two people who are really important in every single decision that we make at Headway. Those are our patients who are seeking care and our providers who are delivering it. And really, we can't make a better mental healthcare system without deeply understanding these people and their needs, challenges and what we can do to best support them.
When I joined Headway about a year ago, I got a really important mission and mandate from our CEO. And what Andrew said was everything that we build at Headway needs to be built with the voice of the user. And he doesn't mean this just on paper, and he doesn't mean this just as a nice thing to say. He actually really, truly means this. This is a non-negotiable from his perspective.
What he often says is that every employee at Headway should be ‘touching grass,’ which is sort of like Gen Z slang term, but really what that means is getting outside of our bubbles, getting outside of our small office environments and actually understanding the world around us.
So, we can't build for patients, and we can't build for providers unless we're actually interacting with them, hearing from them directly and learning from them. This is the best place to be as a researcher when you get a mandate like this, because this means that our ability to connect with customers isn't just a nice to have, it's actually really critical to our company. And we see that throughout the leadership of Headway down to every single employee that works here. So, we have been working on trying to do this at scale.
What does it mean to actually touch grass, get outside and talk to our users at scale? And again, super exciting mandate, but also a challenging one because we're a startup, and we have six researchers on our team. So, it would not be possible for us to represent the voice of every user in every situation, in every room, just using those six researchers contacting our participants individually. And our patients and providers cannot just necessarily adapt to our schedules. We need to be able to adapt to them.
So, if somebody is looking for mental healthcare, this is not necessarily somebody who has time to sit down in our nine to five schedule and do an interview with us. This is also providers who are very busy, both running their small private practices and also providing really important care for their patients. So, we've got to figure out a way that we can adapt to their schedules where we can meet them where they are.
Like I said, we're a small team of researchers. We can't be in every single room supporting every single employee at Headway in making their decisions and everyone across Headway is busy. As we were trying to figure out how do we really meet this mandate, how do we make sure that we can touch grass at scale with our users? This is where we started looking for vendor support and this is where we partnered with Listen Labs.
So, I'll pass it to Ria to share a little bit more about Listen Labs.
Ria Shah
Thank you, Lexi. So yeah, I sort of briefly skipped over it at the beginning, but Listen Labs is an end-to-end AI research platform. We're headquartered out of San Francisco. We have offices in New York, which is where I'm talking to you from, and London. The way you want to think of us is exactly what the slide is saying, right? You get the best of qualitative at the speed of quantitative.
I want to step back and give you just a little bit of history on the company. We were born out of a Harvard research project over four years ago. Our co-founders, Alfred and Florian, were exploring the use of GenAI as it relates to qual and quant research. From there, fast forward three to four years, we now have customers like Microsoft, Google, Nestle, Procter & Gamble, Levi's, Skim, Sweetgreen, if you've seen the case study on that.
And what's really been working is that we're a platform built by researchers that come from industry. We have a head of insights, Eric Nobin, and they're influencing how we've built the AI native platform to really deliver value for our customers.
I'll get into a couple of the use cases here, but at a high level, that's really where Listen Labs is.
As far as, how the platform works very quickly, you want to think of it in three key ways. I know that there's five steps here on the screen, but the first step is using AI to conduct your research.