How Headway scales the voice of the user

September 24, 2026, at 12 p.m. ET/5 p.m. U.K.Orange rectangular button with “Register Now” written in all caps and white text.

Listen Labs’s all black logo. To the left of the company name written in sentence case is a square with a partial circle off the lower left corner.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. The catch:

  • Therapists are seeing full caseloads.
  • Parents are juggling care for their kids.
  • The research team is small.

Lexi Breitz, Ph.D., director of research at Headway, expected AI-moderated interviews to feel cold, and worried providers would refuse to open up to a machine. Instead, clinicians got candid on sensitive topics, hard-to-reach parents participated on their own schedules. And when the CEO needed provider voices for a strategy session, her team delivered them in under 12 hours.

In this session, Bretiz and Ria Shah of Listen Labs share how a small insights team scaled qualitative research across the company without adding researchers. 

Key takeaways:

  1. Why participants often open up more to an AI moderator, especially on sensitive topics.
  2. How to reach busy, hard-to-schedule audiences like clinicians and parents on their own time.
  3. How a small insights team lets cross-functional partners run their own studies, with researcher guardrails.
  4. How to turn around decision-ready qualitative insights in hours instead of weeks.

Presenters:

Lexi Breitz’s circular headshot with the ocean blurred in the background.
Lexi Breitz, Ph.D., Director of Research, Headway

Lexi Breitz is director of research at Headway, where she leads a team focused on building a new mental healthcare system everyone can access. She holds a Ph.D. in social psychology from Ohio State University, with a research background in social cognition motivation and health behavior. Before joining Headway, Lexi served as director of research and data science at Workday, where she oversaw a team of 80+ researchers, data scientists and engineers. Her career spans research leadership roles at Meta, Instagram and Nielsen, and she serves as faculty at USC's Master of Science in Applied Psychology program. Across her work, Lexi brings a deep focus on understanding users' attitudes, motivations and behaviors to build product experiences that meet real human needs.
Ria Shah’s circular headshot on a white background with a plant semi-blurred in the top right.Ria Shah, Head of Growth, Listen Labs

Ria Shah is head of growth at Listen Labs, an AI-first customer research platform building the future of research at scale. Before Listen Labs, she spent four years building Toni, an AI interviewing platform she co-founded and led as CEO, backed by Daniel Gross and acquired in 2025, after serving organizations including the Chicago Bears, Women in Product and All Raise. Earlier, she spent five years in management consulting at CVP, where she became the youngest manager in company history and oversaw $90M in new growth. She holds a B.A. in economics from Johns Hopkins, with early research roots in public health and behavioral data, including community work in the D.R. Congo studying how language and trust shape outcomes. Across her career, Ria has understood one thing deeply: The most valuable human insights live in conversation and the tools to capture them at scale are only now catching up.