Nadia, 38

“I thought I hated marketing. I hated guessing. The experiments showed me the part of my job I loved was the research nobody gave me time for.”

Nadia came to the studio the way a lot of clients do: certain about the "away from", vague about the "toward". Twelve years in marketing, the last four as a manager at a consumer-goods company, and a creeping sense that she was performing a job she used to want.

The Untangle phase punctured the first assumption. Her Energy Ledger - two weeks of honestly logging what drained and what fed her - showed the drain was not marketing. It was shipping campaigns on gut feel and vibes. The entries that lit up were the two weeks a year she got to run actual customer interviews.

That reframed everything. "I do not need to leave the building," Devon told her, "I need to find the room where the interviewing happens." The room was UX research.

Her prototypes were small and cheap: an eight-dollar usability-testing course to learn the vocabulary, two structured interviews with researchers found through alumni connections, then a weekend usability study for a friend's nonprofit booking site - five users, a discussion guide, a findings memo. The memo became the centerpiece of her portfolio.

The Land phase leaned on the transfer story: twelve years of marketing is twelve years of studying customers with a budget attached. Elena rebuilt the resume around research evidence hiding in marketing clothes. Nine months after her first session, Nadia signed as a UX researcher at a healthcare software company - within 4% of her marketing salary.

Her Clarity Brief is framed in her home office. She says the sentence that mattered most was the shortest: "The problem was never the field. It was the guessing."