Kendra Shapiro

Traditional surveys and 1:1 interviews play a central role in Ancestry's insights work, but they increasingly found important customer context left unexplained. In this session, Ancestry's insights team shares how they evolved their approach to capture emotion, motivation, and nuance—while still operating at enterprise scale. Key Takeaways: 1. Where surveys and interviews break down when teams need confidence, not just direction 2. How customers' own words revealed insights that quantitative data consistently missed 3. What changed when richer customer stories became central to decision-making