Greenbook Future List Spotlight: Isabel Parashos

Editor’s Note: The following interview features a 2025 Greenbook Future List honoree, Isabel Parashos. The Greenbook Future List recognizes leadership, professional growth, personal integrity, passion, and excellence in the next generation of consumer insights and marketing professionals within the first 10 years of their careers.

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Isabel Parashos, Lead Insights Consultant at Xero, brings curiosity, empathy, and adaptability to her work—qualities also reflected in her personal passions for travel, art, and fitness.

In this interview, she shares the lessons that have shaped her career, the value of strong female mentors, and how evolving tech is changing the research landscape while offering new opportunities to elevate insights.

Outside of insights, what are your passions and interests?

I love to travel, read, exercise and view art. For me, it is really important to stretch my thinking and challenge my limits and these are the four things that work best for me.

Travel, reading and art introduce you to ways of life and experiences that you don't personally go through and sometimes don't even consider. They have really deepened my empathy and introduced me to people, places and things that I otherwise wouldn't have been exposed to.

Exercise is a great motivation for me because it gives me tangible goals to work towards and easily trackable milestones. I've also found it the best way to keep my hands busy and reduce my screentime, making me really sit with my thoughts. 

Who is your career role model or source of inspiration?

My biggest source of career inspiration is by far all the exceptional women I know in my personal and professional life. Although we all come from different backgrounds and in some cases work in completely different fields, it has been so important to me to have a network of people I can openly share challenges with and learn from.

I've not only benefited from the women in my life being a pillar of support for me when I've needed them but I've also taken great joy in being able to watch them achieve great things for themselves. 

I admire their drive and passion to succeed, while showing kindness, empathy and creating space for me and others to share with them. 

What is the most valuable lesson you have learned from market research?

The most valuable lesson I learned is that there is something to learn from every situation you find yourself in, if you go in with an open mind. 

What I love most about my job is the opportunity to talk to different people and that we are tasked with helping, to answer questions that we would otherwise not be exposed to. As part of this we are required to consider different perspectives and different styles and to remain unbiased. With this need to adapt, you're constantly learning what works well and what doesn't and helps you grow as a researcher and sometimes as a person. 

What are three skills you believe to be crucial to succeed in market research and why?

The three skills I believe to be crucial to a successful career in market research are:

1. Innate curiosity: Having a fundamental desire to learn and experience different things and perspectives will open you up to insights about yourself and others that you would have  never guessed possible - it also makes your job more fun and interesting.
2. Adaptability: Although adaptability looks different in-house compared to at an agency, it is a very necessary part of the skill set. Whether it be a deadline change, participants not showing up or the first part of a project has uncovered insights that mean the second part needs to be rescoped; Flexibility is key to being a good researcher because it ensures you are set up to achieve the best research outcome rather than following a plan.
3. Empathy: It doesn't matter if you are talking to stakeholders, your team, customers or C-Suite, everyone is human and has a unique life experience with different stressors that impact how they navigate different environments. Remembering that will help you achieve better results, together.

Some of the most insightful, important and memorable moments in my career have come from situations where I felt like I had no idea what I was doing, but ultimately they helped me grow. 

What do you think the key characteristics or qualities of a leader are? How does this play into MRX?

I'm lucky to have been (and continue to be) exposed to great leaders throughout my career who have taken time to coach and up-skill me. 

All of the best leaders I've interacted with have the following characteristics in common:

1. They ask questions and listen to your answers first before giving their opinion
2. They lead by example, whether that be by setting standards for quality of work or modeling behaviors that they wish to see from their team and the people they work with
3. They challenge you, respectfully, and give you opportunities for reflection and improvement
4. They champion their people and foster environments for their people to thrive; whether that be by creating opportunities for them, giving feedback or empowering them in their roles

What challenges do you see facing newer MRX professionals as technology advances?

Although technological advances have been great at creating efficiencies for us in the world of insights, I do think that the process of combing through open ends to create themes or manually type up transcripts required us to use both our ability to focus but also required us to develop pattern recognition. There is something really motivating and satisfying about the aha moment when you finally identify the fundamental truth to the problem you are trying to solve after combing through data.

On the flip side, I also think that by taking out some of the more manual elements of our role, we will be able to come to those aha moments faster and focus on how we elevate those insights or how they land within the businesses we work for - which is motivating in and of itself in a different way.