Susan Liu

Susan Liu is a Senior User Research Manager at Sage, where she leads the user research team within the company’s Performance Marketing function. Her work focuses on using customer and user insights to influence strategy, inform tactical initiatives, and help teams create experiences that better meet the needs of their audiences. At Sage, Susan has built and developed a growing user research function and established the team as a trusted partner across the organization. Her research work supports initiatives across Sage.com globally, providing actionable insights that help teams understand users, identify opportunities, and make more informed decisions. User research and customer insight are central to her approach, with a strong emphasis on ensuring that research findings remain accessible and useful beyond the individual project in which they were generated. Susan has a particular interest in continuous discovery, a research approach that brings customer input into product and business decisions on an ongoing basis rather than treating research as a one-time activity. She has discussed how her team uses continuous discovery to understand user needs, validate assumptions, and maintain an ongoing connection with customers. At Sage, this includes organizing research findings into a user-needs repository that allows stakeholders to access and use insights when making decisions. Her approach emphasizes understanding users from their own perspective. Susan has advocated for framing user needs around the problems and goals customers are trying to accomplish rather than immediately translating research findings into proposed solutions. This helps teams maintain a clear distinction between what users need and the solutions a business may want to build. Susan also brings experience in design research. Before joining Sage, she was Head of Design Research within a multidisciplinary design team at Virgin Money. This background has allowed her to work across research, design, marketing, and business functions and to connect customer insights with broader organizational strategy. Her research experience extends into B2B environments, where she has discussed the particular challenges involved in recruiting and researching business customers, including business owners, executives, and other senior decision-makers. She has also shared approaches for working with stakeholders, communicating research context, and ensuring that individual research sessions are not treated as representative of an entire user population. Susan has contributed to industry conversations about continuous discovery, customer research, user needs, research repositories, stakeholder engagement, and research-driven decision-making. She has appeared as a guest expert in Userlytics content discussing how organizations can move from traditional research approaches toward more continuous and customer-centered ways of working.