Zack Naylor

Zack Naylor is a UX, design, research, and product strategy professional with more than 15 years of experience helping organizations make better-informed decisions about their products and customer experiences. His career has spanned startups, Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies, and organizations across a wide range of industries, giving him extensive experience working at the intersection of user research, experience design, product strategy, and business objectives.

Zack is best known as the co-founder of Aurelius, a user research and insights platform created to help UX and product teams gather customer research data, organize and analyze it, turn research into actionable insights, and connect those insights to product and design decisions.

As CEO and co-founder, he helped shape the company’s product strategy and philosophy around making research more accessible, useful, and connected to the broader product development process. Before and alongside his work at Aurelius, Zack held a range of UX and design leadership roles. His experience includes serving as Principal UX Designer at The Nerdery, UX Team Leader at Workfront, Director of User Experience at Connexions Loyalty, User Experience Manager at Pikimal, and Senior Manager of Experience Design at Life Time. He has also worked with early-stage companies and contributed to organizations including ModCloth, Lockerz, and Pikimal.

A major theme throughout Zack’s work has been connecting research to meaningful product and business decisions. He advocates for understanding not only users and their needs, but also the businesses and organizations responsible for creating the products and services they use. In discussions about UX research, he has emphasized the importance of understanding business goals, conducting stakeholder interviews, gaining organizational buy-in, and connecting research outcomes to measurable business impact.

Zack has also been an active contributor to the ResearchOps community. He was a core member of the team behind the global #WhatIsResearchOps project and served as a ResearchOps community board member from 2018 to 2019. His work has contributed to conversations around making research more organized, scalable, accessible, and integrated into product development.

Through his writing, speaking, and educational content, Zack has covered topics including UX research methods, research repositories, affinity diagramming, product strategy, stakeholder alignment, research operations, usability testing, and turning customer feedback into actionable product insights.

His LinkedIn profile includes articles on organizing user research data, creating UX research plans, affinity diagramming, and connecting research to product strategy. Zack studied at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh from 2003 to 2006. He has also participated in the UX community through organizations and initiatives including UXPA Minnesota, AIGA Minnesota, the Information Architecture Institute, and ResearchOps. More recently, Zack’s LinkedIn profile identifies him with Blank Metal, where his work focuses on helping teams make better product decisions, particularly when problems are complex. This follows his years of experience building products, leading UX organizations, and developing tools and practices that help teams turn customer research into better decisions.