Why data alone isn’t enough

If you’ve ever stared at a dashboard and wondered why churn is creeping up or conversion is slipping, you’re not alone. Metrics give you signals, but rarely the story.

Asia explained that she had her own turning point years ago while consulting on demand generation campaigns for SaaS clients. Even when she helped teams flood the top of the funnel, they weren’t seeing retention or sustainable growth.

“We were only going to retain a very small percentage of them after six months. That’s when I realized, all this marketing work might not be the right work.”

This realization pushed her deeper into product-led growth, where customer experience, product value, and user success become the real levers for scale.

The missing link? Human insight. Teams needed to talk to their customers, not just analyze them.

Customer interviews: the secret weapon for SaaS growth

Asia believes that meaningful customer research doesn’t need to be complex, expensive, or time-consuming. She routinely helps clients uncover powerful insights with just 10–20 interviews, often conducted in under two weeks.

And yet, many founders and product leaders avoid interviews altogether, believing that:

• Their challenges are too unique for existing frameworks
• There’s no clear process for customer insight
• Research will take too long to deliver value

Asia has spent the last few years systematically breaking these myths.

“Research can happen extremely fast,” she said. “I've proven that several times over. I can get people on the phone in 24 hours.”

By tailoring research design to the specific problem at hand, like poor 12-month retention or low upsell conversion, Asia helps teams focus on the conversations that matter most. Each interview becomes a window into the friction points, unmet needs, and unexpected opportunities hidden within the customer journey.

Founders in the room: a game-changer for action

One of the most compelling takeaways from the episode is how Asia shifted her own stance on stakeholder involvement in user interviews. For years, she asked founders and executives to stay out of the room, fearing they’d bias the conversation or intimidate participants.

But after repeated challenges getting buy-in post-research, she flipped her approach.

“It wasn’t until the founder watched a user struggle through something that we saw real change,” she said. “They’d start coding fixes during the interview.”

Now, she actively encourages CEOs, product leads, and marketers to sit in (cameras off) during live interviews. It creates empathy, accountability, and, most importantly, momentum.

Watching someone churn, struggle, or express confusion in real time brings a level of urgency that no PowerPoint deck ever could.

Designing customer research that gets results

Asia takes a structured yet nimble approach to research. Her go-to framework starts with a simple question:

What problem are we trying to solve?

From there, she identifies:

1. Who is most directly connected to that problem
2. What a “success case” looks like (e.g., long-term customers)
3. What failure or churn looks like (e.g., early exits, inactive users)
4. A manageable sample size (often just 5 interviews per segment)

Whether it’s a UX research study, churn interview, or a new product test, the goal is to balance depth with speed, and to leave room for course corrections.

She recounted a recent project where early interviews revealed a mismatch between the offer and the intended customer segment. Instead of pushing through with 15 pre-scheduled calls, they pivoted mid-way, revised the offer, and continued with a more relevant batch of users.

“It’s all about trade-off management,” she said. “The faster you learn, the sooner you can steer the ship.”

Churn is uncomfortable—but critical

Few teams want to talk to customers who’ve churned. It’s awkward. It’s emotional. But it’s also essential.

Asia likens churn interviews to therapy. She keeps them short (around 30 minutes), compensates generously, and creates a space where former customers feel safe expressing frustration or even indifference.

Her advice? Be a dispassionate but compassionate analyst.

• Don’t try to defend the product
• Don’t correct misunderstandings in the moment
• Don’t try to re-sell them

Instead, listen for patterns. Stack the pain points. Identify the moments where the perceived value started to break down.

“Usually what you find is it’s never just one thing,” she noted. “It’s five to ten little things that stacked up.”

From insights to action: how to prioritize

Customer research often uncovers a long list of issues, opportunities, and unmet needs. Asia’s approach to prioritization starts with a key distinction:

• Value generators: New jobs to be done that expand product value and retention
• Quality-of-life fixes: Usability improvements, feature enhancements, and small frustrations

She also breaks churn drivers into:

• Controllables: Onboarding gaps, missing features, support friction
• Uncontrollables: Budget cuts, job changes, external events

By mapping these findings to retention strategy or growth strategy goals, and tying them to revenue loss or opportunity, teams can make confident decisions about what to tackle first.

“You don’t need statistical significance to take action,” she emphasized. “Not in our world.”

Customer research is a choice and a competitive advantage

Too many teams delay research because they think they need permission, resources, or six-month timelines. Asia argues that it’s not a constraint, it’s a choice.

“You can decide to move fast,” she said. “Research is not what slows you down. It’s what speeds up your clarity.”

Final thoughts

If your team is spinning its wheels (adding features, testing headlines, adjusting pricing) without seeing real traction, consider pausing to listen. Not just to the data, but to the people behind it.

Asia Orangio’s approach to customer insights and product-led growth reminds us that the answers are often already within reach. You just have to ask the right people the right questions, and be open to what you hear.

“Usually what ends up happening is the person you talk to says, ‘Wow, that felt so good just to talk to someone and share this.’ That’s how you know you did a good job,” Asia concluded. 

Episode links

• Asia Orangio on LinkedIn
• Lija Hogan on LinkedIn
• DemandMaven website
• DemandMaven podcast
• Nathan Isaacs on LinkedIn
• Take your research to the next level – In this on-demand webinar, learn how to elevate your research strategy, leverage new platform features, and drive impactful generative insights.
• The executive’s guide to human insight – A practical guide on integrating fast, real‑time customer feedback throughout the product development process to accelerate decision‑making.
• Build products customers love with continuous discovery – In this podcast episode, Teresa Torres talks about getting customer input earlier in the product development lifecycle to better dial in product market fit.
• 6 business benefits of scaling customer research – This blog post explores how expanding access to customer insight across an organization can improve discovery, design, launch, organizational buy‑in, team success, and product quality.