The decision: what should Dr. Tail's smart-care expansion actually build?

The situation. Dr. Tail is a Korean-founded startup serving US pet owners. The team was planning its smart-care expansion with a new CPO incoming, and had never run discovery research. The roadmap was being set by intuition, in one language, about users who live in another.

What I did. Ran the company's first discovery research: generative interviews with 20 US pet owners, conducted remotely from Canada: planned and synthesized in Korean with the team, moderated in English with the users. Facilitated cross-timezone design-thinking sessions in Korean and English so the findings were the team's findings, not a consultant's PDF.

The bridge, concretely. This is the engagement the K↔E moat exists for: a Korean team, US users, and no translation layer between them. Strategy debates happened in Korean; user evidence arrived in English; both sides stayed native.

The outcome. The research narrowed a sprawling expansion concept to the two core problems worth building for. The synthesized findings became a prioritized initiative roadmap that the incoming CPO used directly to set her first-quarter strategy: the expansion direction was set by user evidence before development investment, not corrected by it after.