about

Louis Grove

I'm a senior user researcher who builds the research tooling I want to use. I think about how complex, evolving systems work — first biological, then social, now AI-native — and how the people inside those systems make decisions.

Through-line

My undergraduate degree was in evolutionary biology. I wanted to understand how biological systems adapt under selection pressure — the long, blind, recursive process by which design emerges without a designer. I then did an MA in social anthropology at SOAS, because the same question scales up: how do social systems, cultures, and incentive structures change over time? What positive feedback loops can we identify, and which ones can we deliberately enable?

I've spent the last seven years applying that lens to user research. Mostly at startups in dynamic, emerging tech markets, where the systems are visibly self-organising and the playbooks haven't been written yet. Lately at Cleo, a financial-AI company, where the self-improving system is the product itself — and the team building it.

How I work

Mixed methods, with the rigour and the flexibility to choose the right tool for the question. Choice-based conjoint when pricing decisions are on the line. Latent class analysis when the segments aren't obvious. Ethnographic interviews when the answer is shaped by context I can't see from a survey. R, Python, SQL when I need to query the warehouse myself rather than wait for a data team. Increasingly, vibe-coded prototypes when prototyping yields the fastest answer.

The discipline I keep coming back to: research stops being a separate motion when you instrument the system at the level of every interaction.Hooks fire on every event. Threads emerge. Clusters surface gaps. The same agent runtime that consumes a tool produces evidence about it. The work then is to listen carefully to what's actually happening, frame it for the people who need to act on it, and build the next loop.

What I'm looking for

A team where research has a seat at the table for product strategy and engineering, where mixed-methods rigour is valued, and where the systems being studied are the ones I find most interesting in the world right now: AI systems that learn from how people use them.

I'm based in London and open to relocating to the US (SF, NYC, Seattle).

Outside work

Building agents that play deckbuilders. Reading about cultural evolution and complex adaptive systems. Cooking. Running.