Panel Pro
A self-service research platform connecting researchers with pre-screened, identity-verified tech professionals, built from scratch to solve URI's own recruiting pain.
The Problem
Third-party research panels are plagued by low-quality participants, fraud, poor targeting, and time-consuming screening. When you’re running enterprise UX research for platforms like Azure or Google Cloud, you need participants who actually use these products professionally, not people gaming screeners for gift cards.
URI faced this problem on every project. So we built the solution.
What Panel Pro Does
Panel Pro is a self-service research platform with a pre-screened panel of identity-verified and employment-verified business application users and tech professionals. Researchers can launch studies against participants profiled across 1,500+ attributes (job roles, responsibilities, specific software and hardware used) without lengthy screening processes.
Key Capabilities
- 100 responses in as little as 24 hours: pre-profiling eliminates screening bottlenecks
- Panel-within-a-panel: create proprietary sub-panels with continuous custom profiling
- Quality ratings: underperforming panelists are automatically removed
- Follow-up research: re-engage the same respondents or subsets for longitudinal studies
- Full compliance: GDPR, consent forms, NDAs, gratuity distribution, and tax management handled
What I Learned Building It
This was my biggest bet at URI. We were building an enterprise SaaS platform from scratch with a small team. I had to learn pricing strategy, competitive positioning, marketing, and SaaS product development, all while running a 100-person agency.
It gave me an ever deeper appreciation of product development. So much of what you see in a finished product doesn’t communicate the time and thought behind each feature and design choice, or the effort put into researching market fit, stakeholder communication, GTM strategy, and on and on. I have designed and architected products in the past, but having responsibility for every aspect of the product and product strategy myself was “enlightening” to say the least.
The Philosophy
Panel Pro came from the same principle that drove most of URI’s innovations: solve your own problem first, then sell the solution. We needed better participants. We built a better panel. Then we made it available to everyone.