About Zach Pousman
Zach Pousman is the CEO and Founder of Helpfully. For 25 years, he has led fieldwork and quantitative research that uncovers the gap between what companies think users need and what actually drives adoption, retention, and business outcomes.
It's a problem AI is making worse, not better. Teams today struggle with too much information, building products on assumptions instead of evidence. Most user research skims the surface. Focus groups, surveys, quick usability tests capture what people say they do, not what they actually do when no one's watching. That gap costs companies millions in failed launches, misallocated resources, and products that solve the wrong problems.
Zach goes deeper. Through longitudinal ethnographic research, behavioral pattern analysis, and field observation in real-world situations — hospital hallways, factory floors, living rooms — he identifies the forces that shape how people really interact with technology. He finds the questions teams didn't know to ask, and the answers that change strategic direction.
Where most researchers document behavior, Zach uncovers the underlying logic: the cultural frameworks, cognitive constraints, and contextual pressures that determine whether products succeed or fail in the real world. Zach earned a philosophy degree from the University of Chicago which gave him the ability to question fundamental assumptions about meaning and cognition. His HCI master's from Georgia Tech and a decade of PhD work gave him systematic methods for designing future-facing systems and evaluating success in the real world.
He finds the business opportunities hiding in behavior patterns that competitors overlook. Google, Anthem, First Data, CVS Health, the United Nations, and dozens of venture-backed startups bring Zach in when the stakes are high and the path forward is unclear.
Given a few weeks, he can change how teams think. He convinces executives to spend time in call centers and on factory floors not for inspiration, but for strategic clarity.
Zach structures client engagements to move fast and deliver real value: close enough to understand your culture, independent enough to challenge it. He assembles liquid teams tailored to each assignment — the right researchers, designers, and strategists for the problem at hand, with careful use of AI to accelerate the work. His teams don't replace yours. They sharpen them.
