Rob Manzano

Rob has been a UX leader for 15 years. After his early beginnings in linguistics and communication (as co-founder of music-centric PR company basicpeople), he joined Nokia in 2005, where he learned everything about usability and customer-centricity from the ground up and helped establish a solid user research practice. In 2014 he moved on to SoundCloud, building the user research capability basically from scratch, and making an entire company more user-centric by leveraging everyone’s inner user researcher and establishing strong user models. In 2017, Rob joined Zalando, where over the last 3 years he has transformed a small research team of 4 into a research and customer knowledge organisation counting 30 professionals (user researchers, data analysts, business developers and engineers), combining traditional user research with analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence approaches, helping create truly individual and personalised customer experiences.