Hugo Alves - Let's Get Real About Synthetic Users (with Hugo Alves, Co-founder @ Synthetic Users)
About this episode
Hugo Alves discusses the use of generative AI to create synthetic users for product research and decision-making.
On this episode, I speak to Hugo Alves, co-founder of Synthetic Users, about one of the most controversial topics in modern product development: using generative AI to simulate users for research and decision-making. Hugo has a background in clinical psychology and product, and has spent the past three years building a platform that generates synthetic qualitative interviews to help teams reduce risk and make better decisions. Episode highlights: What Synthetic Users actually is - generating in-depth qualitative interviews with AI-powered "synthetic" participants to help teams reduce risk and accelerate discovery Most companies don't do enough, or any, research in the first place, and they need as many tools in their locker to help with the ultimate goal: making great products. The pragmatist's view of AI - why Hugo doesn't care whether LLMs are "conscious", only whether they produce useful outputs The agentic "swarm" approach - using specialised sub-agents (planners, interviewers, critics) instead of one giant prompt to improve quality and reduce drift B2B vs B2C - why synthetic research works well in B2B contexts, and the harder (future) problem of modelling organisational…
People in this episode
Host: One Knight in Product
Guest: Hugo Alves
Topics covered
- synthetic users
- generative AI
- product development
- qualitative research
- B2B research
- decision-making
Keywords
- synthetic users
- generative AI
- qualitative interviews
- product development
- B2B
- research tools
- AI outputs
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Synthetic Users
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- The State of B2B Product Management (with me, Saeed Khan and guest host Janna Bastow)
- CPO Stories: Nick Kenn - Winmau
- Dan Olsen - Vibe Coding: The New Product Team Superpower? (with Dan Olsen, Product Management Trainer and Author “The Lean Product Playbook“)
- CPO Stories: Jessica Hall - Just Eat Takeaway
- Michele Hansen - Standing up for User Research in the Age of AI (with Michele Hansen, Founder @ Geocodio & Author “Deploy Empathy“)
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