Elena Rodriguez

Elena Rodriguez discovered her passion for understanding users during her first job out of college, when she spent six months in customer support before moving into product management. Those six months of listening to frustrated users shaped everything that came after.

She went on to lead product teams at fast-growing tech companies, working on personalization features and collaborative tools that changed how teams work. Throughout her career, the same pattern emerged: the teams that truly understood their users shipped better products.

The problem was that understanding users was expensive and slow. User research was always the bottleneck. Focus groups took weeks to organize. Surveys got low response rates. And by the time research was complete, the product had often already moved on.

Elena joined SocioLogic because she saw synthetic users as the solution to a problem that had frustrated her entire career. Now she helps product teams integrate synthetic user research into their discovery and development processes.

Her writing focuses on practical applications: how to use synthetic users for product discovery, how to prioritize roadmaps based on user insights, and how to build products that people actually love. She writes the articles she wishes existed when she was a PM.

Elena is based in San Francisco, where she's constantly exploring new restaurants and maintaining an ever-growing list of "places I definitely need to try." She also volunteers as a mentor for aspiring product managers from underrepresented backgrounds.