Pa'lante Labs is a fractional research and product partner for startups building in emerging tech, security and regulated spaces, especially when your users include people the industry tends to overlook.
Led by Ben Gonzalez-Lesser, PhD · former Senior UX Researcher at Meta
A big build, a new market or a pivot is coming, and nobody has talked to the people it's for.
Privacy, safety, money or legal status ride on getting the experience right, and a generic usability test won't catch the risks.
Dashboards, tickets and interviews are piling up. You need someone to turn them into a clear decision.
Generative and evaluative research that tells you what to build and for whom, planned, run and synthesized end to end.
Turning findings into roadmaps, PRDs and shipped features your team can stand behind.
Research on trust and compliance-sensitive experiences, so what you ship holds up with users and regulators alike.
Ethical, community-informed research, in English and Spanish, with the people who carry the most risk and are left out of most studies.
Every engagement is scoped and priced to your team, timeline and budget.
One focused study around one decision. A clear scope agreed up front, and findings your team can act on the week it ends.
A senior research or product lead embedded part-time: running studies, shaping the roadmap and building your team's practice.
A standing check-in for founders and research leads: plan reviews, study design, hiring and a second opinion when it counts.
Tell us what you need and we'll send a proposal.
A short intro call, then a focused plan built around the decision you need to make. No long retainer required.
We work inside your team's tools and rhythms, alongside your engineers, designers and founders.
You keep the research, the playbooks and the capability we build together, not a dependency on us.
Anonymized projects from Ben's work at a global tech company. Each one shipped.
Usage logs plus lab interviews showed people weren't stuck on the screen. They were quitting because they had to take the headset off to find a password.
Shipped a new phone-based sign-in flow · patent filed
Interviews and journey maps across indie, studio and enterprise developers showed one-size-fits-all privacy guidance was failing all three.
Segment-aware guidance · fewer submission errors
Contextual inquiry reframed resistance to an automation platform as a trust and knowledge problem, not an interface problem.
Adopted across multiple tax jurisdictions
Pa'lante Labs was founded by Ben Gonzalez-Lesser, PhD, a sociologist and mixed-methods researcher. Ben spent more than four years as a Senior UX Researcher at Meta across Enterprise Products and Reality Labs, and before that taught as an Assistant Professor at Quinnipiac University. He holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Connecticut and works in English and Spanish.
We're based in Holyoke, Massachusetts: a mill city built on engineering, and home to one of the largest Puerto Rican communities in the continental US. The name comes from both.
Ben on LinkedIn →Tell us what you're building and who it's for. We'll tell you honestly whether we can help. Se habla español.