Glauco, the Research Lead at N26, reflects on his transition from an individual contributor to a UX research leader and the mindset shifts that come with scaling impact through others. He discusses why deep, insightful research is no longer enough on its own, and why today’s researchers must balance slow, foundational work with fast, highly actionable outputs. Glauco also explores how AI can support UX leadership and how context, strategy, and personal research philosophy help shape strong, modern research teams.
Episode highlights
00:01:51 – About Glauco
00:03:12 – Glauco’s journey to UX leadership
00:06:06 – Challenges of becoming a good UX leader
00:10:14 – Leading a research team at N26
00:16:00 – Fast vs slow track in UX research
00:21:41 – AI and UX leadership
About our guest
Glauco Cavalheiro is a user research manager at N26, where he leads an amazing team uncovering insights that shape the future of digital banking. Trained in applied social sciences, he brings a deep curiosity about human behaviour and attitudes to the world of product strategy.
With 11 years of experience transitioning from individual contributor to research leader, Glauco is passionate about the craft of research – and building impactful research practices in fast-paced environments.
This is the biggest shift that I needed to make as a leader, moving from IC to leadership. No longer am I a passive person observing reality. I need to be an active agent of reality, and my opinion and my vision matter for that. This shift has been the biggest challenge of becoming a leader in research. 
Podcast transcript
[00:00:00] Glauco Cavalheiro: There is one thing about being a good leader maybe in any discipline, but that I’ve been thinking a lot about and trying to develop that is owning and having context. I think this is a big difference from when I was in IC and now is that now I think it’s. Mandatory for me to really understand what’s going on in the company.
[00:00:28] Tina Ličková: Welcome to UXR Geeks, where we geek out with researchers from all around the world and topics that are passionate about. I’m your host Kova, a researcher and a product manager, and this podcast is brought to you by UXtweak, the UX research platform for recruiting, conducting, analyzing, and sharing.
Insights all in one place.
This is UXR Geeks, and you’re listening to an episode that I recorded with Glauco, who is a research lead at N 26. We started to talk about leadership. Slowly went into ai. And this discussion became a very nice intersection between leadership, AI and how it can actually help to be a UX leader. But I also think this episode is full of wisdom and humbleness and humility of glucco.
So. If you are looking into stepping into a leadership role, it’s something that I would highly recommend to tune in.
Hello Glauco.
[00:01:38] Glauco Cavalheiro: How’s it going?
[00:01:38] Tina Ličková: Good. Good. I’m really happy to see you and I’m really happy to get to know you and I think the audience wants to get to know you. So tell us who are you and what is I important to know about you?
[00:01:51] Glauco Cavalheiro: Yeah, that’s a very big question. To get started, I think I am a researcher and like of course, like you can see that on my LinkedIn, but like professionally.
11 years ago, this became the one thing that I am very confident that I’m a researcher now and I’ll be a researcher for the rest of my life. Maybe I would be doing different research, maybe, I don’t know if I get tired of this, I would go to get that PhD or I would do research in another environment with like physical projects.
Something that I was always curious about. But I’m sure that I’ll be doing research or leading research as I’m doing now for the rest of my professional days. Until I ly changed my mind about that. But I think that’s it. Other than that, what’s maybe important to know is that I am Brazilian. I have a beautiful family now dealing with having just moved to Berlin with a toddler, which is a very special type of challenge.
[00:02:49] Tina Ličková: But so far everything’s been really nice and we are going to talk about what you kind of already pointed out, leading research and leading researchers, and I will start trying to figure out your story. Like how did you become a leader? What actually attracted you to become a leader and not going into the individual contributor space.
[00:03:12] Glauco Cavalheiro: It’s also a big question that I wrestled a lot with during the career career, but always thinking what’s next? I started in research 11 years ago by accident. I left a career in design, in art direction, in advertisement. That’s my initial background, and I decided that I would never go again to the creative industry, and I wanted to do something different, and I was.
Freelancing for a time trying to figure out, and I got this, I worked with video making at this time and I got this video making freelance to film some interviews for a branding agency. So I filmed a bunch of interviews. A very interesting project when the blood shop, you know, the cosmetics brand was starting in Brazil.
So the core question of the research is like, what is beauty for Brazilian women? And might know that like beauty is a big topic in, in Brazil. So I got a job. I did the filming and I started doing the editing. And when I sent the videos that I created a bit of the script that they gave me a bit of like my ideas, the director of research called me and asked if I ever thought about being a researcher because she thought I had an eye for, for catching stuff.
And this is how I started. So I worked with research for 11 years since then, and in the past few years, I am working as a leader of research. And I think to your question, what changed that I think. Internally for me, I was missing the novelty of the challenge. After doing research so much, I kind of like knew the script.
Of course, like every new project, every new stakeholder, you learn something new. But I was missing a bit of like going through this learning curve of like figuring out a new challenge and also more externally, I was thinking that my impact was a bit limited. On what I, what I could do. So I crossed this like exponential growth in the career, being a senior and doing a lot of very interesting projects.
And at some point I was thinking like from five years from now, will I be doing like two x five x, 10 x more impact than I’m doing now as an ic? And I thought I would do more impact if I could scale myself. As a leader, and this is what pushed me to follow this path.
[00:05:20] Tina Ličková: Interesting because what you are describing, I basically also went through in the last two years now, now I will be very blunt.
I kind of knew from having experience as a formal and an informal leader that. Managing people makes me hate people. Research makes me love people. Managing people is just where it’s like, just no go for me. That’s why I chose different route in my career just recently, and I’m still staying on the individual contributor expert level, so.
I am going there to, as you said, having this challenge, having this novelty. What is it about the leadership thing that you were like, okay, this is what I wanna challenge myself with?
[00:06:06] Glauco Cavalheiro: I think to your point, I also, it was never clear to me that I like am natural leader, even though I got this feedback a few times from a few people, especially on the coaching side, but I know that management will bring some other stuff and I think this other stuff like.
Managing vacations, having those HR conversations, doing like the administration of people is something that I don’t love. But also I started speaking with other leaders and I don’t think that a lot of people love that part of the job, like going to Workday, approving vacations, approving budget, approving expenses, and, and this kind of stuff.
The bureaucracy of the job, but I really wanted to challenge me on my ability to make research. Work and work better of my ability of taking the traits that I think throughout my career I build and through the help of a lot of people, like, like Now can I give this back to the universe somehow? And I think that by.
Having a team and by having the opportunity to shape a discipline as a leader, this is what I was going for when I decided to, to take this challenge.
[00:07:20] Tina Ličková: I just wanna point out one thing that you said and that it wasn’t clear to me five years ago as a leader, still want to have a goal that you trying to achieve with people.
This is a really big distinction for everybody thinking about like where to go because I, for example, find it very hard to steer other people into the direction that I need. It’s just taking too much energy for me. I, there is no joy about it. I will maybe go back to some aspects of this, but what would you say?
Is the first step to be a good UX research leader specifically, and not a big question. I’m rolling today.
[00:08:02] Glauco Cavalheiro: I like, I don’t, I don’t even know if I would consider myself a great leader. I’m definitely trying my best every day with the help of my amazing team. But it, it’s hard to answer this question without going into the cliche, but there is one thing about being a good leader maybe in any discipline, but that I’ve been thinking a lot about and trying to develop that is owning and having context.
I think this is a big difference from when I was in IC and now is that now I think it’s. Mandatory for me to really understand what’s going on in the company, to really own the details of our strategy and even speak in the rooms in the forums that I can about that and bring this context to the team. I think one of the things that I always appreciated on other leaders and that I try to bring to the team if this like.
Mapping the context to them that they might not have the time or might not be their focus to do. I think it’s both the dimension of the strategy and the things that might be in index and what’s on the mind of some leaders. But also how to navigate stakeholder management in different teams. Like what this person needs, what’s the style of communication of this team?
What is the style of work of this team like? This is a faster team. This is a team that needs like a lot of actionability teams that need a lot of like quick wins for them to start listening to your research. But there’s also teams that like, they like to think deeper. They will appreciate more deeper insights and in supporting the researchers with this knowledge.
I think it’s one of the things that a good leader needs to. Do well or at least have tried to do to my best ability to like search for this information, to go talk to people, to get to know all the teams that you’ll be impacting, which sometimes is challenging because usually research teams are small and the research leader that is usually a single leader has to own.
The complex for the whole product are, but I think that’s like the job, that’s what you’re signing up to.
[00:10:04] Tina Ličková: And maybe just to understand your situation right now, you work for N 26, which is a pretty big company. Pretty innovative.
[00:10:13] Glauco Cavalheiro: So yeah, I’m leading research in N 26, and we have this pretty amazing team.
With four researchers and we are five, all of us. When I arrived, we researchers were embedded either on smaller teams or on a group of teams that in the company we call domain or a segment, depending on the level of hierarchy that they are. And one of the things that we changed, we discussed with the team and if that makes sense, but to centralize the research prioritization in the research team despite of where.
It was coming and make sure that we would be tackling the most important stuff. And then on how many researchers you had allocated in each team. So the context that we have right now, and this is, I think this is a big challenge for leadership in research for a lot of people. I read a lot about, I talked with other leaders and everyone struggles between the models of the centralized, decentralized, and I think that.
The hybrid model is what usually works, and of course it depends on logic of the company. So for us in internet six, what has been working the best is having researchers ask. Point of context to a specific team so they know who to reach out to when they have questions, who to reach, who to reach out to when they need research support.
And also those people are the ones that have some level of subject matter expertise because we are talking. Like in 19 six, we have so many dimensions of products. You have investments, you have day-to-day banking, you have the internal products. So researchers need this level. We cannot be switching people from one team to the other because it will take a lot of time for them to get the context there.
So this is the context that we are operating right now. We centralize the prioritization of research among ourselves, looking at research. Of the company goals, looking at what’s more important and what’s key for us at this point as a company. So if we have to locate like two researchers on a topic that belongs to one team, that that will be fine.
But each researcher is the point of contact for one specific team.
[00:12:17] Tina Ličková: Now going back to the content of your work leader. Also in this environment, one of the things that you were telling me, or when we were preparing for the episode is that you had to let go of the craft. So how do you actually let go of the craft by being still an expert and lead in in the, you know, expertise level?
[00:12:41] Glauco Cavalheiro: I think that every day, that aspect of my job is the hardest. Because I really love the craft. Like I, I really love doing research. I really enjoy the day to day of research. Even like of course no one loves recruiting, but getting all those things done is something that gives me pleasure. I let go of the craft very slowly in intensive.
So I started as a lead, but I did a few projects as an IC when I started and then started leading the team and then started taking over more reports until I started managing the whole discipline. So I don’t think I will ever be able to let go. And also this is a feedback that I got from my mentors and leaders on that that’s actually enjoying the craft so much and having this passion about the craft so much is what allows me to pass over to the teams and get them excited about the things.
Doing that sometimes ha get them passed through challenges because like we tackle it together and I really like to be hands on. Also, I think when you’re a line manager, you’re still in the weeds, like you’re not on the executive level yet, like you’re still working with it. I try to find or create some space to do some IC work.
So this is something that like ongoing, we have all the projects on the team. We have like all the management work, there is all the work about creating processes, creating culture for the team. But I am also taking. Some strategic questions in trying to answer myself as an ic, and also taking this and some opportunity to bring the team together for us to work together and have this sharing of experience of everybody in the team.
So I think this is how I survive missing doing research is by like actually doing research among other things. Of course, like that there’s a price to pay because. It takes time, but it’s worth it and it’s also important for the team. If you are the most senior person on a team, if you’ve been doing that for more times, doesn’t seem like more of the hard situations.
It should help them if you could do some research and show them like how you do stuff, and it’s not that you’re gonna like school them with that, but this can inspire very interesting conversations on the teams weekly about like, how do you do that? How do you do this part? Like I found interesting that you did this. I prefer to do that way.
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In our preparation, identify something very interesting, which is like a fast and slow track.
[00:16:08] Glauco Cavalheiro: It’s a question that is at of the research career right now. If I can’t make one bold statement. I think so far it was really easy for us to get away with long, deep, very interesting, very rich research that maybe didn’t create actionable, not only actionable insights.
I think we, we might have come up with actionable insights, but those insights might not have made to the roadmap. And I think so far until like. One. Two years ago it was okay, but it’s not okay anymore. We don’t have the luxury anymore to do those amazing projects that I loved doing, but that you cannot always tie to what is like the exact thing that it made difference.
In the team’s delivery. So I think balancing fast and slow is not a matter of choice anymore. It’s something that we need to do. Mm-hmm. Specifically on our case in intern six, we are driving a culture that relies a lot in experimentation. This has been true in intern six for the past, almost 10 years.
Before intern six, I was working in Trivago and the hotel industry relies a lot of easy testing to make basically. All decisions. And then it’s like what is the role of our, of research? If everything that we are doing, we are figuring out route through experimentation. And I think this balance is super daunting at the beginning, but there is such a nice opportunity to work on this because on one end.
Research can highly impact the generation of hypothesis. What is the center of the existence of an experiment is having in a hypothesis. You cannot make an experiment if there is no hypothesis, if there’s no assumption that you wanna test and prove. But where do assumptions come from? Where do hypothesis come from For like, everyone can sit on a room and come up with a lot of hypothesis, but experimenting on the product development environment.
Is not that cheap. You need engineering time. You need design time to come up with your version A, version B, sometimes version C, D, E, for you to run an experiment. If you sit on a room and start having your hypothesis, you can get lucky, but it’s casino. You’re betting whether this will work or not, and you’re trying to learn fast, and that’s cheap as you can, and that that’s fine, that works.
But if you have a user centered hypothesis, hypothesis that are informed by data and that are informed by actual. Information that comes from the reality, you have much hotter hypothesis. It’s much more likely that you have to do less iterations and therefore save a lot of engineering time and money on that.
If your hypothesis come from a place where you already deeply understand your user, you’re already deeply understand the problems that they have, you’re already deeply understand what they are trying to get done with your product and where things are not going well. You know there is on one level, if you are a researcher listing each of this and you’re struggling with your company moving faster to a more experimentation driven culture, which is happening to a lot of folks at this time.
I think it research is key on such an environment. And also there is the other side of the game that is. No big strategy comes from nowhere. Sometimes it does, sometimes like some people thinking in a room come up with a strategy, but research also has the power of outlining all what those opportunities are, what are the gaps in the industry for certain types of product, for certain types of needs.
Of course that like this is a bit more tricky depending on the company because this is the space that sometimes researchers have to like foster their the way in. A little bit because not every company is ready or willing or is thinking of listening to research for their big strategic goals. But then like that’s the job again, to demonstrate that this is something that we can do.
Mm-hmm. Then it means that for every project that we are doing, a small or big, there is no way that we can have a delivery. That doesn’t have a dimension of supporting the experiment, nature culture, there’s no way that we can have a delivery that doesn’t come with like very specific quick wins or very actionable stuff.
I really, really value the deep fat learning that we get from qualitative research, but at the same time, we need to create a narrative that is compelling to our stakeholders. So we need this. On one hand really brings research very close to the impact, and on the other builds a narrative that is compelling.
So stakeholders trust the discipline and crave for more research because their life will be much easier when they’re doing their work with the research support.
[00:21:00] Tina Ličková: And you are talking about the speed. I had a glimpse into our preparation document, and I was laughing a little bit that you pointed out also the scaling with ai.
Because like there is no episode or no presentation with mentioning AI these days. Right? And it’s, it’s becoming a reality. Like how do we actually utilize it? The paradigm is changing towards ai. I see more people utilizing it. So how are you actually working, you and your team with ai, how does it help you with this fast track and maybe also to stay slow?
[00:21:41] Glauco Cavalheiro: When you are supposed to stay slow, there are three points that I can take away from using AI and, and before those three points is, it’s not a matter of liking it or not agreeing with it or not, like there’s no escape. Like this is the reality. Like it’s like not wanting to work in the internet in the nineties, like that’s where the world is going.
Like you cannot get away from that. I love the moment that we are living because I’m very lazy. So I really loved some deep work on analysis, but I love that I can scale my thinking so much with ai. So one of the things that we are doing slash trying to do, because not all the models that we have access to are there yet.
Remember, we are a FinTech, we we’re a bank in Germany, so there’s a lot of regulation. We cannot just use anything. It is to do qualitative deductive analysis. Once you have a code book, once you have a team library to analyze. Large amounts of data. So like we collect feedback in the app store, being able to do the human part that is creating the best themes, creating the best categories, understanding what are the levels of analysis that you can, and creating a code book to do that and having a model to run that for you, like this is gold.
How can we, a small team of four that has a lot of research to do, be able to sit down and analyze in four levels, a data set that has a thousand entries, which is something that we have like every month coming from user feedback. Again, the models are not ready to do that over and over again. You have like some manual work to do and so try and, and narrow, but.
Large qualitative analysis is one thing that we are doing. The other dimension, this is not necessarily related to fast and slow, but has a a lot to do with the impact of research, is having our repository within a tool. We’re using notebook L to put. All the research work there and giving its to stakeholders so they can make questions to our research repository.
This is really powerful When folks are onboarding, when there’s a new project starting, when they have like this new topic that they’re gonna do, that they can just go there. It’s like, what do we know about? Credit cards. Yeah, and, and like before we would have like to go through a repository. We have to walk them through the files, maybe sending a few presentations and all like, we just send the link like everything is here, summarized you, take your summary, bring back to us and then we can discuss.
But, but if you go there, you know everything that we know about this and it’s a tool they use only our files so it doesn’t hallucinate to other stuff and it has been really powerful. The third point, and I think this is about the low part. Is having AI copilots. This is something that I’ve been relying a lot since we got access to the tools, is having copilots for different parts of my job.
So I have one copilot that I created on Gemini to help me think about research projects on a very deep way. So what I did, I created like this largest instruction that is very grounded on my philosophy of research, how I believe the research should be done, the points that I pay attention when I’m thinking on research project and also.
A few like articles and books that, to me are foundational for thinking UX research, but also some files from the company with our goals and KPIs and where we are going and make this co-pilot, make a connection between what we need as a company, the type of insights that will bring us forward and making impact to the KPIs, but also being true to my values and to my thinking of research.
And then what I do, like I input some. Overall idea of a topic, and then it helps me articulate the different elements of the research project, the goals, the research questions, and whenever something new comes up, I spend a few good minutes, if not a few hours, going back and forth with this agent to figure out research.
I also. Agents for all abstracts of research quickly understand what we are doing for management tasks, for providing feedback, for like teaching an agent, how I think giving examples of things that I believe that are examples of things that look good, example of things that would need improvement and one improvement it should be so I can also support my team to get like faster feedback.
From things that they’re thinking. So I think there’s a ton of opportunity. There are some stuff that I’m not using right now, but I think makes a lot of sense for research. That is, I think unrated small interviews, like we’re not talking about deep interviews. We’re not talking about anthropological large studies, but like small interviews about like churn.
Why are you churning? This is something that. Now AI can do it literally, and it’s very, very good. Also, unmoderated follow ups on usability tasks and this kind of stuff. So I think it all makes a lot of difference in research. It’s there to stay and we should all be leveraging this power.
[00:26:42] Tina Ličková: I am interested in this combination of the leadership and the AI and your team.
How would you say your team or your way of managing is. Making your team engage and participate in your own vision. So how does your team participate on this philosophy becoming a real thing, not just a just prone quote unquote.
[00:27:09] Glauco Cavalheiro: I’m sure that this is something that I’ll be able to answer in five or 10 years because now the reality is so fuzzy and I think it’s always a challenge to find the balance between, especially if you’re like.
Learning leadership like me that you will give the amount of see that, that a team needs to bring their own style versus things that if you’ve been working for 10 years on your own as a researcher, mostly like I did, have so much like deep rooted. Values, but also like ways of working and a vision of what quality looks like.
That is really important to find this balance and also let the team bring that, and I think at this point. This is something that is work in progress for me. Understanding how to bring the team, how to scale my vision and my philosophy, which I think it’s something very important that a leader will do. I think the way to make action about this is.
Every 101, every time that I’m reviewing something that someone is doing, every time that a researcher raises a question and and ask like, what do you think about what I’m doing? I think that those are the little moments where I have the opportunity to bring this. And also I have the challenge to remind myself that there’s something that is ways of working.
Folks should have the freedom and the autonomy on how they would do, but there are other things that are like in negotiable value or. Strong beliefs that I have about how research should look like. That is the biggest role, I think, as a new leader to balance this, but deeply believe that if you’re making this step, if you’re taking this challenge, it’s also part of the job for you to bring your vision and your philosophy to the work of the team that you’re doing.
So have take a few deep breaths and make things out. And even though I think it’s really particularly hard for researchers because. Being a researcher is like putting your values aside and just listening and accepting what you’re getting. This is the biggest shift I needed and still need to make as a leader, like moving from IC to leadership is that no longer am a passive person observing the reality.
I need to be an active agent of the reality and my opinion and my vision matters for that. This was not true for my whole career. I was like seating and observing and accepting whatever was coming, and now this shift has been the biggest challenge. I’ve becoming a leader in research.
[00:29:45] Tina Ličková: Thank you for your wisdom.
I feel like you are really good at learning to be a leader and not only learning, but being a good leader from what I hear.
[00:29:56] Glauco Cavalheiro: Thank you very much, and thanks for listening. I thank you. Thank you everyone for listening.
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