About Parley
The best research we ever did got lost. So we built somewhere for it to live.
MaraWe interviewed sixty dispatchers. A year later a new PM ran the same study from scratch — nobody could find the first one.
Parley started with a familiar kind of waste. Mara Lindqvist and Tomás Reyes were running research and product at a logistics software company. Their team did good interviews — careful, well-recruited, honest. Then the findings went into a slide deck, the deck went into a folder, and the folder went quiet.
The insight wasn’t wrong. It just wasn’t findable at the moment someone needed it: in a planning meeting, in a spec, in a debate about what to build next. So decisions got made on memory and the loudest recent anecdote.
Parley is our answer: a repository where every interview, call and ticket stays searchable, every quote keeps its context, and every theme shows how many people actually said it. We want customers to be in the room whenever a product decision is made — even when they’re not on the call.
Why we exist
To keep customers in the room when decisions are made — with their own words, not our summary of them.
Principles
Four things we won’t trade away
Each principle has a product consequence. If we can’t point to where it shows up in Parley, it isn’t a principle yet.
- 01
Evidence over eloquence
A well-told anecdote shouldn’t beat a pattern. We show counts, segments and sources next to every quote.
In the product
Every theme shows how many people raised it, not just how many highlights it has.
- 02
Context travels with the quote
A line without its surroundings can be made to say anything. Quotes in Parley always link back to the moment they were said.
In the product
Clips, transcripts and participant details are one click from any insight or embed.
- 03
Research belongs to everyone
Engineers, designers and support should be able to hear customers directly, without asking for access.
In the product
Viewers are free on every paid plan, and search covers every study they can see.
- 04
Participants are owed a promise
People agreed to talk to you, not to be quoted forever. Privacy is part of the product, not a setting.
In the product
Redaction, consent records and one-step deletion across every study.
Milestones
How Parley got here
Spring 2023
Two people, one shared drive
Mara and Tomás prototype a searchable transcript archive for a handful of research teams they know.
Autumn 2023
Highlights and tags
The first version people pay for: highlight a passage, tag it, find it again later.
Summer 2024
Beyond interviews
Help-desk tickets and survey answers join recordings, tagged with the same vocabulary.
Spring 2025
Free viewers
We stop charging for people who only read research, so engineers and support can hear customers directly.
Winter 2025
Privacy tools
Automatic redaction, consent records and one-step participant deletion.
Autumn 2026
Theme maps
Counts by person, segment filters and trends across new research.
The team
Small team, lots of interviews
We asked everyone for their favourite follow-up question. It says more about how we work than a job title does.
Mara Lindqvist
Co-founder & CEO
“What happened right before that?”
Tomás Reyes
Co-founder, Head of Product
“What did you try first?”
Ines Achterberg
Research Operations
“Can you show me?”
Kofi Mensah
Engineering Lead
“Who else was involved?”
Hana Sato
Product Designer
“What would you have expected to see?”
Ruth Okonkwo
Customer Success
“How did that make the rest of your day?”
Team members are fictional and shown with illustrated initials.
How we work
We try to practise what the product preaches
- Remote, four time zones
- Written by default, with two overlapping hours a day for anything that needs a conversation.
- Everyone joins customer calls
- Every team member — engineers included — sits in on at least two customer conversations a month.
- We research in Parley
- Our own interviews, tickets and churn calls live in a Parley workspace the whole company can read.
- A public changelog
- Every release is written up in plain language, including the things we removed and why.
Hear it from your customers next.
Start with a free workspace, or book a demo and we’ll walk through one of your own studies with you.