Meet Our Founders

“We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.” For the past few years, the most powerful new tool in product work has been AI. It compresses tasks that used to take hours into seconds - drafts the spec, writes the report, summarizes the call. For a long list of jobs, that is exactly what we want.

But product discovery is not on that list. Discovery is the work of figuring out what is actually true about a user's situation, what they are trying to do, and the gap between where they are and where they want to be. Those inputs do not sit in a dataset somewhere waiting to be retrieved. They get built up - interview by interview, observation by observation, contradiction by contradiction - inside the head of the person doing the work.

We borrow Linus Lee's distinction here. An instrumental interface gets you from A to B as fast as possible - exactly right for booking a ride or writing a weekly report. An engagedinterface keeps you inside a domain long enough to genuinely understand it - like a musical instrument or a flashcard deck. Discovery belongs to the second kind. If an AI handed you “the three biggest problems your users have,” would you bet your roadmap on it? Probably not - and not because you doubt the model, but because you did not earn the conviction.

CLRA is our attempt to build an engaged interface for problem discovery. It does not interview your users for you. It does not conclude what your problem is. It gives you a structured place to organize your research plan, capture interviews, extract highlights, frame problems as coherent job stories, and collaborate with your team in the same problem space. The AI features we ship sit on top of that - they help you synthesize what you have already gathered, never replace the gathering itself.

We want to be honest: this worldview is not unique to CLRA. You can get most of what we describe by combining Notion, Miro, and Dovetail with enough discipline - or by vibe-coding your own workspace. We built CLRA for people who agree with the worldview but do not want to rebuild the structure from scratch every time, and who want a product where the discipline is already encoded in the workflow.

If you believe product work is less about shipping features and more about the long, slow craft of building empathy and judgment - come build CLRA with us.