Solving the Problem of Fragmented, Unstructured Customer Insights - Dwayne King

Dwayne King is the CEO and Co-Founder of Rutabaga, a startup building a decision intelligence engine that turns fragmented, unstructured customer insights into actionable knowledge accessible across the organization. 

Rutabaga’s mission is to help companies become genuinely customer-centric by eliminating the barriers between scattered data, institutional memory, and daily decision-making.

Key Takeaways

• From Data to Action: Rutabaga ingests qualitative, unstructured customer data (such as interviews, call transcripts, and research reports) and transforms it into structured, actionable insights directly within existing team workflows.
• Solving Institutional Amnesia: Dwayne observed that companies often repeat research and lose valuable insights due to organizational silos and staff turnover. Rutabaga acts as a persistent, searchable “brain” for institutional memory, so teams don’t lose history or context.
• AI-Powered Speed: Their ingest engine dramatically reduces “time-to-insight”-what previously took a week of manual analysis now takes about an hour, thanks to AI, graph databases for connection mapping, and integrations with tools like Jira and Figma.
• Embedded in Decision Workflows: The team learned it’s not enough to collect and centralize insights; actionable data must appear in the tools and moments where decisions are made, not just in a standalone repository.
• Continuous Customer Feedback: Rutabaga’s roadmap evolves with weekly user research and prototype testing to avoid building a product that only serves their own perspective. Customer feedback consistently shapes functionality and integrations.
• Iterative Product Philosophy: Product vision at Rutabaga evolves through ongoing customer discovery, not from a single “aha” moment-dispelling the myth that tech startups are born fully-formed from a founder’s head.
• Ultimate Goal: Build an intelligence engine that future-proofs institutional knowledge, enables faster iteration, and supports better business decisions at every level.

About Dwayne King ___

Dwayne King is the Founder and CEO of Rutabaga, an AI-native platform helping product teams make smarter, faster decisions by turning scattered customer insights into strategic clarity. With over 20 years of experience in product development, UX design, and human-centered innovation, Dwayne has led transformative work for Fortune 500 companies and high-growth startups alike.

His career has centered on a single theme: helping organizations align around what truly matters to their customers. At Rutabaga, he's tackling one of the most persistent challenges in tech—fragmented decision-making—by building the connective tissue between insight and action. Dwayne is passionate about designing systems, teams, and experiences that don’t just ship faster, but ship smarter.

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Transcript

Nathan C: 0:00

Hello and welcome to The Glow Up! I'm Nathan C and today I'm talking with Dwayne King, CEO and Co-Founder of Rutabaga. Dwayne, it is so good to talk with you today. Thanks for joining me! Could you tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do at Rutabaga?

Dwayne: 0:16

Yeah, yeah. We're a early stage startup. We're a decision intelligence engine. So really what that means is we help companies gather all their qualitative insights about the customers, bring'em into one place, and make them actionable so they can use it to drive decisions about the roadmaps, marketing campaigns. Companies have talked for a long time about being customer centric, and we're really trying to help companies do that by taking what's unactionable data right now, making it actionable and putting it in the work streams that they're using already so that they have customer data at the ready.

Nathan C: 0:45

One of the things, that you just said that's like one of my favorite topics is, how do you turn customer insights into like, data and action that everybody on the team can use? What's your approach and what was the problem you noticed and set out to solve there?

Dwayne: 1:04

I think there's a couple of things to think about on that. Number one, you know, I observed in my past work so often that the company would be doing something wrong. You would find data that would support that. Everybody would see the data and agree we're doing it wrong and go back doing what they were doing. And so I started working on ways to, in an analog way, work with the team to like start driving'em in the right direction. That was one of the early thoughts how can I digitize this and do it at scale instead of me in an analog way? And so there's a few things that we have there. And one is putting some structure to that, so instead of it just being data, how do we start to take evidence, turn in insights and insights into something that's actually actionable? What are we trying to accomplish as a company and what does the company want and where's that win-win? How do we get there? Part of what we're gonna do with Rutabaga is with all that data, what are some opportunity spaces? And then how can we use the data to simulate possibilities, to weed out the bad ideas really quickly and figure out what those good ideas are to go truth test in the world. Then you actually have, instead of it just being data, you have ideas that you can test and then actively act on'em.

Nathan C: 2:15

As a marketer, there's really no shortage of data inputs. I'm getting comments on social media or not getting comments on social media. I can look at my marketing dashboards. There might be a product team and a research team that's also reviewing and adding data to our understanding about the customer. But this point that you brought up of like, okay, so now what can I do about it? And Then I love this part even further of like taking that one step where it's like, not just what are the options, but like these are the ones with a high likelihood to work. Or these are ones that are, you know, hit an internal threshold for like worth testing. Amazing! I'm curious like what got you started as a founder and, what was your origin story of understanding this pain point and deciding to turn it into a company or a solution?

Dwayne: 3:14

I wish there was like that blinding insight, you know, like that one moment of like,"Oh my God, I need to do this!" But it actually just kind of evolved over time. So originally I used to have a consultancy, and we primarily worked with enterprise, which meant getting into enterprise is hard'cause you gotta go through procurement teams and procurement teams hate small consultancies. Like they want, to like put it all in one big consultant, you know what I mean? So you're just like, getting in is really hard. And so once you have a new logo, it means like you'd get a whole bunch of customers, as many customers you can under that one logo. And the number of times I would get a call,"Hey Dwayne, how much budget should I set aside to look into x?" And that my answer would be, well, don't set aside any budget because I just did this for your group over here. Go call them and get that report because it answers almost the exact question you're asking. And even if, even if it's not the exact question, you're gonna ask me better questions if you read that report first,'cause it's gonna answer, it's gonna give you more context so you're asking better questions. And it really started, and that happened a lot. And I started to realize that within an enterprise, like unless you do the research, commission the research, or know the person that does the research, you have no idea that it happens. And like if they hadn't called me, that would've been another couple hundred thousand dollars they spent to redo the exact same research. That was kind of like the initial seed of the idea of like, can't we could consolidate this in a way that people could make this searchable? But then it started growing more of I started to see when I moved after I left my consultancy and went in-house, started to see the lack of action, how hard it was to move people even when they could see the evidence that they were going on the wrong path and that you had to paint the path for them like that, that was the problem, even when they could see the way to go, it was that they couldn't see the way to go. They, they saw they were on the wrong path, but they didn't know the way to go and having to be able to paint out that path for'em. And so that was really kind of the pieces that started to come together to help me understand that Rutabaga needed to be a thing.

Nathan C: 5:03

You said at the top you're like, man, it would be so easy if there was like a single"aha!" moment where like the solution was just clear. But like, I would argue that like a major premise of The Glow Up is to dispel that exact idea that like a founder has an idea, it's perfect out of the box, they go make the company slam dunk, everybody gets an exit, right? And like what you described is this, sounds like kind of a data driven, iterative approach to like seeing a pain in the market, understanding it from new perspectives, being able to build that experience that you have from your prior roles into really coming up with an immaculate solution that understands all these pieces. Actually, I wanna go back to this idea that you said, because this is so huge, right? That unless you're the person doing the research who asked for somebody to do the research or were like somehow directly invested in that research happening, you probably aren't getting the most you could out of that institutional knowledge. The first thing that I thought of, right? Especially in startups, especially in enterprises that want to do innovation, right? An executive may be, you know, like average executive time in an enterprise is somewhere between like 18 months to like three or five years. It's really not that long and often it is shorter than innovative, like launching a product or, you know, building from phase one to phase three. And so the narrative and like the basis for like, why is this product doing what it is? Where are we going? What is the future? And there's like usually one guy or gal, you know, they're a producer, a project manager who's like waving the flag saying,"Hey, this was supposed to be a thing!" I just love this idea that like, by collecting data and insights by, learning from it and sharing it widely, you can start to really maintain the value of work that's already done. And ideally, right where you came at the very top was how can you learn and grow and iterate faster? Right? And that to me is such gold when you think about product teams who are facing the kinds of challenges they are today, right? Faster, faster, faster!

Dwayne: 7:36

To a T almost every one of them, I would say every one of'em, but there's probably been an exception, have made a comment to the effect of,"We're a relationship company and we're too big to be a relationship company." Meaning like all their institutional knowledge is shared via relationship, meaning you have to know somebody in order to get like that. And really, at our core what we're doing is building a brain for the company, you know, that it never forgets, like it always has a knowledge. Like you mentioned that rotation of people, like we're building that memory that can always remember it never forgets anything.

Nathan C: 8:11

It could be like making better targeted marketing campaigns. It could be describing and like finding product features to go learn from it. It could be, you know, long-term roadmap and how you activate, keep it relevant, sort it. When you're thinking about your own business and your roadmap, how are you measuring the impacts of this work? How are you measuring the impact when you have such a large vision and can touch so many parts of a business?

Dwayne: 8:41

Yeah. I can tell you we've joked numerous times about the irony of having to build Rutabaga without having Rutabaga. Like this would be so much easier to do if we had the tool. I think, one of our first measures that we're really interested in is time-to-insight. Because the first tool we're building is the ingest engine. Just because in thinking about the sequencing, like we've gotta get the data in order to be able to do anything with the data. So we're like, okay, well the first thing we gotta build is that ingest engine and be able to help companies take raw data and get insights with it. And so that's our first measure, is can we speed the time to insights? And so, you know, we've taken what would take a person about a week and now it can take about an hour of analysis time. It's working! Much faster and it works well. There's other tools that can do something similar, but we feel like we're definitely best in class at it.

Nathan C: 9:32

How are you using like AI or other backend processes to help that ingestion and summary and inclusion of new data sources? How are you giving people a whole week back?

Dwayne: 9:44

Yeah, the first thing that we've focused on is teams that have an insights team or outbound PMs or market researchers. People whose job is to go out and talk to customers or potential customers and really understand what their latent or unspoken needs are. They're recording those. So coming back, ingesting those recordings and making sense of those, finding the insights inside of those. That's our first step. Next step is loading those inside of a graph database and understanding the relationship and time sequences of those so that we can start to hook up to other data sources like you had mentioned, social media, CRM, support systems. And we can start to traverse that graph and figure out where data fits inside that. So then we can start to be a centralized repository for all your customer data and start all your unstructured customer data and put some structure to it.

Nathan C: 10:29

Amazing! Thank you! I'm glad we got to the, using the graph databases to really structure a whole ecosystem of data, thank you for calling that out. You're working in a juicy problem space where you want your own tool to help build it. One of the challenges that approach to building a product kind of presents is you yourselves are experts in the kind of tool that you want. How do you make sure then that, your sort of customer desires of your own tool are in line with and matching your customer's desires? How do you make sure that, that like inherent understanding of the problem that you have stays connected to what the market and to what customers are looking for?

Dwayne: 11:16

Yeah. We do a lot of research, so before we did any pencil to paper, we did probably 30 interviews with folks. Because that was one of the things, I saw the problem, I understood the problem, but I wanted to make sure I wasn't building a tool that had an audience of one you know, like perfect tool for me, no one else! And really understood like, made sure it had broad applicability. But now at this point this is a big part of my job. This week alone, I think I had 15 interviews where early on they were generative, like where it was, just talking to me about your work and what's missing in your work and how you wanna work. And now it's very much more concept testing where we're, you know, putting the tool in front of people and talk to'em about how they would use it and getting feedback and ideas for what's missing and where we could go with it. Do the typical design thinking thing of like,"What world would you want?" Down to like, really low fidelity prototypes, this is what we've got and like really getting ideas and iterations on it. But yeah, I'm talking to people every week about what we're building, where we want to go, and getting feedback and thoughts and ideas. Like dozens a week.

Nathan C: 12:22

It is what I would expect. It's the behavior I would expect from an insights tool, but I I'm glad to hear it. And I love the way that you, you framed it out. I'm curious, have you had moments where what you're hearing from your customers and all of those interviews and tests, where that's impacted your understanding of the product, the space, or even your roadmap?

Dwayne: 12:46

Yeah weekly, I would say. I don't think we've ever, you know, pivoted, it's never been like, oh, we were building this, when we're building something else. But the, sophistication and nuance of what we're building keeps evolving and changing. Like I would tell you, it was even maybe a month or two ago where we had the revelation that to build a repository and expect an organization to come to you is a losing proposition. We need to be in the workflows where decisions are being made. We need to start building relationships with the tools where decisions are being made so that, so that we're not expecting like that an engineer is making a decision about how they're gonna build something that they have a requirement about and are gonna come to us to make that decision that we need to be in Jira where they're reading the requirement and making the decisions and the designer, we need to be in Figma. It seems obvious now that we know it, but that's from these discussions we started thinking about where, when, and how decisions are being made and like, oh, we need, we need to be there. I mean, we still wanna try to drive traffic back because there's a lot you get from what we're building, but also being in the workflows where and when the decisions are being made. That'd be a big an example. But then there's like smaller things of, you know, we talk about, I forget what, one of my co-founders, talks about version I think 35 or something. Like whenever we talk about a feature, she's like,"Yep, that'll be in version 35!"

Nathan C: 14:11

Oh my gosh! Shorthand for like"Good idea, but not now friends." But yeah. Someday. someday Is so important, right? Like, I absolutely love it! As a marketer, we talk a lot in like, show up in your customer's channel of choice, right? And often what people think about is like be on the social media platform that your customer is in. But what you brought up, I think is even more precise and salient, right? Which is this idea that, if you're working with busy professionals at an enterprise where new tools are real hard to implement, adoption is real hard to, you know, get. Getting people to care about something enough to like engage with a new technology is very hard! What are ways that you can reduce that barrier? Where am I using artificial intelligence? AI that was in the tools that I'm already using, right? So like I use Descript to edit my podcast and there's an AI that pulls out all the ahs and ums from what I do. I didn't want to take my video files and put it through CapCut or some other video editing just so that I could like have a clean transcript. That sort of integration of like, bring the value to me! I signed up for Canva because it's AI background removal, right? Something that, like when I started in marketing, somebody had a job to like cut out, you know, people from photographs. Canva is a one click and I'm done! And like that utility is so fast, it's so immediate. It's in the workflow that I'm trying to do. I love that tool and I pay more for it because it has what I need. And also when you think about this fragmented ecosystem, right? If you need everybody to come to your platform to get value you're asking people to spread their attention. And if you can show up with that insight, you know, like the idea of, could you have insights attached to a Jira ticket? Oh my goodness! You know, a smart front-end developer wants to know why they're doing something. A marketer wants to know what are the motivations for the person they're talking to, and if you can start to highlight that in place?! I'm gonna finish the commercial that I apparently decided to do for Rutabaga!

Dwayne: 16:31

No, no! You could, you can promote us all you want!

Nathan C: 16:34

You can tell as a marketer who cares about data, this is a tool that I'm into! So, you talked about how you got here, some of the pains that you saw and the growth that you're using to iteratively build this idea. I love this idea of Version 35. Let's think about that future a little bit. The name of the show is The Glow Up, and that's a notable transformation. So as you have this stepwise approach, what's the big goal in the next six months? What are you hoping to just slam dunk?

Dwayne: 17:05

Yeah. Well we're you know, we're early stage, right now we're in like a call it an invite- only meaning, we're not generally available. You can't go to the site and like sign up. It's selective in that like we, we have this like certain group that we want, but we wanna make sure it's people that understand the stage we're in and are in it to be like a design partner, not just use the tool and and not give us feedback. So in the next six months, really getting to be GA and start to scale the business is our big goal. Instead of some of that immediate tangibility of like really getting into market and starting to scale the business, I guess is kind of the thing.

Nathan C: 17:39

You know, Dwayne you said something that I wanna push back just a tiny bit on, right? Like you were kind of apologizing for being in this closed alpha, right? And I honestly think, one of the pieces of advice that you get as a founder so often, right, is if your audience is everyone, your audience is no one. And I think it's incredibly smart to make sure you're connecting with folks who can use the tool. There is nothing more disappointing, as somebody who's working in business trying to get something done, sees a software that seems like it's gonna solve all their problems, and then it's not ready for where they are. So, while it is painful and while so much of the momentum in a startup conversation is about how do we grow, how do we get to customers? I honestly think it's worth some applause that you're focused on actually knowing and connecting with folks who can get value today. Right? Because if they get value, they're gonna tell their friends, right? These are tight knit communities.

Dwayne: 18:43

Yeah. I think it,"invite-only" just sounds kind of snooty and it's not meant to be snooty. It's more of just like, I wanna make sure that you understand what you're getting into and we're a good fit for each other. We're early stage so it's not gonna be as slick and polished as some other software. We have that expectation of like, you know, we're looking for feedback. We want somebody that's gonna like be on our design advisory board and, help us grow and be better and you know, so yeah.

Nathan C: 19:06

Those are the kind of partnerships that can be really cool, right? Like when you have that opportunity to really impact and get something that, helps you move the needle. Fantastic six month goals! Get to GA. So, to those goals and the rest of the work that you're doing at Rutabaga, is there anything that you're looking for, whether it's partnerships, testers, research, or more?

Dwayne: 19:31

Yeah, I'd say a couple of things. One, if somebody wants to be on the invite only, like if you think, you have a need to, ingest research and be able to make sense of it quickly and are willing to provide feedback and stuff, gimme a call. Love to talk with you and see if there's a good fit there. Also, if, you just wanna take a look at what we're doing and provide feedback, like I said, I talk to dozens of people a week and, I'm always looking for people tell me what they hate about it, what they love about it, ideas they have about how it could be better. You know, just, I'm looking for really candid feedback all the time. Like I sincerely, right now our quote unquote sales is all pretty much inbound, where we're putting out thought leadership and when someone follows us on LinkedIn, I write them a note and say,"Hey, thanks for following. Really appreciate it." Oh yeah, that's probably how we got connected! And say,"If you'd like to take a look behind the scenes, I'd love to show you." One of three things happens, and they're all good. The worst thing that can happen is I get feedback and you know, as a early stage founder, that's always good. What usually ends up happening is I also get an advocate out of it. They're like, oh, I'd love to help. I got people I can introduce you to, or whatever. And then sometimes they're actually a decision maker that's needs, needs us. It's like,"Oh, well how do I get signed up with Rutabaga?" And so, any of those three things, it's a win! I'd love to just talk to people'cause you know you might end up loving what we have, even if you can't use it and end up being an advocate.

Nathan C: 20:49

This is really fantastic advice that any founder can use, right? Be enthusiastic, connect with people who show interest and when you have a simple, relatable offer, for the right folks, you can learn so much from how people engage. One of the things that I love to make time for on The Glow Up is a community spotlight or shout out, to groups doing good work. Maybe they're an impact org, nonprofit or other. Is there somebody that you'd like to give a, or some group that you'd like to give a shout out to?

Dwayne: 21:22

Yeah. So our logo and mascot is a rhinoceros and I have a fondness for rhinos. The Rhino Recovery Fund, I'll throw out a note for them'cause they're an endangered species and they need help. So I'll throw out a shout out for the Rhino Recovery Fund'cause I think they're doing good work.

Nathan C: 21:37

This is the first shout out to one of the largest animals on the planet. And I love the connection to sustainability and advocacy groups. Thank you! If people wanna learn more, if they wanna engage with you as an early tester or provide some feedback if they think they're an insights driven professional, who could use a tool like this, how can people learn more? How can they connect with you?

Dwayne: 22:04

Yeah, I'm on LinkedIn, super easy. You know, the linkedin.com/in/dwayne, and then my email is just Dwayne@rutabaga.app, so get me there as well.

Nathan C: 22:16

Amazing! Well Dwayne, those who know me on The Glow Up know that consumer insights, an iterative process, bringing the customer and research to everyone on the team and building a product that's both aligned with its customers as well as where technology and trends are taking us are just my favorite topics to talk about. I'll probably have to follow up with you to learn more about getting my hands into some insights tools like this, because I'm just so inspired to see what could I learn from my research and consumer data as I'm growing and iterating on what Awesome Future does. I could see it being both something I used to build my company as well as support the customers that I work with. It's a bit of a passion episode for me today, but I am so thrilled to have you. Thank you so much for joining us on The Glow Up!

Dwayne: 23:12

Thanks! This was fun. I appreciate you having me and putting in a good word for Rutabaga! Really appreciate it!

Nathan C: 23:17

Heck yeah! I learned about Rutabaga because I was at a networking event here in Portland and somebody said,"You do consumer insights?! I know a tool that you should probably know about!" So that leadership seems to be working.

Dwayne: 23:31

Good to hear!

Nathan C: 23:32

It's great to talk with you, Dwayne! Thanks again for joining us on the call.