Why We Started Pilea 🌱 Solving the Feedback Chaos

I’m Simon Oliver Ommundsen 👋, a former UX designer and product manager who has spent years conducting extensive user research. From startups to larger organizations, I’ve seen firsthand how powerful user insights can be—and how difficult it is to manage them effectively. The process of capturing feedback, organizing it, and making it useful has always been more painful than it should be.

In every role I’ve held, whether getting buy-in for user research was easy or hard, the real challenge was what came after: turning raw insights into actionable knowledge. Research repository tools promised to help, but time and again, I found that they weren’t adopted by the rest of the team. The tools were either too cumbersome, too complex, or required too much manual effort to keep up-to-date. The result? Insights were lost, overlooked, or only shared in a biased, incomplete way.

This frustration led me to create Pilea🌱—a tool to simplify managing user research and make it easy for the entire team to use and benefit from.

The Struggle to Tag Insights is Real!

Over the years, I’ve conducted countless user interviews, surveys, and usability tests. Each session produced valuable feedback, but documenting and organizing that feedback was time-consuming. After an interview, I’d end up with pages of notes filled with details—some critical, some minor. I wanted to keep everything, but dumping it all into the backlog wasn’t practical.

Even with research repository tools, the process of tagging, summarizing, and sharing insights felt like a chore. I’d forget details, lose track of patterns, and sometimes, the insights never made it to the rest of the team. The tools just didn’t fit into the team’s workflow, and adoption suffered.

A Problem That Didn't Seem To Go Away

This wasn’t a one-time issue. Across different companies and teams, the pattern repeated itself:

• Research was done, but insights got buried.

• Teams wanted to use research, but tools were too clunky.

• Insights were shared, but often filtered through one person’s bias or memory.

The result was missed opportunities and slower decision-making. The potential of continuous user research was there, but the tools didn’t support it in a sustainable way.

Pilea: Designed to Solve These Frustrations

I started Pilea to solve this long-standing problem. By automating the tedious parts of managing user research, Pilea helps teams:

• Capture and organize insights effortlessly without spending hours on mundane work.

• Spot patterns and themes across interviews, surveys, and support tickets.

• Share unbiased, accurate insights that everyone can use.

Instead of spending hours summarizing interviews or tagging feedback, Pilea does the heavy lifting. This means teams can focus on making decisions and taking action—without worrying that valuable insights are slipping through the cracks.

Insights Should Be a Team Effort

A tool for managing user research should make it easier for everyone to engage with insights—not just the person conducting the research. By simplifying the process and automating the busywork, Pilea makes it possible for the whole team to stay connected to what users are saying.

When insights are easy to find, easy to share, and easy to act on, continuous user research becomes a team habit, not an individual burden.

A Tool Born from Experience

Pilea is the tool I wish I’d had in every role I’ve worked. It’s designed to solve real frustrations I’ve felt for years—frustrations that many UX designers, product managers, customer support agents and researchers know all too well.

Our goal is simple: to make user research accessible and useful for the whole team.

If you’ve struggled with managing user insights, know that you’re not alone. And know that there’s a better way!