From Blind Spots to Breakthroughs: Apollo’s Journey with AI-Moderated Research

Apollo GraphQL is the leading platform for building and scaling GraphQL APIs. Their product team prides itself on building dev tools for developers, by developers.

But that deep expertise comes with a challenge: when you’re this close to your product, it’s easy to become blind to what’s not working. That’s exactly the issue Apollo’s design team set out to tackle with Strella.

The Challenge:

As developers designing tools for other developers, Apollo’s team had a clear understanding of how their product was supposed to work—but not always how it felt in the hands of users.

“Anytime you’re building an experience, you’re going to come with a bias - because we know the product inside and out. Oftentimes we take that for granted. We become blind to some of the shortcomings and opportunities that we have in our product experiences.”

This internal bias was limiting their ability to evaluate the real user experience. What they needed was honest, external feedback - delivered quickly and without friction.

The Process:

The team turned to Strella to run rapid, AI-moderated interviews with developers in their target audience. They were curious if AI could really guide nuanced conversations, and if the feedback would feel natural, or robotic?

The results surprised them.

“In one of the interviews, the participant flat-out said the designs were terrible, were not valuable, and that they didn’t make any sense. And I felt like if that was done via human interaction, I don’t think we would have gotten that kind of insight.”

Instead of pulling punches or people-pleasing, participants gave raw, unfiltered feedback.

Apollo ran a full set of user interviews using Strella, letting the AI-moderator handle scheduling, moderation, and synthesis.

The AI moderator was able to follow up on user feedback in real time, dig deeper when responses were vague, and keep participants engaged with thoughtful, conversational prompts.

Most importantly, the design team got unfiltered, high-signal insights, fast.

“Prior to using Strella, it would take someone on our team 3-3.5 weeks to get a research project off the ground." "What Strella allowed us to do was take that 3-3/5 weeks and condense it significantly. In some instances, we were able to start getting feedback within hours as opposed to weeks.”

The Results:

Saving Time Without Sacrificing Depth

Traditionally, collecting and synthesizing qualitative research would have required hours of manual effort. With Strella, everything, from recruitment to synthesis, was automated, freeing up the team to focus on interpreting and acting on insights.

Apollo GraphQL touched on a use case they’ve recently leveraged to unlock insights faster: using Strella as a research repository and using the Chat Feature to reduce manual workflows.

“One of the great features we like is after the research has been conducted, is using Strella as almost a research repository.” “I like to go in and ask Strella specific questions, and give it tasks like ‘Can you find me a specific quote in this spirit?’, and it will give me a list of quotes and who said it and the clips so I can easily put them in a slide deck or presentation.”

Uncovering Hidden Flaws

Because the feedback was so direct, Apollo discovered several usability gaps they hadn’t identified internally. These were things that only surfaced when fresh eyes, and fresh perspectives, interacted with the product.

“Using a product like Strella really keeps us honest. It helps us become unblind and helps us see some of the things that we may not have been paying attention to just because we’re so familiar with the things that we’re building.”

De-risking Design Decisions

Instead of guessing how users would respond to changes, the team could now test assumptions in real time, before committing to a full build. This helped them make more confident product decisions and avoid wasted cycles.

Apollo’s Takeaway

What started as an experiment has become a new part of Apollo’s research stack. The team now uses Strella to continuously collect high-quality user insights, without slowing down product development.

By removing bias, surfacing blind spots, and cutting research time dramatically, Strella has helped Apollo stay grounded in what really matters: how real users experience their product.

Watch the full interview here:

Curious how AI-moderated interviews can sharpen your product instincts?

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