How the Highlight platform is enabling speed to insight & market throughout the product lifecycle

In the last year, Highlight’s come a long way. It was a year of incredible transformation for our product intelligence platform as we shipped hundreds of improvements and launched all new powerful capabilities purpose-built for and informed by what we learned by staying close to our customers. It’s worth taking a moment to visit how far we’ve come in making it easier and faster for our customers to create products people love.

Highlight’s mission

Highlight is built by research experts for those who want to build winning products. We know that the best research is never one-and-done. Product teams operate at their best when they have regular infusions of consumer insights to guide them along the product lifecycle, informing the big decisions and their day-to-day decisions.

While market conditions and consumer sentiment are continuously changing, data-driven insights reliably derisk your business, and set your team up for success.

That’s why our mission at Highlight is to make high quality, contextualized insights easy, fast, and available to product builders. When Highlight users have easier, faster access to high quality insights, they have the data they need to confidently answer key business questions, and make important decisions big and small.

The work we do every day is in support of this mission - continuously adding more value in the platform day by day. So let’s take a look at just a few of the most notable launches that are making high-quality product and consumer insights more accessible, more quickly than ever.

Never start from scratch–launch smart research with AI-powered and expert-informed guidance

When Highlight launched our product intelligence platform in 2025 ago, we were excited to have embedded, expert-crafted Survey Blueprints–think of these like customizable templates, purpose built for your use case. Authored by our in-house researchers, these Blueprints put the power in any user’s hand to run research-grade surveys.

Now, we’ve leveled up how we infuse expertise into your research; prompt our Highlight AI with your key business questions, and we’ll share back our recommended project design, including a recommended Survey Blueprint and relevant questions from our Question Library.

The corpus of best research practices that Highlight AI has been trained on has grown exponentially, as we continue to build for every use case imaginable along the product lifecycle. With this built in guidance, everyone can be a research pro.

Whether you’re concept testing (more on that later), innovating a brand new product line, or renovating your hero product, there’s a Survey Blueprint with questions written and recommended by the experts.

Get to know your audience deeply with the Audience Profiler Blueprint. (See it in action in our study of skincare consumers.)

Use digital testing to view your category, customer, and portfolio with more depth

In the best of times, teams that build products need to mitigate risk before any go-to-market motion–no one wants millions of dollars in manufacturing, merchandising, advertising, and more wasted, or tons of disused product ending up in landfills. In times like these, risk mitigation is priority number one.

Before you invest one cent in material product development, you can now use the Highlight platform to answer key business questions like:

• Where is there white space in our category?
• What unmet or undermet needs are consumers facing?
• What does my consumer prioritize, care about, and how do they see themselves?
• Will a packaging update boost our velocity? Or alienate loyal consumers?

If you are testing concepts (such as in LOLA’s pack testing example), you can upload images for Highlight respondents to react to (i.e., a stimulus). If you are getting to know your customer better, you might use an audience profiler digital Survey Blueprint.

When product is ready for testing, Highlight’s customers are still using the platform for quality in-home usage testing–but we’re heartened to see the swell of product builders incorporating consumer feedback into their innovation process earlier and more often, to ensure that what they’re building delivers on customer needs and deserves a spot on shelf.

See how LOLA is looking before they leap with concept testing by Highlight

 

Show your results to any stakeholder with Instant Reports

You can add any amount of users to your Highlight account–but we know that you also have stakeholders that either aren’t consumer insights nerds themselves, or are too busy to jump in and explore the data in the platform.

You don’t have the time to be making slides, either. So that’s why we’re doing it for you–or, more accurately, Highlight AI is.

Now, what once took hours or even days of your time is ready for sharing out to stakeholders in just a few moments. With Instant Reports, Highlight AI generates a Powerpoint and spreadsheet to elegantly synthesize what you learned from your research.

• Want to generate a full read out of all your results? No problem.

• Want to create a presentation displaying results for just a specific segment like Gen Z? Easy.

• Want to further customize by excluding incomplete responses or adjusting confidence level? Hold my beer.

Whatever insights your stakeholders need to see, you have the power to create in just a couple clicks.

“I thought the automated report was very helpful! We were using parts of it for quick digestion following our usage study.”

- Brand Manager at P&G

Take a long view of your data with multi-project dashboards

What’s more valuable than a snapshot view of a single project’s results?

Seeing your research results, over time, live side-by-side. With multi-project dashboards, Highlight users can:

• Compare data across projects
• Observe changes over time
• Spot differences between prototype performance
• Identify how the same product performs differently across different consumer sets

When your data is connected, you can unlock deeper insights. See winning patterns, watch metrics moving in the right direction over time, and make stronger, data-driven decisions.

Spindrift VP of Innovation Jon Silverman–who also has the retailer’s perspective from 13 years at Williams-Sonoma–put it best. He articulated the value of showing your data over time for winning distribution with new retail partners.

“ Walk into that buyer, category, manager, whatever it may be,” said Jon, “And say, ‘Hey, this is the work that we've done with consumers… I'm showing you version 26 of this product, and I put the last few versions in front of consumers… I've gotten signal from consumers that this is gonna work. And by the way, I got signal on the three previous prototypes and that signal wasn't great. And so we optimized, and now we're in front of you with this one because we feel we are ready.”

We’re proud to announce that multi-project dashboards are here.

(You can watch his full insights-packed interview here.)

Time to start running towards the next milestones on the roadmap

I hope you enjoyed this note to appreciate just a few of the milestone launchesHighlight had in 2025. But our work is far from done. Every day, customers come to us with new ideas for ways Highlight could make their access to high-quality insights faster and easier, and we’re all ears.

Want to see a demo of the latest platform capabilities? Do you have unmet research needs you want to share with our team? Schedule a call so we can do better research, together.