David is a research director for the customer experience (CX) practice at Forrester, leading a team of analysts focused on helping CX professionals deliver more effective, easier, and more enjoyable customer experiences.
David joined Forrester in 1999 as a senior analyst focused on the technologies enabling Internet commerce and authored Forrester's seminal "eBusiness Networks" report. He then became a research director and led a team of analysts producing the company's first in-depth technology selection research, TechRankings, which became Forrester's most quickly successful product launch and is now called the Forrester Wave™. After TechRankings, David became a principal analyst researching the future of software and authored reports on issues such as software quality ("Must Software Be Buggy?"), machine-to-machine communication ("The Dark Side Of The Web"), and the future of semantic web technologies ("How The X Internet Will Communicate"). .
Following an entrepreneurial venture from 2002 to 2011, during which David founded and ran a successful video production agency for nine years, he returned to Forrester in 2011 as a research director leading a team of analysts researching online video and other media for interactive marketing. In 2013 he became Forrester's first VP of research quality and operations, leading a team of 60 responsible for guidance development, methodology, training, performance metrics, editing, client inquiry, client support, and vendor briefings. In 2015, David became VP of research content experience to help improve the thematic unity, consistency, clarity, and simplicity of Forrester’s research content overall. In August 2016, he transitioned to his current role on Forrester’s CX research team.
Previous Work Experience
Before he first joined Forrester, David served for eight years in software development and technical marketing roles at several software companies, with a focus on user experience (UX), including CGI Informatique and IBM, and then at the first eCommerce platform company, Open Market.
In 2002, David left Forrester to found Upland Productions, a boutique video production agency, and created about 340 videos for clients in a variety of sectors, including MIT, Microsoft Europe, Children’s Hospital Boston, New Atlantic Ventures, Avery Dennison, Ambient Devices, Fashion Institute of Technology, the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, the French Embassy to the United States, and many private schools including the MIT Sloan School of Management, Groton, Hotchkiss, Choate, and St. Paul's, among others.
Education
David holds a B.A. in cognitive science from Amherst College and an M.A. in the history of ideas from St. John's Graduate Institute, Santa Fe. Prior to college, David grew up in France, where he earned a baccalauréat from Lycée des Eaux Claires in Grenoble and first learned to code, becoming especially fascinated by UX design and human-computer interaction.
