Chinmayee Channuri, an undergraduate senior double-majoring in Informatics at the School of Information and Management Information Systems at McCombs School of Business, has won the Fall 2025 Dean’s Choice Award for her capstone project “Building Product Growth Metrics for Voila Voice.” Dean’s Choice Awards are selected from among graduating iSchool students by Interim Dean Soo Young Rieh at our semi-annual iSchool Capstone Poster Session events.
Channuri’s winning project aimed to help Voila Voice, an early-stage AI ed-tech startup, gain clarity around how users experience and derive value from the product. As Voila Voice scaled, the team needed a reliable way to understand user behavior, identify signals of product-market fit, and make confident growth decisions. Channuri’s contribution was to translate complex product data into an easy-to-understand map of the full user journey and dashboards aligned to key stages of product growth, giving the company better visibility into how users discover, engage with, and return to the product.
“During my time at the iSchool, I learned to see analytics as a design problem grounded in user empathy, not just a technical exercise,” Channuri says. “While an effective analytics system does begin with asking the right questions, the iSchool taught me that those questions must be shaped by an understanding of the real users behind the data.”
Working with Voila Voice, Channuri took those ideas to heart, striving to create an internal analytics system that was every bit as human-oriented as the product’s interface and user experience design.
“Rather than centering my work on surface-level metrics, I designed product-growth dashboards that highlighted meaningful user behavior and real signals of product value,” she says. “I also built the underlying analytics system to be lightweight yet scalable, ensuring it could grow alongside the product without sacrificing clarity or interpretability.”
Channuri sees her capstone project as a bridge between her academic training and her long-term goal of working in technical product management, giving her invaluable hands-on experience at the intersection of product, data, and engineering.
“More importantly, the project reinforced the kind of product builder and leader I aspire to be,” Channuri adds. “As I continue my career, I hope to build data-driven products where decisions are guided by trustworthy, interpretable insights and where user behavior serves as a tool for clarity, alignment, and long-term impact.”