[00:00:00] Benson Low: As long as you know you're doing good work for the organization, your partners that you work with find a way to make sure that value gets realized and being understood. The rewards will come because people start recognizing all the hard work that you do, that what's invisible, that becomes visible.
[00:00:20] Erin May: This is Erin May.
[00:00:22] John-Henry Forster: I'm John-Henry Forster, and this is Awkward Silences.
[00:00:27] Erin: Silences.
[00:00:35] Erin: Hello everybody and welcome back to Awkward Silences. Today we are here with Benson Low, the head of design capability at REA Group. We're really excited to have you here to talk about something that needs maybe a little more attention and visibility which is, how do we make invisible work of Ops more visible and more valued. We're here today to hopefully help do that. Thanks so much, Benson, for joining us.
[00:01:01] Benson: Thank you for having me.
[00:01:02] Erin: That's great to have you. Got JH here too.
[00:01:05] JH: Yes. This is not a topic I've thought a ton about, then you hear it, when it's operation stuff, when it doesn't work, everyone sees it and complains, but when it's working seamlessly, it's just kind of magic that happens. It makes a lot of sense upon a little reflection.
[00:01:17] Benson: Yes. I've made a career out of it. Sometimes it's important to shine a light on things that people don't understand or recognize. A lot of it has to do with showing value. People don't recognize it or see it until they value it.
[00:01:34] Erin: It is one of the things you learn when you've worked in a startup or two is like the secret of every startup is an operations team. It's not just code making things happen.
[00:01:45] Benson: Yes. I've been in a couple of startups myself and to touch with the CEOs involving Ops. The team is small, everything's Ops.
[00:01:54] Erin: Yes. We've done a couple of episodes on Research Ops. Research Ops is really hot right now, which we love. What are we talking about when we talk about Research Ops? What's your sort of definition? What do you think about it?
[00:02:12] Benson: Yes, maybe a quick intro. For those that don’t know, I'm also part of the Research Ops community. I'm also on the board of directors in the Research Ops Community. It's been running for over four years now. We've got over 13,000 community members still growing, still amazes me today.
[00:02:32] Erin: How many Research Ops-ers are there in the world?
[00:02:35] Benson: It feels as if mostly researchers only do Ops because they don't have Ops. That's where I'm going to talk about shining a light on them, visible researchers do. I would say mostly people that do research, it doesn't have to be researchers. It could be designers, it could be product managers, people that are passionate about doing research. One of the things that the Research Ops communities try to do is really shine a light on the people, the mechanisms, the strategies that set research in motion. What that means is what are the knowledge that's emerging and to work at scale.
What are those scales of operations that need the skills and attention from an organizational memory perspective, how do things get done? How do people remember doing those things? Then collectively, how do we build capability in this profession and part of the industry of research? It's been exciting to be part of it. Research Ops has been realized by this community and kind of defined by this community when we did the first project. What is Research Ops? Out of it came a lot of things. We had a mapping, we had a definition of skill sets, but one of the most important things that Emma Bolton helped us distill is our eight pillars of Research Ops that covered the key pillars. There's always going to be new things coming out and emergent, but that really shines a lot on what are the key areas that we need to define and work towards.
[00:04:06] JH: Is that the big mind map thing I've seen where it has like all of the different branches and stuff?
[00:04:10] Benson: Yes. [crosstalk] area.
[00:04:11] JH: Yes. I was sharing this with my team recently, we should put that in the show notes. It's one of the things that's very exhaustive the way that community did pull that together and you go through and dig it, there's so much in there that you wouldn't think of on your own without seeing the detail and the thought.
[00:04:24] Benson: Yes. I think that's part of the ways that we're making the community is making things visible. Most of the biggest thing that's invisible is the network effect. If you don't have this, you don't have that, you don't have that, you don't have this. Showing those connections is visibility as well. I feel like the relationships are invisible.
[00:04:41] Erin: That's really interesting. There's so much to do with Research Ops, which is one of the takeaways of this mind map. A couple of things could happen. One would be you aren't doing some of the things and maybe you should be that's not great, or you don't have the people to do them well, you're doing them, you're not doing them well, and you were just talking about how they're interconnected. When things are interconnected like that and you can do everything all at once, how do you figure out where to start so the whole thing doesn't collapse?
[00:05:13] Benson: Yes. One of the biggest things to understand is understand how others will do it first. That's where the community comes in. That's where this project helps to highlight, especially if you're a researcher of one. We talk to a lot of people that are researchers of one in organizations. They don't know where to start. They're operating by themselves. They're in a certain silo or within a part of the organization that's not getting the collaboration or the connection they need. By showing, I would say the overall view first, how do you suddenly slowly build that up?
Connecting with people ultimately is your first step. Is there a Design Ops team? Is there a Devs Ops team? Is there an operational team within the organization? Talk to HR. Talk to finance. A lot of the research isn't just about research, it's about setting things up. That's Ops. How do you get funding to get the right incentives for the right people to get people into the session to do the research? That's the very first step. If you don't have the right incentive, you're not going to have the right people that fairly and from an equality perspective, we value their time in the research. Those are the bare basics we want to get right.
[00:06:27] JH: You mentioned in the community there's a lot of researchers who are doing Ops out of necessity and they've realized that there's some things that they need to streamline and scale up. The way you just described that is there kind of a pattern or commonality of a researcher realizes they need more help with recruiting and incentive payments and then they go into this thing? Is there a journey they go on? Is it very highly unique and contextual on the company and all that?
[00:06:51] Benson: I think that's why the mapping helps because it's not a linear connection. It's a web of things. You could go around multiple steps to get to a standpoint or directly to a standpoint. Some organizations are set up differently. The last thing we want is set on a defined structure. You have to do this before you do that. There's a sequence of things from a research process perspective that you should do once before the other. In largely things from an Ops perspective, how do you get started? There's many ways to go around it. It's finding the path of least resistance. I would say something I would advocate.
Bridget and I have run multiple workshops in terms of setting up Research Ops and how do you scale Ops before. Is really understanding your organization first and foremost. How does it actually operate and how does Research Ops operate within it?
[00:07:46] Erin: You talked about the importance of starting with building relationships and working with people when you're doing operations work. I imagine that becomes really useful when you want to make your work visible, having people to be on that journey with you.
[00:08:02] Benson: Yes. You'd be surprised. A lot of your organizations don't understand what the researchers do. The first and biggest thing is make yourself visible. Show your value to your organization and why it's important for them to collaborate and support what your work does. To really define what value you bring to the org. Ultimately research has a lot of ROI we can talk about. Fundamentally things like making sure we have the best insights to inform product and design on making the best decisions we can, given the insights we have.
[00:08:37] Erin: Yes. Research Ops makes research possible. Start with the end. Why does research matter? If research doesn't matter, Research Ops doesn't matter either.
[00:08:48] Benson: Absolutely correct. Correct. You can fundamentally reference the model and why is the product valuable? Why is design valuable? Why is engineering valuable? How can we connect to those values? Again, that network effect. We are here to amplify those values. We are also here to de-risk the organization going down the wrong path. Those are the values that the research team needs to make sure people understand that before they even set up operations. Everything then hangs around that.
[00:09:19] JH: To jump into the visibility piece, I'm going to guess a lot here, almost like a life cycle to it, where initially recruitment's a mess and we can't get participants to do research, we leave research value. Somebody Benson comes in, fixes recruitment, and everyone in that moment is very visible. We have this issue, this person fixed it for us. It's great. You flash forward a couple of months and everyone takes it for granted. There's some new people. We're great at recruiting, nobody knows all the magic that goes into it. Now it's back to being invisible. Is it something where you have a moment where it gets recognition, but it doesn't sustain or?
[00:09:52] Benson: JH, I love that reference because we do have a research life cycle with Ops in it. I think maybe as part of this discussion we can shine a light on that. I think the primary research life cycle is well-known even outside of research. You need to have research briefly, maybe do some secondary research before you do primary research, but then do it on that cycle. Ultimately there's an outer track, how ops support the systems, this inner cycle. Essentially, the community has created a research life cycle with ops supporting it. That's another way of showing in the life cycle when you have to shine a light at the right time in the right research step for the organization to see how ops is operating and supporting. One of the biggest things that's coming through at the moment is that insights are hidden, "Where do I find the research that we did six months ago? Why are we doing that research again that we did last year?"
Your research becomes invisible. It's stored in SharePoint, it's stored in Confluence or whatever filing system you have. We've got a ton of tools coming through in our community that supports that, our research repository tools. Setting that up needs support, setting that up needs visibility and we are trying to make sure that our insights are visible. That's one of the hardest jobs as researchers, "How do I keep it alive? How do I make sure that people see it and use it?"
[00:11:21] Erin: It's just like, there's two components to the light shining then, which is one, making the product of the work you do visible. In this case, insights. They're visible, they're findable, you can find them.
[00:11:35] Benson: Yes.
[00:11:36] Erin: Two, there's, I don't know, taking some credit, letting it be known that brought to you by Research Ops.
[00:11:45] Benson: That's right.
[00:11:46] Erin: You'll need a little logo or something to put on your visible work, this made possible by ops. How do you think about those two pieces?
[00:11:54] Benson: Love that, Erin. Understand your company's rituals. Are there town halls? Are there showcases? Are there events where you can shine that light? Because you can show it individually, but you need an audience. Find the right platform to talk about it. I'm sure there's company wikis or portals or intranets if you still have those but do that in Slack in those community groups within the organization to connect back to the research library, the recruitment brief, "Hey, someone asks something about incentivization," talk about it broadly. I think the work that I've done in the past, both from setting up research teams, now leading research teams has been advocacy. Advocacy work for research. If you're a research leader in your organization, that's your main job.
How do you let your team shine and show their value and show their work? Also, how do you as leaders show, hey, we're setting this up for the rest of the organization to do research, not just for researchers? How can you help yourself? How can we shine a light, there's these tools and these things for you to self-serve. We don't want to be a bottleneck. We want everyone to do research as well as we could, but we can provide you with training. We can make sure that you got the right tools. We can have the templates for you to get started quickly, and we can coach and mentor you if you need that. We have all these infrastructure ops in place for the organization to do great research. Ultimately great insights for you to make the best decisions and to de-risk your product going to market.
[00:13:34] JH: I love the role of the leader you're describing thereof showcasing the impact and the work of their team and creating space and alignment across other functions for that work to be supported and valued. That makes sense. What happens in a case where you don't have that person and it's a smaller team? Because I'd imagine there's some awkwardness for probably some researchers and operations people to be self-promoting of like, "I'm going to go out and tell everyone about all the great work I'm doing." How do you see people do that in a way that--
[00:14:00] Erin: I worked on that.
[00:14:03] Benson: Oh, look, it all starts from that. That's where you look at partners. Look at support people. How do you talk to a GM, to a VP, to have some support and value research. How can they shine a light for you? To your point, you might not have that status in the organization. If you partner with others, do the groundwork and work with that person or multiple people that gives you that platform, or shine a light in the work that you do. That's a great start. Ultimately, to your point, JH, it's really a big struggle. If the organization don't value research, then sometimes you got to ask why are you here?
[00:14:47] JH: Yes. What you were saying before about the frameworks feels really helpful here. Now you're in a conversation with the design leader project and you're talking about the research life cycle, and then being able to tag on and like, here are some of the scaffoldings that we've been helping with around that, or whatever. It's not a self-promotional thing, it's a very tactical, here's what we're doing. It's a useful framework. That person probably can then go repeat that and champion it elsewhere. I think some of the examples the community are doing here are probably really helpful.
[00:15:13] Benson: Absolutely. They don't even have to do the work themselves. They can just reference what the community's doing. They come about a community of tens of thousands of people at the moment, right? So isn't this made up? So I think that gives-- that's one of the reasons why the community is so important for these researchers that are in these organizations that doesn't really value Research Ops just yet. It gives them some backing and support for them to say, "Hey, I didn't make this up." A lot of leaders in our field have set this up. I'm here, I've been hired, who is my hiring manager, who's my supporter, my cheerleader in the organization that I'm doing great research for, how can they help me share some of this out?
Ultimately, I think these are just advocacy work highlighting it. You got to show it. Ultimately, the biggest way is working with designers, working with product managers or whoever that's doing research for you as a team. They're using the note-taking template. They're looking at the research repository because you've set that up. They'll buy in because they see the value themselves because they're the ones using it. I feel like the biggest work that you can do from an advocacy perspective is collaboration. Yes, you can talk about it so it can get attention and awareness of the work that you're doing, but ultimately it gets embedded into the organization that you're in when others are doing it with you. Research is a team sport because we don't have researchers in every organization to do everything.
[00:16:44] Erin: How far are you trying to spread your sphere of influence or visibility within the organization? For example, it seems to me, first and foremost, research has to know Research Ops is valuable, or you're not going to get too far. Then you're also talking about not just researchers, but also people who are doing research, people who you want to see doing research. What about everybody else? People not doing research in the organization. Are you worried about them or do you-- Who needs to know about this work we're doing and what it's accomplishing?
[00:17:22] Benson: One of the other invisible connections that we have to draw a line towards and connect to is, if the product was successful being launched, are people connecting to the success on what researchers did? It doesn't have to be the researcher, but research played a role in finding the insight, identifying the opportunity, supporting framing, and evolving, optimizing the solution, but even going to market, making sure we have designed and build the right thing for our end users. We are part of the product development life cycle. If you talk about life cycles, we are part of the product development life cycle. Make sure that's connected back to the work. When the team successfully organizes and is successful, you have played a part in it. How do you make sure that you're being recognized for it as part of the team, but also the value of research of a successful product. Sometimes a lot of people forget all the research work being done and the attention gets seen by amazing engineers, great solution from a design, looks awesome. We're getting a lot of revenue, great conversion rates, great engagements from our product, great product management. How do I make sure that based on all this, it was supported and helped enabled by good research.
[00:18:42] Erin: I'm hearing you say it's not necessarily so important to shine a light always specifically on the Research Ops part of the impact you saw, but the research in general with Research Ops being an integral part of that, that this research is just not happening without this Ops layer to it.
[00:19:04] Benson: As long as people understand when a product manager goes away and talks to a customer, we set up continuous discovery or their research discovery that they want to do. That doesn't just happen. That takes planning, that takes organization, that takes finance to make it happen. When it doesn't happen, to your point earlier, Erin, people complain about it, "Why did that participant not turn up? That wasn't the right recruit. That's off spec." That's when operations get questioned. Sometimes, I was going to say, it takes failure to get visibility. People want to solve Ops problems for you then because they don't want to talk to another person that's off-spec because it just wasted an hour of their time. Sometimes it takes failure to shine a lot as well.
[00:19:55] JH: When you think about how you talk about the impact and value of Research Ops, so it enables all this research to happen. Do you find that it's better if people are framing it around speed and access by operationalizing these things and standard things like more product managers, more people are able to do research more around the impact or quality of the research? Like we've raised the bar because we have this support and the scaffolding for everyone. Is it both, like when you're talking to stakeholders, is there one side that you want to play up more of like the efficiency versus the impact and quality, or what resonates?
[00:20:24] Benson: Yes, again, it depends on the organization, what they value most. Go for that, first and foremost, I think, I'm going to take a step further up, JH be strategic. What is your Research Ops goal? Why are you here? Where do you see research and Research Ops in your organization? Not just next three months or even 12 months? What's your horizon? Two, three. Now think about that and be strategic. Then you have a plan and that can change that plan. Your strategic plancan change, but that should be aligned to what your organization's strategy is, your group strategy, because if you get that, then everything you talk about in alignment with other people's strategy, other people's OKRs. If they're fundamentally one speed to market, then your Research Ops is geared towards speed to market that resonates with people. When you talk about, hey, I'm here to make this faster for you, to make it more time efficient for you, then talk in the language that they want to hear.
[00:21:19] JH: Is that the type of thing you can pick up on pretty easily from some stakeholder interviews and stuff? You talk to somebody, and you hear an engineering leader be, we want to do more research, but we can't fit into our development cycles. Then you can be like, "Aha, I can tell you that we can fix that or something."
[00:21:33] Benson: Yes, I think on a relationship management perspective, absolutely do that, because everyone's got a slightly different angle in terms of what they want out of research and Ops, but largely speaking, there should be a way for you to access the group or company strategy. Start there. At the bare minimum, look at the company's annual report. How does the cost of goods sold track to your shareholders? Sometimes researchers had to know where the cash flow of money lies within the organization, what's being valued by our shareholders in a big organization. That's where you could see, hey, people value this more than anything else. If research can be seen connected to that value, great, and then we can operationalize ourselves to make that happen.
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[00:22:18] JH: All right. Quick awkward interruption here. It's fun to talk about user research, but what's really fun is doing user research and we want to help you with that.
[00:22:26] Erin: We want to help you so much that we have created a special place. It's called userinterviews.com/awkward for you to get your first three participants free.
[00:22:38] JH: We all know we should be talking to users more. We went ahead and removed as many barriers as possible. It's going to be easy. It's going to be quick. You're going to love it, so get over there and check it out.
[00:22:46] Erin: Then when you're done with that, go on over to your favorite podcasting app and leave us a review, please.
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[00:22:55] Erin: You mentioned this big high-level strategic three-year view on why we are here, Research Ops. I'm curious, what some examples of that might look like in a different organization. What are some different flavors of that?
[00:23:10] Benson: When you talk about researcher one, but when you have researchers from really three and up when you have 20 researchers, I don't know big organizations. I know that there's organizations that have got 40-plus researchers. You really have to be strategic then. How do all these researchers work together? Where are we going towards? I would say started when you got about five researchers, you're starting to scale. That's where I started to see research scaling when you have about five researchers end up. What that means is you've got to have a plan, you got to have a strategy for the group. What are the biggest Ops stuff that you strategically need for the rest of your organization because you've got multiple research areas that you're supporting?
How does then, do we need the research library now or can we do what we have and do that in the next 12 months? What can we make do with? What can we show the value most consistently within these 12 months, but in three years' time we have to have this thing? That could be a really well-resourced Research Ops library. That could be an annual funding model for your recruitment panel. Do you need a recruitment panel? Do you have an in-house recruitment panel? When do you want to set that up? Those things need to be planned; they need to be strategized because they just don't happen by themselves. Creating an internal panel of within your own customers, you need to work with sales, you need to work with customer support, you need to work with finance, then you need to work with legal, and risk, and how do you manage PII?
All that stuff becomes so big that a researcher of one can't handle. You need a team of researchers or dedicated Ops person and we've got to talk about that to say, hey, now we've got someone dedicated for this role and their first initial tackling project could be this thing. Could be a customer panel, could be how we recruit that could be the first job, and unfortunately, that's probably most of the things that we see on our community is Research Ops person gets brought on mostly to handle recruitment or the Research Ops library or to manage a panel. Those are probably the three big jobs when they first start to do that.
[00:25:10] JH: How do you square or advise people to like, okay, you're doing this higher-level strategic work, you've laid out some of these opportunities and priorities and sequence them a little bit. Made a roadmap of sorts. You're thinking the bigger picture, but then there's all these like probably immediate day-to-day things that need to get done that are a little bit smaller in scale. You can have impact just through iter iterative work. Of like, we cleaned up the note template, we did this, we did that. It feels like you probably need both. You need some of the day-to-day impacts. How do you make sure that people don't get too fixated on the big shiny objects and lose track of some of the smaller stuff that has impacted like more immediately?
[00:25:42] Benson: Great question. Ultimately, we go with whatever your cadence of planning and prioritization comes down to. For example, I'll just use my organization at REA group. We've got OKRs for the year, and there are network effects of OKRs. That group have those OKRs, so the research team that I'm managing is within design. Designs got OKRs. We also want to make sure that the research team have OKRs and one of those OKRs is ops, how do we make sure that we have efficient operations within the organization and how do I break that down, so I break that down by key results? How does that make sense? Can we have a research library where people can reliably access insights as one of the chaos that we have?
That's probably always on. We have to then make sure that all the initiatives that we have to have the key result, let's say 80% of all research get access from the research library, we then make sure that all research is put into the library, let alone then we direct people to the library to make sure they can self-serve. We make sure that's easy to use for anyone that wants to access our previous insights. I'm just making a very clear example there on the daily basis. When I talk to my researcher, we planned on a fortnightly basis, have we done that? Anything else we can optimize? Hey, that research was that inputted back into your store now into the research library. We also shine a light on the monthly research that we've done. Finding ways of getting people to really enrich our research library so that people know that it's a really great source of value. That's one example.
[00:27:23] Erin: Might be just a little bit of a tangent, but something JH and I were actually talking about recently. I'm curious, you mentioned tapping into the existing OKRs of the teams you work with and sit in and so there's a couple of ways to get insights. There's primary, secondary, you go do new research or you use existing research, hence some of the benefits of the insight’s library. I guess setting learning goals is tricky, did you learn something you just like pull everyone in the company? Did you learn something? Did you make a good decision? What was the output of that decision?
How do you think balancing, particularly as your organization grows and you have more existing insights, the importance you put on organizing those existing insights and trying to get people to tap into those before going and doing new research versus going and doing new research and where do we need to spend our time as an Ops function across recruiting and all this active new research stuff versus making the most out of all the research that's been done in the past? Do you follow the lead of the research and design teams, or do you have a point of view on how that needs to shift with the org?
[00:28:32] Benson: Yes, that's a really good question. This is the thing that we tackle daily, Erin. One of the challenges is there a fire burning?Do we need to fix that recruitment because we are getting inconsistent, or I would say a standard that's below par for my participants? That's something that we are working on right now is that maybe it's coming to Christmas, people are coming in or dropping out without attending, or whatever the case is. Is there a way for us to reduce the dropout rate for sessions? There's always issues in Ops that we need to tackle that is at the forefront on us doing our research well. That's priority one is are there things on fire? Other things we need to focus on to get right because that's not working today. Then there are things that, it depends.
We're working in an organization now; we've got eight researchers and they're essentially business partners in those product verticals. You've got financial services, you've got residential products, rental products, commercial property. We work in essentially a property tech organization. They've got lots of products, lots of different things. How do we ensure that we have access to real estate agent professionals? That's always a big thing that we have, and we've got a customer panel for that, but how do we make sure that we enrich it? How do our customers find value being on the panel? How do we give back? Are there insights we give back to our customers so that they want to be on a panel instead of us trying to reduce churn off the panel to build that up. Those are all the things that we do on a daily basis, and it depends on which area needs what. We might have multiple panels and the archetype needs reworking; we've got another benchmark that we have to do. I think those are the things that we have to manage on a daily basis. Unfortunately, as I give you, it depends on what your organizational needs are, and then go from there.
[00:30:27] JH: Nice. It always it depends on product and research. A question I realized seems an obvious one to ask is when you talk about showcasing impacts, and you talk about operations, feels like metrics is maybe a way of doing that, right? I think if you think about DevOps, people are going to talk about uptime or speed to deploy or number deployments or whatever, and you'd show the systems working. Has there been any standardization on that, like the Research Ops side as the community matured? Like these are good metrics to point to, to show the efficiency or the impact that you're driving.
[00:30:55] Benson: Yes. It's something that we're tackling from how fast can we do research. Again, it depends. One of the things that we're trying to educate our teams is that it depends on the research type that you're doing. How do you then share the level of methodology? People don't really care about the methodology of research a lot of the time. They just want to know the insight really quickly, but sometimes you just can't make that up. Sometimes it might take three months. That educational process on showing the metric values are different in an engineering perspective or marketing perspective or econ perspective. You can have really detailed product analytics in there. The analytics we have is, "Hey, how many people have access to their insights in our library?" That's a good analytic. That means that we have saved the company another research piece, potentially.
If that project was kicked off all purely based on secondary research that we have done in the last two years, we've saved the company another research project, but also if they do want to have the new ones, there's a small gap here. All the secondary is great, but we noticed there's a slight opportunity to do a bit deeper research. Great. We are saving time from doing three rounds of research, going straight to the new ones more targeted research. We also should shine a light on speed to research, speed to insight. It's because it's backed by overwhelming value of knowledge that we've built up. Because we talked about early on, why are we doing the same research six months later? In a different part of the organization, let's save the organizing time and money and re-use that, and focus on the nuances and other deeper stuff if we want to.
[00:32:36] Erin: It seems like part of the art here is knowing when to be visible, when not to be visible. In that spirit, what are some anti-tips in terms of Research Ops visibility in terms of when do not want to be visible, or what are some bad ways to go about trying to be visible?
[00:32:58] Benson: So many. Look, I've done a lot of this myself. Early on in my career when I was really passionate about making sure that research works really well, you've got to hit a lot of brick walls. [laughs] You're going to hit a lot of brick walls. People don't care or it's a tough conversation that they don't understand and see the value of Research Ops. Don't get emotional. Don't react to it. I feel that's something, it's an empty. This doesn't work for you. It's frustrating. I know because I think many people have been through that cycle, but it's important to keep your head and be strategic about it. See it as a long-term goal. It's a long play. It's a long tail.
I think that's my advice from a backward of making Ops visible, is when you're trying to break through a brick wall, you're going to be hard to work with, and that only puts you back a few more steps than you think you're moving forward because people find you hard to work with, you keep pushing agenda they don't see value for, not right there. Another one is asking for the world without evidence. Like, "Hey, I need a research library right now." Why? You haven't built a business case. You haven't shown value. You haven't established why you need that recruitment process in place.
Another way of any more steps to getting research done. Even if you're in a startup, you're short on time and money, and people say, "Hey, why do you want another step in this thing?" You're trying to convince people, but without the right reasoning, you're making it hard for people to understand. Make sure you get support from others who shape your business case. Not just yourself, but others who help you shape it, and just don't be the lone ranger. Be the only one shouting from the mountains because they just think you're crazy. [laughs]
[00:34:46] Erin: Don't come in too hot and-
[00:34:49] Benson: No, no, don't come in too hot.
[00:34:50] Erin: -make some friends.
[00:34:52] Benson: Make some friends. Make it almost like a collaboration pitch, right? Instead of you pitching by yourself. It feels lonely sometimes though especially if you're a researcher of one. Then one more is the bad anti-ways of doing this is giving up too early. I've heard so many stories in the community as well. They try to set up Ops to try and make it visible, but they're not getting traction after six months. Why do I bother? Then things become more painful because that's not set up. It takes patience. It also takes time. Pick your battles. Like I said earlier before, where are the things of less resistance?
It might take you six steps to get to the first step, but sometimes that might be the easiest, least frustrating way. I would say, take the time. Go to the community, share your challenges. Are there a different angle perspective you haven't thought about? Bounce ideas with others. Get mentorship, I would say, to support that if you feel like you are wanting to give up. I think that's an entity. You've tried so hard by yourself, but where else can you get support? Don't always look internally. You can look externally for it.
[00:36:00] JH: The thing you hear commonly with change management working with stakeholders is, you're changing processes or making adjustments, frame it as an experiment. Like, "Hey, I think there's a better way for us to do recruitment or do note-taking. Let's take the next six to eight weeks and try to see how it goes. We can reflect on it." Does that apply here too? Instead of trying to sell people like silver bullets of like, "I have the perfect way to do this," and then maybe it doesn't work. Is that framing useful?
[00:36:23] Benson: Absolutely, JH. I think that's a beautiful way to put it. People love experimentation. You should experiment with ops. Try out processes that may work. It may not work for your organization. I'm sure you can find sequential steps online on how to do X in Research Ops, but that might not work for you. Try it out, shape it up, drop steps because you find it too hard, and see what works for you. A research library could start in Excel, if you want it to [laughs] It doesn't have to have a purchase product with SSO set up and everything. Just make sure you store it in a safe space and just start with that. It could be just as simple as that. It depends on how much experimentation you make and see what sticks. I think that's a great angle. Experiment and see what sticks, what resonates with your designer and your program manager, and start with that.
[00:37:14] JH: This is a little bit of a different question, but I'm just curious because it feels Research Ops has evolved so much over the last handful of years from a more nascent thing, if you hear a little bit of to being much more mainstream, to having this huge community around it. If you look ahead a few years, where do you think Research Ops is going? How do you think that will mature over the next three to five years?
[00:37:32] Benson: That's a great question. I'm not sure. I think there's a number of pathways that you can go to. I think Research Ops as a profession needs a lot more maturity. I feel researchers are just trying to do Ops themselves at the moment. There is a growing community of Research Ops professionals, but we're probably a follower of design ops program managers. We're not there yet in terms of framing up what our core responsibilities are and how do we start to connect with a program of work from an operational perspective. I think we're getting there. We are establishing a lot of those key programs within a research org. Not too many organizations have a whole team of re-ops people. How would that work? Because the reference I would make is design Ops and design program managers and they might have 20 design program managers at SSA Capital One. That's a very different scale to one DPM in a small organization. I would love to see what that would look like from a Research Ops perspective. What would those things look like in a bigger, larger-scale Ops team for research? Would it be similar, or would it be different? Because we do obviously have very different needs from design versus research.
[00:38:48] JH: As people move into Research Ops roles full time, like do it as a profession as you called out, do you think more of those people will be coming from a research background or coming more from an operations background?
[00:38:58] Benson: I would say a bit of both. I think it's a healthy thing because you need a diversity of perspectives. You could have a DPM that has done design program management before going to Research Ops because maybe that's an angle they like doing. That be really valuable because they've done program of work before. How do you train researchers? The skill career letter for researchers. That's an Ops thing that people don't even talk about. When you've got 40-plus researchers, you're going to need training your researchers and there's so many different aspects of research, right?
Do you want researchers that know data science? Do you want researchers that have really amazing mixed methods approach on how to do research? In order for that to happen, you got to have training programs in place. I'm thinking of-- because I'm drawing a very clear line here. That's what DPMs do for design. You got to have motion design, you got to have a great brand design. How many types of designers have you got? How do you make sure you got the right balance of craft? Then you got principal roles, staff roles, and all that stuff. I think career laddering in research and Research Ops is a big thing that we continue to talking about because it's still, I'd say behind design.
[00:40:04] Erin: On that note, how did you find your way into Research Ops?
[00:40:08] Benson: Look, my background's design, and I build up design teams and ended up needing research because we don't have a research team, in one of the past roles that I was working in. In building up a research team, you have to do Ops [chuckles]. Building a team of one, to building a team of 13 researchers are very different. I could see how Ops come into play like I said before when you have 3, 4, 5 researchers, then it gets really big when you have you know, more than 10 researchers, and so forth. Then you have to have Ops, and unfortunately a lot of Ops in product design and research.
Most of the Ops land on people leaders, because they're setting up the capability. They're setting up the team for success, and they're responsible for the career paths. They're responsible for making sure they have the right tools in place. Setting up, they have a way to manage their performance. That's all operational. A lot of times it starts at the leader. They're the ones who set the budget. Right.
[00:41:06] Erin: Right. Or in the coordination between the people on the team, [crosstalk] so much of that too.
[00:41:10] Benson: I had to do that yet, because of the leadership role I was previously put in that place, which I love doing, but it's also important to know that some of these roles shouldn't be leader responsible roles, it should be a dedicated role to make sure that this gets done.
[00:41:28] Erin: You became the thing you needed in your previous job twice?
[00:41:33] Benson: Multiple times. Yes, I want to go back to one point. JH, we talked about the metrics from a research value perspective. Another angle that I would say has had high numbers is thinking about risk and opportunity, and the ratios that we get it. I think the risk and opportunity, or you can angle it towards tied to NPS, ties to your consumer set, or whichever metric that your organization has. Research should have a direct connection to those metrics. Have we improved consumer set because we fixed a pain point? We have identified pain points for the organization to fix that should lift NPS and/or consumer set or customer set.
That's a really direct way on hitting the organizational metrics. Another one is programmatically have usability testing or benchmarking in place to monitor and optimize experiences, and that also have a direct way on improving company targets with those metrics. Your metrics should be the company's most important metric, like NPS or consumer set, or customer set.
[00:42:41] JH: Yes. I like that connection as well, I think I mean, there's been a three line for sure. A lot of the like ways you talked about this is you need to connect research and research Ops to other things in the company so that it's easy for people to internalize what, why, and how it's valuable, so it makes a lot of sense.
[00:42:55] Erin: All right, parting thoughts. Final words to leave folks with in terms of whether you're a Research Ops person or a researcher or someone with some interests, and for whatever reason making Research Ops more visible. Last thoughts on.
[00:43:09] Benson: I think it's sometimes hard when you try to do this, try to make something invisible visible. One of the things I was literally talking about with one of my peers is that we do all this work, and no one sees it. It can be disheartening sometimes, but they don't see it, but as long as you know you're doing good work for the organization, your partners that you'll work with, find a way to make sure that value gets realized and being understood. The rewards will come because people start recognizing the order of how will you do that was invisible that becomes visible.
[00:43:44] Erin: Yes. I think a lot of that is very relevant to anyone in any kind of Ops role, right?
[00:43:49] Benson: Yes, yes. Yes. In any kind of Ops role and yes, don't get disheartened. I think the main thing in a lot of my advice is, be patient. Find a way to connect, like I said before to more important things that your team or your organization values are, and connect to it, and people will start seeing because I think one of the things that people start seeing is when they don't have it.
[00:44:12] Erin: Well, we see you Ops people and we see you too Benson. Thanks for joining. We appreciate you.
[00:44:17] Benson: Thank you, Erin. Thank you, JH.
[00:44:19] JH: Yes, thanks.
[00:44:22] Erin: Thanks for listening to Awkward Silences brought to you by User Interviews.
[00:44:27] JH: Theme music by Fragile Gang.