Research Ops 2.0, Episode 4: Building Enduring Systems Amidst Constant Change
In just ten years, ResearchOps has transformed from an obscure Silicon Valley specialty into a vibrant global profession. My name is Kate Talzi and this is ResearchOps two point zero, a five part audio documentary all about the future of ResearchOps. In this series, you'll hear the voices of ChaCha club members, senior research leaders and the smart minds behind user interviews. The only way to recruit high quality participants for any kind of research. This is episode four, building enduring systems amidst constant change, And Luana is going to kick us off with an excellent story connected to science fiction.
Luna:So I have to connect with my hobby. Like, I write science fiction for a while now. And I feel like research systems are just like the solar system. If you don't know, the solar system and all the universe is always expanding and expanding and creating more connections and creating more system and stuff. So, when you stop growing it and you stop building these connections, the system dies eventually.
Luna:So, when I say that this research system has to be alive, is that if you have to stop streamlining the process, you have to stop, Okay, I'm not going to change this process anymore. It's perfect as it is. In one month, they're going to be outdated because things are changing. So this is the most important thing I have to consider when I'm building research system.
Kate:That's Luana Cruz, a research ops professional based in Brazil, and she's capturing something fundamental about the modern work world. Change isn't the exception, it is the rule. Whether it's layoffs, re orgs, shifting priorities, or technological disruptions like AI, the research systems we build need to survive constant change. And the Catch-twenty two situation? Building successful research systems takes both stability and time.
Kate:So how do you build enduring research systems when the ground keeps shifting beneath your feet? That's exactly the question we're going to explore in this fourth episode of ResearchOps two point zero.
Lexi:Lexi Breitz, Director of Research, Data Science and UX Operations Workday. I used to think definitely early in my career that change was something that would happen every once in a while and I'd have to like scramble and deal with it. And, but it was a rarity. The more that I've grown in my career, the more that dealing with change and managing it effectively has become my entire job. Everything that I do is about the changes that are coming, how do we adapt effectively, how do we make sure that we're getting ahead of things, that we're not overreacting to changes, things like that.
Lexi:It's not make change go away, it is deal with change effectively.
Mia:Alright. Mia Myszczuk, Target, Senior UX Research Operations Manager. Yes, I'm a Gemini Libra Libra, if you're a horoscope person, so that's sun rising and moon. So I'm all air. So I'm constantly reinventing myself and reinventing how I work.
Mia:And so that can look like meeting new teams, understanding how they work, maybe taking bits and pieces of how they work, and knowing my team, adopting those things, but also just adjusting to the winds of change in our economy and the company itself. You just can't be precious about anything anymore. And so I think maybe I'm uniquely positioned in my attitude and personality to be okay with this arena of constant change that we all live in.
Kate:I think we can all agree that in recent years the tech industry has been anything but stable. I don't have to know you to know with reasonable accuracy that you've experienced some kind of professional upheaval in the past two years, but as research ops professionals we are tasked with building robust systems and processes systems that must stand the test of time and change. So let's kick off by addressing the first thing people think about when they hear the word change, at least these days. This is the elephant in the room topic.
Carolyn:I'm Carolyn Morgan. I'm the head of research operations enablement at Cisco Security Design. We had two rounds of layoffs in the past year. It's been, it's been a, like honestly, I'll just be quite frank, it's a bummer. And, and I like, those were the two worst days of my employment.
Carolyn:Like honestly, probably two of the worst days of my life. Just because they, they really sucked.
Kate:That's Carolyn Morgan, a research operations and enablement manager at Cisco, being real. It goes without saying that layoffs are not easy. They suck, as Carolyn says. And not just for the people who've been laid off, but also for people like Carolyn who've had to see valued team members leave and adapt to the reality of a shrunken team. As you'll learn later, Carolyn and her team at Cisco have adapted really well to the new reality.
Kate:But the big question is, why have these layoffs happened in the first place? Here's Dennis, the co founder and CPO of You's interviews, with his beautifully articulated point of view.
Denis:Yeah. I I think an another piece that made the layoffs feel incredibly painful no. I think made the layoffs even more painful for researchers is that research did grow just disproportionately quickly in this, like, twenty twenty to twenty twenty two time frame. LinkedIn had, UX research as the eighth fastest growing job title in 2021 and 2022. Like, eighth fastest growing job title in North America, which was pretty crazy.
Denis:I think the number one fastest growing job title was vaccine specialist. So it was just you know, I think I think just thinking about the growth of that space in that period was was really wild. I I don't know exactly why there was that much growth. My best guess is that the the world was changing so quickly, and there was so much uncertainty that organizations felt like they needed to invest in user research to just to understand what was going on in the world. That's my best bet for why that why it scaled up so quickly.
Denis:But then I think when you look at it with that context, the layoffs were less of a indictment on research overall and more of a correction back to, like, more historical norms for the amount of research within an organization.
Kate:The layoffs of the past few years feel immediate and raw because they are. But it's worth remembering that layoffs and change have been a feature for decades, especially in tech. ResearchOps professionals Lydia, Noel and Tim have experienced this firsthand. Here's Lydia Ayanna, a research operations specialist who's been in the industry for years.
Lydia:I mean, even when I was a kid, I remember my dad working at Intel and he was anytime there was layoffs. This was like thirty plus years ago. He would be worried, you know, so it's just kind of unfortunately normal. But yeah, it was it's really just worrying about like we talk about the value of research ops and because the value is not seen by everybody, especially the by the higher up people in companies who really don't know the individual roles, it's probably easier for them to do away with roles that they don't see as obvious like engineering. Everybody knows what engineering is.
Lydia:Everybody knows what they do, even if you don't know the specifics.
Noel:Noelle Lam, ServiceNow, Senior Manager, Research Operations. I think it was around 02/2009, and they had layoffs, and I was part of the layoff. The head of research was laid off, I was laid off, about half the research team was laid off, and I took a really short six month stint at a project management company. They did e learning, e trainings for Microsoft, and I went there for six months, and then I got the call for Salesforce, and I went and took that job at Salesforce, and that was a very specific dedicated research operations role, although it wasn't called that at the time, but it was supporting their research team fully. Since I loved it so much and I was itching to get out of Seattle I took the job and slept on a couch for three months when I got to San Francisco and the job took off from there.
Noel:Was there for nine years.
Kate:Here's Tim Toye, the senior manager for research operations at Adobe. Tim's also been on the research op scene for years, and to use his words, he's seen it ebb and flow.
Tim:You know, the ebbs and flows of people's interest in user research seem there seems to be an ebb and flow. Right? Like, sometimes it's like, let's get all the research as possible. And then sometimes it's like, no. We have rock star designers.
Tim:Let's focus on them. And that ebb and flow felt like it was coming at Airbnb regardless of the pandemic. So I don't know if it was gonna be totally sustainable, but it was a it was a really fun ride that we were able to build this team up. And similarly, a lot of those people are still in almost, I think almost everyone except Joey who went off to become a Brazilian jiu jitsu coach is still in research operations. So it's really I like it.
Tim:It feels like there's a little bit like, to your point, giving people a career path, giving people a sense of belonging, a sense of community with the club too.
Kate:If you don't know, the ChaCha club is a members club for research ops professionals. Find out more via the show notes. The US and EU are dominant when it comes to tech, so it can be easy to forget that emerging economies have been impacted by the global economic downturn too. Here's Luana again, who, as a reminder, is a science fiction writer and a research ops professional based in Brazil, which has a booming digital sector.
Luna:So we have this boom in research operations during 'nineteen and 'twenty. And when it started like late 'twenty one, we started having layoffs. So, we have product, we have products doing more research. Not every research was that kind of good, but we always resist and have to make adaptations. Some of us became product managers that are also specialists in research.
Luna:We have some research operations that are also doing research right now or became research leadership. I feel like Brazil has these unique characteristics that we have to adapt to everything. Because not everything that comes, that happens outside Brazil happens to us, but a lot of the things that happens outside affect us.
Kate:A lot has been said and written about layoffs in general, so we're not going to dwell on this topic for too long. But it is useful to cover the fact that layoffs are a repetitive theme particularly in emerging industries and during turbulent times. Here's Dennis to sum things up: Aside from being the co founder and CPO of User Interviews, Dennis also has a BA in computer science and economics from Yale.
Denis:Yeah. I don't I don't wanna overstate my econ background. But in college, I was an economics and computer science double major. And so was very much into tech, but also very much, you know, into business since, you know, I I had many introductory and intermediate econ classes that I took in college. And I would say that the the big trend that I think about, like, the kind of the macro context that I think about for layoffs in tech or layoffs in research is that essentially there was a big shift in the macroeconomic context around 2021, 2022.
Denis:Due to COVID, there was really high inflation because essentially demand was an all time high coming out of COVID when people were excited to buy goods and services. But supply continued to be constrained because of all of the backlog of supply chain issues that happened around the world due to COVID. And so it looked like there was runaway inflation around the world. The US responded by increasing interest rates, and interest rates are a way for us to essentially try to dampen demand so that inflation can get under control. With higher interest rates, it is much less appealing for investors, for professional investors, to invest in growth stocks where the profits are far in the future.
Denis:And you saw this with the stock prices of public companies like Asana and others, where they're highly unprofitable, focused on growth. I think their stock prices for many tech companies fell 90% in that period. So just just really, really crazy.
Kate:Yep. If you had tech investments at that time, you'll remember that moment pretty clearly. It was and has been crazy times. Here's one last bit of context from Dennis.
Denis:And essentially, companies here, like, basically have to react to the incentives in front of them. You know, when companies are are kind of faced with this decision, maybe it starts first with investors, and investors have less of an appetite to fund unprofitable companies that are solely focused on growth. And so that mandate basically shifts to companies to move away from this sole focus on growth and focus more on profitability. And so, you know, in 2022 to today, now companies are being rewarded much more for profitability. You know, you can't be a public company that is, you know, really continuing to invest heavily in the future at the expense of profitability today.
Denis:And so all of that context really led to organizations having to lower headcount across all departments, not just research. But you saw you saw mass layoffs, not just in research, but in product management, in design, in engineering. You know? And so I I feel like the the mass layoffs in research, the biggest contributor was really this shift in the macro economy. And it's, like, less of an indictment on research and more just a shift in how companies were being forced to operate.
Kate:Dennis' economic analysis helps us understand that the recent volatility isn't just about research or research ops. It's about massive macroeconomic shifts that have affected entire industries, not to mention the advent of AI and how that's shifted where budgets are spent. But it also points to the fact that every team has to be able to show that they're delivering tangible, measurable and profit orientated value to the company. There are no two ways about it. Interestingly, despite the downturn, the user interviews budget report published in May 2025 show that overall budgets for research have stayed the same or are growing year on year, which is intriguing.
Kate:Anyway, we could do an entire episode on budgets. Let's stay focused on the topic of change.
Lexi:There are always cycles in business, in tech, right? There are good years, the money's flowing, we get to add people, it's awesome. And then there are bad years when we have cuts and it won't last forever. We'll we'll see an upswing again in the future.
Kate:It would be easy for this episode to become hyper focused on layoffs because, well, they're visceral, grab headlines, and dominate conversations, and for very good reason. But layoffs are just one force of change.
Luna:So I have to give you an example. I was working once to this company that every three months, they were changing their roadmap and like changing the roadmap drastically. Like, okay, we are not going to do that. This is not our core anymore. So everything has to be changing.
Luna:Because by this time I was working in a startup, a unicorn startup. So we can expect things to be more dynamic. If you cannot adapt to that, there's nothing wrong with you. You just maybe need something more solid, like banks. You don't see banks changing like every three months.
Kate:Luana is right. Changes of mind can be a constant if leadership isn't deeply strategic and sure footed. And as Rodrigo Delsson, who's in charge of UX Research Operations at Wealthsimple is about to share, change can come via mergers and acquisitions too.
Rodrigo:Yeah. So, I mean, I worked in private tech, so I've worked in private tech for my whole career, so it's definitely not stable, right? And that change can come in the shape of like re orgs and mergers and acquisitions and company politics and new technology that gets introduced and disrupt things. So these are all things that impact my work life and require some level of adaptability, but also a good level of detachment as well. I don't think it helps to be too attached to what your role current is and how you're currently doing things because you need to be a little bit nimble, especially in that in this industry.
Denis:Over a period of such rapid change with technology and the capabilities that exist, I think it's so important for everybody to just keep learning and keep understanding what's possible because I think that is changing every three to six months. And so I think if you are not paying attention to what is possible with AI and thinking about how it might change your work in the next, you know, six months, a year, two years, three years, I think very quickly you're going to be just miles behind in your understanding of what's possible. And so, you know, when I think about my advice to PMs, designers, and researchers within user interviews, it's just keep exploring, keep trying out new tools, keep thinking about, how you can use AI in your workflows. And I think that'll just it's just I think all in all, just expands our understanding.
Lexi:So we can't get rid of change. In tech companies, especially, this is a standard part of the process of the business, right? So we are always adapting to learning new information. There's new technologies, there's new needs emerging. We're always going to have changes and needing to respond to those.
Lexi:If we have resilient processes that we have developed, we can deal with that change effectively. So for example, if you have a detailed process on how you prioritize, you got a new space all of a sudden, you're assigned to a totally new thing, but you know the steps, you know what to do in this situation. You have documented guidance, you know how to have the conversations, you know how to make the decisions. That is the stability that keeps you grounded in the change.
Kate:Lexi's headed in the direction we're going. We've covered the context of change. Now it's time to start talking about solutions. All this talk of adaptability and continuous learning sounds great in theory, but what does it actually look like in practice? How do you design research operations that can bend without breaking?
Kate:To understand this, let's dive into a real world transformation at one of the world's most research mature organizations, LinkedIn. Here's Kaylee Dankner, a senior research operations manager working at, you guessed it, LinkedIn.
Kaylee:Yeah. I think, everything, I would say, like eighteen months ago, our research team went through a really big change and it was in response to some of the questions we were getting about like the value of the research practice within the organization. We decided to move to a centralized research organization. We'd always reported into a head of research, but rather than having directors then that mapped to each of our lines of business, we decided to instead map our directors to the type of work being done and have, fungible pools of resources underneath each of those directors that could be, flexed into the spaces where we had the greatest need. The idea behind that was that, like, we were kind of getting feedback that we weren't necessarily working on the highest priority initiatives because we were assigning resources based on, like, where people sat in the business.
Kaylee:And sometimes that meant we were working on really small things in some areas and really big things in other areas. And so we wanted to realign the team in a way that let us flex to wherever the greatest need was in a given time frame.
Kate:Here's what's important about what Kaylee has just said: Managing change isn't just about buckling down with more processes, or more flexible processes or no processes at all. It's also about shifting the structure of your team and how it operates, that's to say how research ops operates and how research operates, to better meet the needs and context of the business. Because again, in our current context, this means shifting from a growth focus to a profit focus.
Kaylee:When Kate pitched the when I was like reading the prompt for that episode, I think one of the things that resonated with me is like, how do you keep consistency amidst change? And I think one of the things I've realized that we did as part of that tops down prioritization process was really look at research at the initiative level. And so rather than trying to say we're going to do a usability study on this exact question within this part of the product, we were like, let's better understand, you know, at a broader range kind of how users are experiencing this thing with this purpose behind it. And so it's let us build out these like roadmaps of research around an initiative. So the change all still happens, right?
Kaylee:Like the churn is happening all around them. But because they're resourced against an initiative, they can change the aspects of the roadmap without changing the purpose of doing the research in the first place. And I think that's made the team much more flexible. It's made them feel more grounded in, like, what they're doing over time. And we're able to forecast research six months at a time now and pretty consistently, which is like an enormous change at LinkedIn.
Kaylee:We were lucky if we could predict three months in the past. And so to be able to predict six months, consistently, I think it's been a really big change. And I think, yeah, been a really big change.
Kate:But let's hold up for a moment because Kaylee said something really important. Let's hit the rewind button and hear it again.
Kaylee:But because they're resourced against an initiative, they can change the aspects of the roadmap without changing the purpose of doing the research in the first place.
Kate:Lexi shares a story that adds to this critical point.
Lexi:I remember early in my career getting some advice from a mentor that was really meaningful to me. It was really attach yourself to interesting problems to solve, not to particular solutions. And this was really meaningful to me when I was working at Meta, right? We'd work on a particular feature and you'd like put your whole heart into this feature and then maybe it would go nowhere. It would be feasible to build or something like that.
Lexi:And so you'd like be heartbroken. Over time you realize it's much more stable and it is much more useful to attach yourself to the problems to solve rather than particular solutions. And I've found this so many times in my career now because if a particular solution doesn't work, that's okay. You move on. There's other ways to solve that particular problem.
Kate:This insight that you can change tactics without changing purpose is the secret to building resilient research systems or any system. When you organize around initiatives rather than features, around solving problems rather than delivering ad hoc solutions, you'll create what systems theorists call adaptive capacity. As a result, your operations become less brittle and more pliable because they're designed for change from the ground up. But what does attaching yourself to initiatives rather than features actually look like in ResearchOps? Kaylee picks up the conversation again.
Kaylee:So we moved to what we called this like top down prioritization model, And we worked directly with the head of product for each of our lines of business to come up with a list of what were the top needs by area and then assign resources based on that. And it took us down an interesting path. So we, we initially wanted to just go to them and say like, Hey, what are the top priorities? What do you want us aligned to? And of course, they were like, do your research, figure out what our top priorities are first, and then come back to us with what you think is going to be best.
Kaylee:And so we started to like really dive into the product strategy documents and start to really understand them at a in-depth level and came up with ideas for what we thought the most important research was going to be based on those priorities we were seeing in the product strategy documents. And we made it a mix of stuff that we had heard from the product team and a mix of things that we were bringing from the research team based on insights from past research. And so it really repositioned the team as like not this follower of requests, but this leader of ideas for what we wanted to do with the research team and how we could provide value back to the organization.
Kate:Kaylee's story of transformation illustrates something crucial. Building enduring systems isn't just about creating strategic frameworks. It's about developing business intelligence and keeping your ear to the ground through relationship building, a regular theme in the series. The most successful research and research ops professionals don't just react to change, they anticipate it by deeply understanding the organizational currents that drive decision making. They move beyond process optimization and firefighting to become genuine strategic partners who can anticipate change and read between the lines.
Kate:No doubt Kayleigh is fortunate to work with a manager who excels at this critical skill, But we all can and should foster this approach.
Kaylee:Our head of research is very good at like reading the tea leaves of the organization. He spends a lot of time working directly with product exec leaders. Like, he goes to all of the meetings within the organization because he sees those as his way to understand the insight of where the team is heading next. And working really closely with him, we've developed a partnership to be able to, anticipate the operational needs that come with, like, the research needs. And so successfully, we, like, were able to read the tea leaves on global being super important again, should say, on LinkedIn.
Kaylee:But setting ourselves up with like the vendors and the relationships so that by the time that that the need actually hit, we were ready to go. We've invested a lot in training the team on new skill sets and bringing in external folks to help them learn those things. And so by the time the need hits, we're, like, well prepared for the next evolution of where we're heading as a team. And obviously, like, you're not going to hit every single one of those things. Like, you're going to get hit by surprises still, but doing our best to kind of like read where things are going.
Kaylee:And sometimes that means investing in things that don't come to fruition. But overall, it's been, I think, successful tactic for us to take as a team.
Kate:Here's Carolyn Morgan from Cisco. Carolyn echoes Kaylee when it comes to the importance of prioritisation, both to respond to change and, most important of all, to start to manage it.
Carolyn:The one thing that came out of these layoffs is our extreme focus now on prioritization and making sure that we don't overextend ourselves too much, right? Making sure that what we work on is the highest priority, the biggest bang for our buck, and in alignment with all of their business goals. Like anytime that a work request comes in, that's the number one question I ask, right? Like what's the priority of this? Right?
Carolyn:Because we don't have any room to spare. And it makes us a leaner team. But I think that I think my folks have recognized the value in their work because of these exercises.
Kate:Becoming experts on the business and not just the customer or end user has been a repetitive theme throughout this series. Here's Lexi Brights.
Lexi:A growth opportunity that I see for research professionals too, but I've seen this in research ops, which is we really need to invest in understanding the business. Sometimes we can get a little bit divorced from that because we're focused on research processes or something like that. But understanding what's going on in the context of the business helps you be much more proactive and less reactive to changes because you can predict what's coming if you're paying attention to things like what the executives are talking about and the new strategies that they're rolling out. The more that you pay attention to that stuff, the more you can see what'll need to change in our processes and practices and can anticipate that rather than having to suddenly react. So I'm really excited for our ops team to play a role in our AI enablement.
Lexi:So we know that tools are gonna change. We know that practices are gonna change, but there is a chaos of information happening right now. We don't know what's real. We don't know what's valuable. There is such an important strategic role for ops to play right now in helping us get through this and helping us understand which tools are actually useful and how they can provide value along the journey.
Lexi:So I am really excited for, you know, again, that move from like tactical enablement of tooling to really like a strategic partner in how we get through this.
Kate:ResearchOps as a strategic partner has come up time and again as a core theme in the series. I asked Caroline what her advice would be for other ResearchOps professionals navigating change, and here's what she had to say.
Carolyn:Honestly, I think my advice would be to learn more about product operations and how businesses run. Because I'm doing that now. Like, oh, this is the actual bones and structures of product development. And I wish it would have made my job so much easier to know where we can fit in, like finding commonalities. But I feel like I struggled for years to like figure out how to translate research into product into product lingo into product knowledge.
Carolyn:And now I'm just now understanding it. I've been doing this for years now.
Kate:I asked Carolyn what she wished she'd known about product ops before specifically.
Carolyn:Quarterly business reviews, right? How could we work things like that into our practice? We have roadmap reviews. We have retros and things like that, but like really putting how do we businessify our work? Right?
Carolyn:Because at the end of the day, that's what folks are going to judge us on, is how much we contribute to the business. I think another thing that I would have dug into deeper, really told myself like, is what you need to know, is how the product decisions get made, right, and like how they're tracked.
Kate:How do we businessify our work? And again, that's a more fun way of saying how do we attach ourselves to the priorities of the business and attach ourselves to initiatives rather than features. And to use Lexi's words, we as researchers and research ops really need to invest in understanding the business. Karina Cook, the Director of Design Research Strategy and Operations at Penn Interactive, has loads of experience delivering research systems, and she has one more wonderful nugget of advice to add.
Carina:So something I learned from doing this a few times is that no matter how well you plan and how detailed you build something out, plans can fall through. And you can sell something so well, get all the buy in, get all the resources, and then build the demand for it. And the demand can be so high that maybe you can't keep up, and then your resources fall through even more. So that's something I've learned over the years with, you know, shrinking teams, disappearing resources, that it's it's so nice to be able to build the demand for something and see so many people want it, but the hard part is losing the resources that are there to upkeep it. So it I don't really have a solution outside of doing our best to enable people to deal to own things on their own and to continue to use these systems in a way that makes them truly scalable, that don't require so much support from other people.
Carina:Just because, you know, you don't want a whole thing to crumble because of losing some resources, but it's also the reality of so many teams today.
Kate:The thing I love most about all of these stories is this. Although the macroeconomic circumstances mean that the layoffs weren't necessarily a direct indictment of research and research ops, as Dennis has pointed out a few times, and layoffs have been anything but fun. Smart teams have used the experience to seriously upgrade their game and upgrade the field of research and research ops as a whole. A rising tide lifts all boats. Whether it's Kaylee and her manager reading the tea leaves at LinkedIn, Caroline becoming laser focused on priorities at Cisco, or Lexi advocating for being responsive to business intelligence, the most successful research and research ops professionals are those who understand that their work exists within a larger ecosystem.
Kate:They're not just optimizing research processes, they're optimizing business outcomes through research. That's key. This outward focus is what separates truly strategic value add operations from tactical firefighting. But it also raises a challenging question: how do you balance being responsive and flexible to business needs while maintaining important systems AND boundaries? The earlier examples pointed to the answer, but let's make it crystal clear.
Kate:Here's Luana Cruz, the research ops specialist at Playlist.
Luna:So we have to do this. Okay, how can I do a small part of the research contribute to the biggest projects? And then we have researchers who are working alongside the non researchers. So I feel like this is the most experience that I have to do with change because everything was just changing like every other day. And I just feel like, Okay, if this is the new dynamic, how can I make sure that the things that I'm building can be dynamic and flexible as people needs?
Luna:Because not everything is fixed. Not everything is like, okay, this is a pillar and this is never going to change. No, everything is changing. So how can my process be like as small as possible so they can adapt to this new, Okay, so like in three months we're going to change again. So we got to make sure that the things that we are building can support these new changes.
Luna:So I feel like I have to change everything that I was working with, because when we we kind of work with process, we kind of feel, Okay, this is the step and we are going to follow every single step for the most part. But this is not true because I don't know what is going to happen with the company, with the business in like three months, six months. None of the things is solid as that. If we were solid, we didn't have layoffs. So how can I adapt this and accept this and make this a part of my daily basis?
Luna:I don't have like, oh, this is my process. I can't change it. Yeah, you can. Like every day you have to change it. It's a system you have to build it to make it alive and to make it alive.
Luna:Also has to be adaptable to change.
Kate:Luana's advice to keep a system alive is wonderfully expressed and excellent advice. But it's really important to note that being flexible and adaptable doesn't mean bending over backwards every time someone asks for something. That's the road to burnout and being stretched thin. If we rewind and replay, Luana also said:
Luna:How can I do a small part of the research to contribute to the biggest projects?
Kate:In other words, just as Kaylee, Carolyn and Lexi have shared, know the business's priorities and make them your priority, which will help you know when to say yes and when to say no. In other words, when to flex and when to stand by a process or a system and push your point home. Lexi offered this advice to research ops professionals.
Lexi:The first, I think, is I've seen research ops professionals lean too much into appeasement, and by this I mean like we just want to make you happy, we don't want to upset you, and so they'll maybe like walk back from a policy that they were going to put out or practice or something like that because the reaction initially isn't positive. And I get it because it is such a relationships dependent field that you don't want to upset people, but people aren't always going to be upset by change, right? Anything that's disruptive to their normal practice is going to be upsetting. We don't want to walk back on things that are important that we know that we're committed to that are valuable just because people are a little bit upset at the beginning. So I would say really sticking up for the expertise and decision making power of research ops.
Lexi:It shouldn't be evaluated on everyone's happy all the time. It should be evaluated on we are effectively implementing the processes that need to be there.
Kate:You may recall Mia Myszczyk from earlier in the episode. Mia agrees with Lexi when it comes to boundary setting and shares her experience from a research ops professional's perspective.
Mia:Yeah, I think that goes hand in hand with boundary setting. I think my biggest mistake has been trying to achieve too many goals too quickly. I think it's better to do a couple things really well than try to hit on many different things and do them not as well. And so I definitely think, actually, now that I'm thinking about this, I would say
Kate:Mia reiterates something everyone else has pointed out, the importance of relationship building.
Mia:At the beginning of my career in res ops, I think my biggest mistake was not understanding how much relationship building is impactful and important to the role. I really think it's a cross functional role. Yes, you are serving the UXR team, right? But you need to be in a good relationship with the customer success team, the sales team, marketing, legal. And so that was definitely a big mistake I made in my first role, is not doing a good enough job of reaching out to those teams, making those introductions, bridging those gaps, and really fostering an open dialogue between the teams.
Kate:The themes of burnout and making invisible work visible are core to the next and final episode in this series, but it's worth touching on them here because they're key to managing change. Senior ResearchOps leader Jenna Lombardo did some of the interviews for the series thanks Jenna and she asked Lexi about the challenge of making invisible work visible. In other words, how to make the skill in your work apparent so that it's valued and therefore more resilient to change?
Lexi:I love that you asked this question because it's the same thing that happens in research all the time, which is everyone thinks they can be a researcher, right? Like we'll have product partners be like, it's just a conversation. That's all you're doing is just talking to people. It looks easy. It's not.
Lexi:And that's the same thing for ops, right? It looks easy. The whole job is to make things easier for people, but it's a job. It's a skillset. It's very defined skills that people develop over time.
Lexi:The advice that I have for people, it's the same advice that I give to researchers, two things. The first is work out loud. What I mean by this is you gotta document what you're doing. Otherwise, people have no idea what's going on. And this can be really simple with your manager, but it should also be with the teams that you support so that they know the things that go on behind the scenes.
Lexi:You don't have to list out every single thing you do in a day, but you want to give them some insight into the complexity of the processes. So work out loud. The second is develop advocates. So sometimes when you first work with people, they're like, who cares about research? That's not that important.
Lexi:And then you show them and they see the value and you develop an advocate over time. And then that's the person going to bat for you when you're not in the room. That's the person saying research brings so much value to the table. It's the same thing for research ops, right? You wanna develop some advocates who are saying, I see the value, I know what you're doing.
Lexi:And they're willing to speak for you and speak to that value when you're not in the room.
Kate:Lexi has shared some excellent advice whatever your role, but it's especially important advice to take when your work is at its best, when it's easy and invisible, as Lexi points out. We're starting to wrap up, but there's one more important topic to cover. All of this talk of embracing change raises an important question. What about the human cost? How do you support people and yourself through constant adaptation without burning out?
Kate:Lexi has a doctorate in philosophy and social psychology, so she's well placed to share her thoughts.
Lexi:This is actually very related to core social psychology theory about social identity and contingencies of self worth. So if you think about it, the example we usually give for this is a professional athlete gets injured and can't continue their career anymore. If they have only ever seen themselves as a professional athlete, that event is shattering, right? How do you even conceive of yourself if it's not being a professional athlete anymore? That's a really risky place to be in for your sense of self, your self worth, your self esteem.
Lexi:If you instead have what we call multiple contingencies of self worth, which is many domains that you get your self worth from, your sense of self, it's much more resilient. So if you are a professional athlete, but you're also a mom and you're also really committed to your community locally, then if one part of your identity is changing, you still have all of these other aspects of yourself that you can rely on. Having that shift in mindset has been really important for me. So when I close my laptop at the end of the day, I shift into other parts of myself that are also important to me. And it's not always work and always on all of the time thinking about those problems.
Kate:As we've seen throughout this episode, building enduring systems in the face of constant change isn't about predicting the future, it's about building adaptive capacity. It's about developing business intelligence, designing for self sufficiency, and perhaps most important of all, knowing when to bend and when to stand firm. Finally, change is a constant, so it's never too early or too late to make change resilience a core feature of your work. A lot of themes have been covered throughout the series, so listen to all five episodes there's one more dropping in two weeks to build resilience and future readiness into how you operate. A big shout out to Lexi for offering to take part in the series As a research leader, your voice has been invaluable.
Kate:Here's Lexi with a note of gratitude: It's a feel good end if you work in research ops, so get out your tissues.
Lexi:So as a person who's both had support by research ops and has not had support by research ops in some of my roles, I'll just say that it's such a privilege to have research ops, to have the support, to have the partnership, and really to treat them as partners in the process rather than a service, right? They're a strategic partner that's there to help make your job more effective, to help you deliver more impact. So if you haven't said thank you to your research ops team lately, do it today. Make sure they know how much you value them.
Kate:So far in this series, we've been hardcore. We've covered the evolution of research ops in episode one, how to leverage AI in episode two, how to build a research platform in episode three, and in this episode, building robust systems in the midst of change has been the focus. It's all very systems and structured type stuff, but in the next and final episode of this series we're going to go soft. As mentioned, episode five drops in two weeks' time and it's dedicated to the people of ResearchOps. You'll hear that ResearchOps professionals come from all sorts of backgrounds, from fishery engineering to primate research, user research, political science and more.
Kate:We'll look at major themes like navigating burnout, making invisible work visible, and the community that makes this profession so incredibly special. To get this and lots of other ResearchOps goodness delivered straight to your email inbox, subscribe to The ResearchOps Review find the link in the show notes. This series was produced by The ChaCha Club, a members club for ResearchOps professionals. A huge thanks to User Interviews for sponsoring this series. User Interviews is the only way to recruit high quality participants for any kind of research.
Kate:Finally, ResearchOps two point zero was co produced with Glenn Thamilton, Jenna Lombardo and Renata Fenter. I'm Kate Tauzy, the founder of The ChaCha Club, a ResearchOps guru, and the author of Research That Scales.
Creators and Guests
