Research Ops 2.0, Episode 5: The People of ResearchOps
This is ResearchOps two point zero. Episode five. The people of ResearchOps.
Kate: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 five for people of ResearchOps. Throughout the series, we've explored the processes and technologies reshaping our field and the systems we're building for the future.
Kate:But behind every system, process, and framework are the people who make it all happen. So in this final episode of ResearchOps two point zero, we're going to turn the spotlight on the curious minds, problem solvers, and systems builders who've made this profession what it is today, the people of ResearchOps. If you're a ResearchOps professional, this episode will make you feel seen and heard, I guarantee it. If you want to transition into ResearchOps, this episode will give you a great heads up as to the skills you need and that ResearchOps folks come from all sorts of backgrounds. And if you're looking to hire a ResearchOps professional, this episode will help you know who to look for.
Kate:Here's a tip: someone with x number of years of experience in ResearchOps might not be it. On that note, here's Daniel Gottlieb to kick us off. Daniel's the head of research operations for Microsoft's Developer Division, and he has one of the most unexpected ResearchOps origin stories I've ever heard.
Daniel:My background is actually in animal behavior. So I have a PhD in animal behavior, and I specifically focused on primate welfare. So that is primate or monkey quality of life. What do they need to be happy? What stresses them out?
Daniel:How do we evaluate if they're happy or sad or stressed or having good emotions, positive emotions or negative emotions?
Kate:If you know anything about research ops, this next bit should sound pretty familiar.
Daniel:So I focused on working with monkeys and understanding their behavioral needs. And I did primate behavior research for about fifteen years. Towards the end of that, I moved on from doing behavioral research directly with the monkeys to doing more oversight of a research program. So instead of actually doing the research on what makes monkeys happy and working with them day to day, I was doing more helping other people do their research projects. And balancing the research project needs with the behavioral needs of the animals, and making sure we have the right fit projects for the right animals, trying to balance not enough resources, too much research happening, not enough animals, but also wanting to make sure they're best suited for it.
Daniel:It was a logistical nightmare, but it was also this fun kind of puzzle to do. How do we do this all in the right way? So we're supporting the science, supporting the animals. And I did that for four or five years or so. I did that for a while, but I hit a point where honestly, I kind of got burnt out from it.
Daniel:It was a very stressful job, and I hit a point when I was ready for a career change.
Kate:For a little extra context, this is happening in early twenty twenty.
Daniel:And at the time we were moving to Seattle, my wife had a job in Seattle, and I knew Seattle had a lot of tech, so I figured what the heck, I might as well dip my toe into the tech world, try that out. And at the time, like I said, I wasn't looking for research ops. I didn't know research ops was even a thing. So I started applying for data science jobs. I applied for a PM job here and there, and I don't even think I knew what PM was.
Daniel:I just saw the descriptions like, oh, that managing project. I like that. I think I can do that. And after I applied enough, I actually had somebody reach out to me who had seen my application saying, hey, you didn't apply to this job. You have this really unique background.
Daniel:We're not getting a lot of primate behaviorists applying to jobs, but I think it actually might fit for this other job I'm supposed to hire for. It's called research operations. I don't really know what it is, but it seems like it might fit what you do. And when I asked for more details, they said basically, you got to read the description. This is what I'm working off of.
Daniel:I applied for the job, got an interview. And at that point, I had to do a complete crash course on what is research operations.
Kate:Daniel's not alone in taking an unconventional path to ResearchOps. ResearchOps attracts problem solvers from all walks of life, which is one of our greatest strengths. To drive the point home, here's Luana Cruz. Luana has been a ResearchOps specialist since 2020 and has worked for some of Brazil's most innovative companies. If you listened to episode four of this series, you'll also know that she's a science fiction writer and as it turns out, a fishery engineer.
Kate:Yep, you heard right.
Luana:So first things first, I'm a fisher engineering. You don't have to ask me about that. It's kind of tricky. But yeah, I graduated in fishery Engineering. I worked as a field researcher back then in college and it was 100 my passion for a while.
Luana:But then when I like finished college, I graduated and I was like, okay, what is my next step?
Kate:From fishery engineering to research ops, it's not exactly a career path you'd find in any guidance counselor's handbook. And I can relate. I have a degree in conceptual fine art and it's actually been pretty impactful in how I see and do research ops. Here's another fun story from Garrett Sukada. Garrett now heads up one of the most mature research ops teams in the industry at Intuit.
Garett:My name is Garrett Sikata. I work at Intuit and I lead the Center of Customer Obsession Research Operations team. It was a calling, I would say. I spent years in college and I ended up with this anthropology degree. And eventually while working at this educational software company, I saw this role for UX researcher open up.
Garett:And within that, one of the criteria was, it's like, you want to have a degree in anthropology. And I'm like, this has got to be a sign because who wants somebody with an anthropology degree? Like, I don't even want an anthropology degree. And I started off as, we'll say like a UX researcher at that company. But what I found is I really enjoyed the operational part of everything and being able to think about how do we set up a lab?
Garett:Like, how do we actually bring in customers and being able to coordinate and work across different teams?
Kate:Right. Let's travel way back. I mean, way back. ResearchOps legend, Tim Toy, has been in this game since before it even had a name.
Tim:So one of the recruiters I was working with was like, hey. I think your contract's gonna end soon. And I was like, yep. And she's like, do have any plans? You know, I was 22, 23 at the time.
Tim:Was like, I have no plans. I have no idea what I'm doing. Like, I'm barely a functioning adult.
Kate:Tim landed his first ResearchOps role in October 2007.
Tim:So she was like, well, I know a recruiter at Adobe, and I think you're a hard worker. You seemingly try you try well enough. I'd love to connect you. And she very graciously was like, let me connect you with a recruiter at Adobe. And they looked at my resume and they were like, I think you'd be a good fit for this role as a research research participant recruiter.
Tim:And that was the title at the time. And I was like, sure. What the hell? I have no idea what you know what? I I just want a job.
Tim:Right? Like, my end game was just get enough money to move out of my parents' house. And they're like, okay. So I interviewed at Adobe and was totally ill prepared. Well, not ill prepared.
Tim:I was very prepared, but I was like I still had a very old mentality. Like, my dad was an accountant. My mom was a pharmacist. So I went to Adobe dressed up in, like, a three piece suit. And then when I walked in the door, everyone was like it was, you know, mid 2 thousands.
Tim:Everyone was, like, in a skinny jeans and a T shirt, and I was so out of place. But I interviewed there, and I got the job and, you know, I realized I could come to work in jeans and a t shirt, and that was nice. But that's kinda how I got my start. Like, I had no I barely understood what I was interviewing for, and that's kinda how I got my start in research operations. And that's kinda how I got my start in user research overall, and I reported
Kate:From that bewildered start in a three piece suit, Tim has built an eighteen year career entirely dedicated to research ops. He set up operations at Adobe Electronic Arts, Airbnb, Splunk, and now he's back at Adobe as a senior manager for research operations. He's come full circle. Tim, if there were an award for the most dedicated person in the field, you would absolutely get it. Not everyone's path has been quite so unconventional.
Kate:Some people took what you might call a more quote unquote traditional route, if anything about research ops can be called traditional at this point?
Jared:Yeah, so I think like my journey to research ops has been definitely kind of a circuitous one. It really started when I joined at Okta, probably, well, now it's eight years ago. And I actually started as a product designer and researcher hybrid.
Kate:Jared Forney, ResearchOps Principal at Okta.
Jared:And what over time, what I discovered was as I moved from product design and research into a full time researcher as our company grew, the thing that really stood out to me as we added more and more researchers, as the scope and scale of our research program evolved, I reached a threshold point at which I was doing what I what I later learned was research ops tasks and and job description work in addition to my day to day research work, talking to customers, doing analysis, and all of that. And there eventually became an inflection point where I realized that I can't do both of these jobs well full time. There was a crossroads point. And I think at that at that moment, I spoke with my manager and I said, hey. Like, there's this kind of emerging field that I've been starting to read about called research operations.
Jared:And it sounds like a lot of the things that I'm doing already. And she says, well, what do you think about that? Do you is it something that you wanna explore in more detail? Is it something that you potentially wanna move into? And I was like, well, after giving it some thought, I'm like, yeah, I think I want to actually try this as a full time role because I found that there was I had a lot of passion and interest for the kind of inner workings of research.
Jared:Right?
Kate:Finally, this is our last origin story. It's worth noting that some people like Mia have come from project and program management backgrounds and have been super successful in the field, landing one top notch research ops role after another.
Mia:Mia Myshek, Target, Senior UX Research Operations Manager. And so my recruiter sent over this job posting of UX ResearchOps. And I was like, I have no idea what that is. And I remember Googling it, and the first article that came up was the eight pillars of ResearchOps.
Kate:Actually, it's the eight pillars of user research, not research ops as is often thought. The eight pillars by Emma Bolton is a framework that emerged from the WhatIsResearchOps movement back in 2018, and it shaped how countless people think about operationalizing research to this day.
Mia:And I've read that article and looked at that big graph with all the bubbles in it and how they all overlap. And that just really every time I look at that article, because I refer back to it, I think about the first time I ever heard of ResearchOps and it really opened a world of that I'd never heard about, right?
Kate:That bubble diagram Mia mentioned, I created it one Sunday afternoon in 2019 to visualize all the data it gathered during the WhatIsResearchOps movement. It's wild to think that a fairly quick graphic could help launch careers and even an entire industry.
Mia:So that's really where I was. I was truly in a career transition, and I was really trying to get into UX. So she really encouraged me to apply. And the person on the other side, he actually came from a detective background. And so he had transitioned from being a detective into a UX researcher.
Mia:And so he had built an entire team of people who didn't come from, I mean, quote unquote, a traditional background. There's no real, like, traditional background the more I, like, learn about people's background of UX research or like res ops.
Kate:When I was producing this episode, I worried over whether the origin stories would be too long or boring. But every one of those stories communicate something invaluable. ResearchOps is a field in which all sorts of people from all sorts of backgrounds bring their unique perspectives and skills to the role, which is perhaps what has made the field so inventive, fun, and creative and helped it evolve so quickly. The early days were dominated by either massive teams at tech giants or intrepid teams of one. But as the field has grown, teams of one are building teams and becoming managers.
Kate:And they're asking, what does career growth look like in research ops for those that are higher and for myself?
Tim:Once I got to EA and I became a people manager, that was one of the first things I did. I was like, I want us to build a career framework because I wanna know where I'm going.
Kate:Tim Toy, ever the trailblazer, was thinking about career frameworks back when most people didn't even know research ops was a thing. Here he is building career ladders at EA between 2010 and 2015.
Tim:Now that I have some semblance of control and quote unquote power, I was like, we're building a career framework. And my first career framework was so ridiculously overly complicated. Like, I overthought it like crazy. But and I, you know, showed it to my VP, and he was like, yeah. You need to take away, like, four of these levels because these this is never gonna happen.
Tim:I'm like, okay. That's very fair. But it was, like, starting that dialogue of, like, this is a job that deserves consideration for growth, for maturity, for just, you know, give someone a career path. Like, it can be as simple as saying, you're research ops level one, then then you can progress to research ops level two, and this is what that looks like. Once we started actually, like, drawing that up, it felt, you know, at least there was a future.
Tim:At least we could aim towards something because otherwise, it was like what when people came on my team, I was like, what am I supposed to tell you? Many of the people that we hired at EA were fresh out of college or fresh out of something, and they were they were very ambitious, and they wanted to grow into something.
Kate:Tim's story highlights a crucial challenge. When you're pioneering a profession, you're not just building research systems, you're building the very foundations of what research ops careers look like. You're writing jobs descriptions that have never existed, defining success metrics from scratch, and proving to organizations that this work and its people deserve real investment and we're here to stay. So what are the skills that make someone successful in research ops? Here's Aaron May, chief marketing officer at User Interviews and cohost of the fantastic podcast, Awkward Silences.
Erin:There's no average person. We're all unique flowers and snowflakes and, you know, personas are dangerous and all of this sort of stuff. But, yeah, I think there are some qualities that I've observed in research ops folks. So obviously, it's gonna depend. Did you come from a research background or not?
Erin:From my experience, it seems like many have come from a research background, but not all. And so what I see in researchers is certainly curiosity. I see open mindedness. A lot of introverts, not all, but it's, you know, I can't tell you how many people we had on the podcast who've said, you're not gonna believe this. I interview people all day, but I'm actually an introvert.
Erin:They say, I believe it because I hear it all the time. But yeah, that curiosity, that, you know, that interest in humanity that, you know, I think that there's a wide spectrum in terms of how much people are in it for some sort of like grand moral cause, but certainly there's an interest in people and what makes them tick and who they are in social sciences. So there's that piece of it. But then there's also the systems piece of it of how do I make things better? How do I make things better for the people that I work with?
Erin:So not only that interest in people sort of at large, but the people closest to me, the people in my work community. I think you have to be somewhat invested in making their lives better in addition to your customers' lives better to be an excellent ops professional. So there's that marriage of I'm interested in this kind of nebulous idea of like systems and how do I improve those? And then at the same time, this, you know, how do I improve the lives of the people around me?
Kate:A quick PSA with support from user interviews and in collaboration with ChaCha Club members, we're publishing a universal ResearchOps career ladder in November. So subscribe to the ResearchOps review, see the show notes, and it will land magically in your email inbox. Back to the kinds of skills that might populate the career ladder, here's Garrett.
Garett:The person I am today is not because of an outcome of anthropology. The reality is that I was so lost in college that the anthropology courses were the one course that I would pick up maybe like once a semester. When I got to the point where I was done with college and anthropology was my closest exit to getting a degree. But I would say that one thread that kind of kept me going and that brings me back to where I am today is I think people are so interesting. I love watching people.
Garett:I love talking to people. I think people are just so interesting that it just, I always, I don't want to be around them. I mean, like, don't, it takes a lot for me to like always converse and kind of be the person in the spotlight, but I love being behind the scenes, right? Being able to just like watch how people interact, watch how people do things and just learn from what they're doing. And I think that's the thing that's really kept me going.
Kate:Here's Jared Forney, the ResearchOps principal at Okta, expanding on the role of ResearchOps as internal researchers. As you might recall, Jared transitioned from research to ResearchOps. So this switch is especially natural for him.
Jared:I know a lot of folks who maybe started ResearchOps and wind up going to research because they enjoy that aspect of the job of, like, talking to customers or working with people. I'm a little unusual in that I've gone the other direction, but one place I do put on my researcher hat a lot is interviewing internally. Talking to the folks on the teams I work with, the stakeholders I work with, and effectively using the same skill sets that I had as a researcher, but just interviewing So having familiarity with research methodologies in that sense, in, you know, how to structure discussion guide or how to interview effectively and do listening sessions is super, super important. Because it's inherently, like I like we talked about before, it's inherently a job where you interface with people. Organizations are made up of people.
Jared:This is a people oriented job. So I'd say that's another real hallmark of a a great research ops person.
Lydia:Lydia Gutierrez, senior UX research ops program manager. One of the things, I wanted to mention also is that I came from market research, and it depends on it depends on the interviewer. But when I would apply for jobs, some people were like, that's not the same as research op as UX. And some people were like, yeah, it is. And in my opinion, I think it's the skills are similar.
Lydia:And so I think that when I read that something in your book that I wanted to mention is it hit the nail on the head for me. The beauty of research ops is that it doesn't require new skills. Instead, it requires a recombination of all sorts of existing systems. And I was like, there you go. That's exactly what happened in my in my role.
Lydia:You know what I mean? Like, I had the the skills needed. I just kinda had to repurpose them for UX.
Kate:Lydia's referencing my book, Research That Scales. See the show notes where I argue that ResearchOps isn't about inventing new skills. It's about combining existing skills in new ways. And she's actually inadvertently picked up on a typo. It should read, quote: A recombination of all sorts of existing skills, end quote not systems, email sent to my publisher Rosenfeldt Media.
Kate:After all, the best ResearchOps teams are diverse. They're made up of communicators and librarians, people who excel with numbers and contracts, service designers and systems thinkers, project and product managers, and yes, administrators too. And when you're a team of one, you've got to wear all of these hats or at least make friends with people who can help. But it's this diversity of talent that strengthens the entire research profession. Here's Luana backing that up with her experience in Brazil.
Luana:Like I said in the beginning, we took a little longer to get to the stage that we have like a research operation teams or only like their research operation role in Brazilian companies. And of course, this relied because we have like the great UX researchers doing operations that are already just so great. But we kind of create this myth that every research operation has to be a UX researcher before. And I feel like this is not true because, yeah, of course, I was a researcher back in college. I was a researcher for like one month or so, a UX researcher, but I feel like the most skills that I have are not connected to UX research at all.
Luana:I feel like the skill that we are requiring for research operations is kind of like, okay, can you manage different projects at the same time? Can you do like discovery with your researchers and non researchers and test the solution and discover a new solution and test it out and doing launch and have metrics. And when I start looking to this process, I feel like it's more like connected to building products process than doing research process. So, yeah, product managers are doing discovery and discovery solutions, are doing tests, are going to launch, I'm going to look at metrics. And it's the same thing as me launching a self-service program.
Luana:Of course, I did grow a lot with my UX researchers. I feel like every time that I'm growing, I'm learning from a product manager. How to build something, how to make sure that the documentation is good enough, how to make sure that the metrics that we are following are complying with our goal as well. So yeah, we kind of have the skills that are connected more with product manager. I'm bad.
Luana:I'm just bad as a UX researcher.
Kate:I know plenty of people who would agree wholeheartedly with Luana's point that ResearchOps takes a lot from product management and product ops. But perhaps one of the most important skills in ResearchOps is the ability to iterate without ego. Carolyn Morgan, who manages a ResearchOps team at Cisco, puts it perfectly.
Carolyn:I think the biggest skill, though, that they have aside from, like, personality traits is that they're they're able to iterate. So they don't get to, you know, well, design it and build a process. And if it doesn't work, okay, cool. What's making it not work? Like, how can we improve it?
Carolyn:And they don't get too attached to it because they understand that it's a constant iteration towards improvement, right? I think that's a skill that you learn over time.
Kate:Luana has a perfect story about learning this lesson the hard way.
Luana:My best memory by far was in my first years of research operations. When I built my first repository, I was building that and it was fun, and I just moved every researcher that we have from SharePoint to this new repository, and it was so good and it was so beautiful. I still have pictures of it until today because it's so beautiful. And after one month that I have launched it, I was kind of, Okay, let's check it out. How designers and researchers are feeling about it.
Luana:And the last time they viewed the repository was one month ago when I launched it and I was like, Okay, what am I doing wrong? Is there something wrong with that? Did I build it at all wrong? Did I have to look up to another references? Do I have to do benchmarking to understand how people are building reports?
Luana:Because I never have built this before. And then I take my one of my designers, I was having just one on one with one of my designers, and I asked what is wrong with repository? Because I have seen that you have done research, but you have not used the research repository at all. Not for use the templates, not for using anything. What is wrong?
Luana:And she was like, Oh, Lua, Axon is so beautiful. I love it. I love to like deep dive on it and read it. But I feel like every time that I just writing a comma, I'm going to mess this up. I feel like this is not built for me.
Luana:It's built for you to upload the content and make it even more beautiful as it is today. And I was like, no, make it ugly, just make it something. I have to understand what is going on. And I feel like I had spent like two months building this repository by this time, and I never asked anyone what they did on this repository. And when I built it and I launched it, I was super proud, but they didn't work at all because it was like, yeah, we don't need that.
Luana:We need kind of a messy place that we can like put information, put insights and share with product and then I changed everything.
Kate:Curious minds and interest in people, the compulsion to fix inefficiencies these are the traits that run deep in ResearchOps professionals. And there's another crucial skill: the ability to sell change to our stakeholders. Daniel, the primate researcher turned head of ResearchOps for Microsoft's Developer Division, takes us back to his primate research days and a lesson that translates perfectly to research ops.
Daniel:I actually did some monkey training. Like, I would do some positive reinforcement training with the monkeys. And positive reinforcement training is one of the biggest life lessons in general I learned from that of how you can make so much change by giving positive reward. I worked with some very aggressive and difficult monkeys and finding that you can gain their trust and you can help shape their behavior in ways that they want to do. Like, look, you're having a very stressful life because you are fighting against these things.
Daniel:This is actually here to help you. You want this, but you're not trusting it. Through positive reinforcement, I'll kind of get you over there. I've also worked with some very angry and difficult people in my jobs. And similarly, positive reinforcement is the way to make the change there.
Daniel:It's not forcing it. It's it's giving them reward. It's doing little steps. It's not saying like, got to do this huge change over here. If you try doing that with a monkey, they'd never listen to you.
Daniel:But if you give a teeny reward to a monkey for just moving its shoulder, and then another reward when they move their shoulder a little bit longer, and another reward when they move it all the way around, eventually you'll be able to have a monkey very happily turn around and present their rump up in the air if they need to get like a medical injection, which is not an easy thing to otherwise convince a monkey to do. So if we're trying to get people to do some difficult research things that's like, this is going to take a lot of time, I don't have the bandwidth for this, I'm supposed to do other things. And I'm like, I know this will help you in your product. But if we can reward step by step little things, can get to these bigger, bigger changes. So positive reinforcement has been like a guiding light for me in everything I do.
Mia:Mia Myszuk, Target, Senior UX Research Operations Manager. I don't want to say selling because you're not selling a product, but you are selling a process. You are selling a change. You're selling the research. The researchers have to sell it, right, to a certain extent.
Mia:And so you have to be delightful and charismatic sometimes. And I think that can either come easily or that can be a struggle. I don't think you would be a failure if you weren't a naturally charismatic person to be in res ops, but I do think that it helps if you can use those skills to relationship build, especially when you're working in larger organizations and you're doing a lot of cross functional push and pull, like, can we share resources? Oh, you need a researcher, can I have a seat on the tool that your team uses? You know, that kind of thing.
Kate:Burnout is recognized by the World Health Organization as an occupational phenomenon. While it's not a medical or mental health condition, it has been classified as a syndrome, a collection of symptoms associated with a specific health related cause, and it's common in tech. Working with researcher Noam Segal, Lenny Rachitsky of Lenny's newsletter produced a report in June 2025 that showed that eighty four percent of tech workers report burnout. That's huge. And research ops professionals are not immune.
Jared:They're definitely long days. I think, like, you know, it's burnout is a very, like, complicated and nuanced sort of feeling because a lot of times you don't realize you're burned out until your until someone tells you or until you you you reach a certain threshold.
Kate:Jared Forney, research ops principal at Okta.
Jared:I do think there's a couple of things that can be, like, risk factors or can typify burnout in a research ops person that can contribute to it that are things to look out for. One of the most challenging parts of being a research operations professional that can contribute to burnout are when we do our job really well, people don't see it. Like, our best work is invisible. And that visibility that does come is often when something breaks. When people are used to a frictionless experience, like, the response to something breaking and becoming visible and exposed as a system is almost immediate.
Jared:And that can be really taxing. That can contribute to feelings of burnout where it's like you don't feel like you always have the recognition when you're doing the work that's contributing to something running smoothly just because people can't see it. I think the other thing that can that can wear on a person in in the research ops space is that our job is really characterized by dependencies. It's the work you do and often your success hinges on other people's roadmaps and prioritization.
Erin:I see burnout everywhere in tech, so I think, you know, that's a part of it is the the overall climate of tech. We went from COVID to some market challenges to there's a lot of interesting things happening in the news in the world, not a ton of stability. So I think the macro kind of factors in, but for research ops specifically, obviously, that's going to be tied to research to some extent, who has gone through a massive reckoning, you know, I think must have been one of the most popular medium articles written about research, right? Judd's research reckoning piece. So I think the research specific struggle to reinvent itself.
Erin:The process of being reborn into a new thing, whatever that's going to be, has certainly had an impact on research ops. We've talked about AI quite a bit, but I think the big disruption coming from that and what does that mean for my job? Am I behind in how I'm using it, etcetera, etcetera. A lot of this macro happened as the field has really been developing and has made a ton of progress, but it's still getting its bearings. It's still scaling itself.
Erin:It's still figuring out to some extent what it is. So again, back to your mind map of what re ops is, there's tremendous potential scope there in terms of what re ops can be. And with budgets getting cut, maybe you have fewer people doing re ops, maybe the need for the things re ups does has not gone away, that's a recipe for burnout.
Kate:The very qualities that make ResearchOps professionals so excellent at their jobs, the systems thinking, the helper mentality, the ability to see and solve problems everywhere, our curiosity and enthusiasm can also make us vulnerable to burnout. When you're good at fixing things, people bring you everything that's broken. And when you care deeply about enabling others, saying no can be tricky, but it's also essential.
Carolyn:So we just know, like, and I'm talking about, like, on the general re ops thing. Re ops leadership is a bit different. But like in general, re ops just like, we know where everything is. That's our strength. Like, you have, you have a need, we have a solution.
Carolyn:Like we can figure it out. I think our weakness is if you have a need, we have a solution. Right? We're generally caretakers. Right?
Carolyn:We like helping people. We like making sure that things are done right. We like making sure that people can do their jobs easier. And I think sometimes that that can lead, like you're talking about, can lead to burnout.
Mia:I do feel like sometimes that can impact boundary setting. Res ops can take on more than what is realistic, maybe, and maybe take on things that are not the best use of their time. I do feel like sometimes research ops or operations in general, too, can become a chief of staff of the team or an admin assistant or managing schedules and calendars. And maybe that's an aspect of a larger group of tasks that all operations folks need to do. But I think if you're trying to level up your operations team, you need to be able to give your operations folks time to have strategy and brainstorming and not be stuck in the weeds of a tactical, you know, calendar managing, recruitment coordinating type of tasks, if that makes sense.
Erin:Yeah, I think a lot of burnout can come from being in reactive mode, which, you know, in a field where you're trying to figure out what you are and prove your impact, you can't fault a person too much for trying to get things done. But I think the solution there is you can't sort of grind out or put more hours into responding to stuff. You will hit a wall. And so that's where strategy, where proactive thinking and planning really come into play of whatever our resources are, how do we make the best use out of them? And then even, you know, I've seen success with, as you have that strategy and that impact story, now you do have a better case for eventually getting more budget as well.
Kate:If you haven't already, make sure to listen to episode four of this series, in which we cover tactics for delivering enduring systems amidst constant change. The word strategy, unsurprisingly, was core to achieving stability, which also means managing burnout and having way more fun and success in your role. And if you reckon being a team of one excludes you from this great advice, here's Luana, Research Operations at Itau Unibanco. Sorry if I've pronounced that incorrectly.
Luana:This also happens a lot with research teams of one, Because we have to deal with all that at the same time. And it's not like they are not gonna pressure you to deliver that, they are going to. And you're just learning how to do that. And even though you are a junior, you are mid level, you are a senior, you have been doing for a long time, it's still too much for just one person to do. So, it's very easy to fall into this place that you're going to just, okay, I'm going to do that, okay, I'm going to do that, and yes, yes, yes, I can do that, yes, I can do that.
Luana:You can't! Let's be honest, that's too much. Research office is a whole department. This is important. We have like different teams.
Luana:I have seen it, a whole department just for operations, that we have like three, five people just for repository and data privacy. That is too much for just one person, or for two person, or for five person. That is too much job to be done. So it's very easy to fall into this place of saying yes for everything and then at the end of the day you got looking at your management stuff, your Kanban and you say, okay, I got nothing done. And when you start thinking that, you stop falling into a place, you start working more hours to get things done, you stop losing track of the impact that you are making, and then you got burned out.
Luana:That happened to me before. So, how can I make sure that I don't fall into this place? You ask for help. You can ask for help for your boss, you can ask for help for other leaderships, you can ask for help for other members of your team, you don't have to build the program all by yourself. You have to build this with other person that are also going to use this product.
Luana:Oh, Lua, I don't feel comfortable enough to ask for help from my boss or from my team. I feel like they're gonna judge. I'm going to break the expectations. Ask for help outside. We have communities for research ops.
Luana:You have other research ops that probably has the same pain point that you have or already faced this in a previous challenge. So ask for help and make sure that okay I'm doing just a couple things but I'm doing the best I can And I know that I'm doing the best I can. I'm seeing the impact of my job without working more hours, without putting a lot on your plate, and also with help of the other person that has done this before.
Kate:When Louis says, make sure you're doing a couple of things really well, that's another way of saying you must have a tightly prioritized strategy with no more than two to three genuine priorities, which repeats Erin's excellent point earlier. And if you're a ResearchOps professional looking for a vibing and supportive community, check out ChaCha Doc Club. See the show notes.
Jared:I think one of the most challenging parts of being a research operations professional that can contribute to burnout are when we do our job really well, people don't see it. Like, our best work is invisible.
Mia:Your question on invisible work really, like, tripped me up because I I think that that's a nebulous area that doesn't have a lot of coverage, especially within ops. And so I was reading this article. This woman coined the concept the glue work, or just another way of describing this invisible work that we all do within our job. And so she has a way of measuring the glue work. But of course, she she has a webinar that you have to sign up to figure out how you measure that work.
Mia:So, of course, I signed up because I want to know how she's measuring this.
Kate:The glue work person is Tanya Riley. See the show notes for the link to her website, which has some pretty cool stuff on it. Over to Sam Gager, the senior director for XD Research at Capital One.
Tanya:Like, only notice research operations when it doesn't work. And, like, that's really kind of like thankless about it. And like, it sucks. But I can say as a researcher who's relied on research ops, I'm deeply appreciative of it and the value that it brings. And it enables a lot that doesn't get talked about enough, quite frankly.
Tanya:And it's hard also for executives like me to sell it into an org. It's like, well, why do you need an operations person? Can't researchers do it themselves? I'm like, yes, they can. But you're gonna take them away from their core functionality.
Tanya:They'll, you know, they'll lose 20% of their time or something. And like, that's a real pain point for a researcher who you're paying lots of money for them to like do research y things and come up with insights. And if they have to spend 20% of their time not doing that at all, it can be a real real burden on organizations, and it's it's hard to sell in.
Kate:Erin is the chief marketing officer at Youse Interviews. I'm going to guess that you follow the phenomenal work Youse Interviews do every year, producing amazing resources for the research profession. Well, Erin's behind it all. I asked Erin for her expert opinion on using marketing skills to make invisible work visible.
Erin:You have to know your audience. That's like marketing one zero one, right, which is not so different than research one zero one. It's all about knowing your audience. And so you need to know who your key stakeholders are, who are gonna keep you going and to keep you having the impact that you wanna have in your organization or whatever that might be. And it might not be the people you initially think.
Erin:So that's number one. And so number two is I know who these folks are. I need to understand what makes them tick, what they care about, what keeps them up at night. Again, back to Research 101, know your audience. And that'll tell you something about making the invisible visible, I think, because you need to know what they care about, to know what to point to and to what to sort of excavate from the process, right?
Erin:I think it's like, well, I did this and this and this, no one cares. Right? Generally in business, I think it's it's like, you're busy. Great. That's wonderful.
Erin:But tell me about the invisible things that have made an impact on something I care about, and and I would be glad to pay attention to that.
Jared:Yeah, and I think this is like another underscoring of like where research ops needs to go, right? Is part of it is, and this is a trend that I'm seeing that started in design and has moved into research and by proxy research operations is there's an increasing need to speak the language of the business, right? Like, and that includes like pegging your metrics against it, being able to demonstrate your impact as it relates to business value. So an example of this for me is trying to demonstrate to the organization the importance of having a centralized participant panel, right? We have all these sources of like, oh, you can get folks from here and there and everywhere.
Jared:And I'm like, well, but we really need a place to centralize it. And why that is, is for every day that our researchers spend recruiting is an expense, right? You know, we had upwards of half of our research project cycle being dedicated to recruiting because we have such a specialized audience. And that also came in the fact that we frequently needed to reach out to external recruitment resources to supplement the people that we were struggling to get internally. And so by rolling out a dedicated participant management library, you know, kind of a participant CRM if you will, we're able to drastically reduce the costs, the per participant cost of bringing those people into studies and speeding up the recruitment process.
Jared:So it it got to a point where when we rolled this tool out and we're using it to recruit at our own company conference, the amount of money that we were saving and recruiting over the course of those three days of our company conference paid for our tooling for participant management for the whole year. So it's like we're we're getting a return on investment in three days. And that's the kind of thing when you can present those values and figures in front of the business, they're like, ah, okay. Like, that's a significant cost saving. So you're already in the green after three days.
Jared:Great. Like, how can we do more of that?
Mia:My biggest achievement is, like, growing confidence in the field, I would say, because it's very easy to have imposter syndrome. It's very easy to feel inferior to very smart researchers around you. They're so smart and they're hired for that for a reason. But you can't let that, you know, stop you from growing your confidence in res ops.
Kate:If you're considering a move in Teresa CHOPS, or if you're new to the field and feeling overwhelmed, don't feel alone. Every single person you've heard from today started somewhere else, felt uncertain, and questioned whether they belonged. What they discovered is that research ops isn't about having all the answers, it's about caring enough to find them, whether those problems involve participant recruitment or primate welfare. Your unique background and specialist knowledge and system skills aren't a limitation. It's exactly what this field needs.
Jared:There's always this feeling of impostor syndrome. Right? Like, oh, it's like, oh, I just don't know anything. You know, there's people all over this organization who have so much expertise, I just don't feel like I'm contributing out of the gate. And the thing I always tell those people is the same thing, is that your fresh eyes are an immediate and depreciating asset in any organization.
Jared:So your fresh perspective is something that nobody else at that organization has. Because the moment your first day is over, you've already gained something at that organization and your fresh eyes aren't quite as vivid as they once were. And I think with that, like, don't be afraid to question the status quo, like why we do something. Come about it from a constructive standpoint, obviously, and maybe not a critical one. But odds are if you ask why the way something is done, somebody who's really good at their job will ask, you know what?
Jared:I haven't thought about that in a really long time. That's a great question. Let's dig into it. And that's really where, like, as someone in a new role can really start to have an immediate benefit or immediate impact when you think about, like, the classic thirty, sixty, ninety days of someone's measurable impact. Just questioning why we do something in a certain way leads to all sorts of great conversations.
Jared:It leads to listening sessions, which leads to low hanging fruit improvements, which leads to impact. Right? It's a very, like, kind of straightforward path that you can take to immediately having benefit within an organization. So I think, like, those are the things that I would say from a research op standpoint, especially someone new moving into this role, I'd add is just read the manual and use your fresh eyes to your advantage to question the status quo.
Kate:And for those worried about the stresses of research ops, Daniel offers some perspective from his previous career.
Daniel:But the level of stress of I understand this, you know, there's a stress of how is my job changing? Am I getting people what they want? Am I good enough for this job? Is this job, you know, how is this changing? How is AI going to affect my job?
Daniel:And that is all stressful. But it's a different stress from waking up and saying like, what if there was a cage war last night? What if the second ranking matcher line tried to overthrow the top ranking matcher line? What's happening then? And those are the fears that I woke up with every single day.
Daniel:You know, somebody saying like, the alpha male broke free and he's running amok. Those were the things that I woke up in a cold sweat. So knowing that I want to come to work and have a loose, wild monkey that we're running around trying to find, very different level of stress.
Kate:Despite all the challenges, the invisible work, the burnout risks, the constant change, not to mention layoffs, ResearchOps professionals remain deeply committed to their craft. Here's Lydia reflecting on her journey.
Lydia:Frankly, I really don't. There's nothing out there that makes me think, oh, I'd like to try that career. Like, I have a couple of friends who are researchers, and they're interested in doing a career change. And I'm like, well, what are you interested? What do you want to do?
Lydia:Because I just I can't fathom changing a career like nothing out there has sparked my interest. I'm very happy with with this role and what we do and like I said the the the layoffs and the change, it has not deterred me.
Kate:This is kind of an emotional moment. The series has taken us on a colorful journey from the evolution of ResearchOps in episode one to exploring the sometimes mind blowing future of AI enhanced research in episode two, the future of ResearchOps professionals as the architects of business intelligence platforms in episode three, how to build enduring research systems when the world around you is constantly changing in episode four, and finally, this episode, a look at the people who are driving the evolution to ResearchOps two point o. It's been an epic ride, and I can't wait to see what comes next. Here's Erin giving us the final word.
Erin:I mean, I love my ops people. In any kind of ops role, they think a good ops person makes things work better. And I do think that research in general works better than it did eight years ago, and that research ops has a lot to do with that. Again, we talked about tooling and having budgets and line items for different tools and different ways of requesting research, of getting research done, templates, whatever it might be. So we were talking before about right now, there are job descriptions that are quite specific about what folks are looking for.
Erin:So to that point about marketing of research ops, there's general understanding, I think of what research ops is, of what it can do for research, and think that's come from ResearchOps proving itself out and that it can deliver value.
Kate:A massive thanks to everyone who featured in the series. And thank you for listening. If you loved the series, please share it with everyone you know. You'll help us produce even more content like this in the future. Finally, I couldn't thank user interviews enough for making the series possible.
Kate: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. 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 Thamelton, Jenna Lombardo and Renato Vento. I'm Kate Tauzy, the founder of the ChaCha Club, a ResearchOps guru and the author of Research That Scales.
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