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In this episode, Pedro Vargas from Banco do Brasil, Caitlin Faughnan from GitLab Inc., Carina Cook from theScore, and Carolyn Morgan from Cisco tackle this great ResearchOps question: "What steps could ResearchOps take to transform its relationship with research into a strategic partnership rather than an administrative service?" Around halfway in, Ned Dwyer, the co-founder and CEO of Great Question, shares his point of view on the topic. Hosted by Kate Towsey, Chief Cha Cha and author of Research That Scales: The Research Operations Handbook.
Creators & Guests
What is It’s a Great ResearchOps Question!?
The Cha Cha Club is a members' club for full-time ResearchOps professionals. Every year, we partner with amazing companies to help Club members share their expertise and advance the field of ResearchOps. This time, we partnered with Great Question, the all-in-one UX research platform, to produce a limited-edition, six-part podcast series that tackles the great questions facing ResearchOps professionals today. Every episode features a panel of Club members discussing a great ResearchOps question like, "What are the challenges and opportunities of AI for ResearchOps?" or "How can I convince leadership to establish the first ResearchOps position in the company?" A new episode will be published every two weeks until all six episodes are live.
This is "It's a Great ResearchOps Question", a 6-part podcast series produced by the Cha Cha Club, a member's club for ResearchOps professionals. In each episode, a panel of club members will tackle a great question about ResearchOps , like what does AI mean for research, or how do you build a compelling business case for research ops? This series is sponsored by Great Question, the all in one UX research platform, and I'm your host, Kate Towsey. I'm the founder of the Cha Cha Club and the author of Research That Scales: The Research Operations Handbook. This is episode 3.
Kate Towsey:In the studio, we have Pedro.
Pedro Vargas:Hi, everyone. I'm Pedro. I'm the ReOps coordinator at Banco do Brasil.
Caitlin Faughnan:And Caitlin. Hey, everyone. I'm Cait or Caitlin. And I am the UX research operations coordinator at GitLab.
Carina Cook:And Carina. Hi, everyone. I'm Carina Cook, and I lead research operations at theScore
Kate Towsey:And last but not least, we have Carolyn.
Carolyn Morgan:Hey, y'all. I'm Carolyn Morgan. I lead research operations and enablement at Cisco in the security design organization.
Kate Towsey:All guest views are their own and not that of their employer. The topic today is what steps could we take to transform research ops' relationship with research so that it's more of a strategic partnership than a recruiting scheduling repository service. I'm very excited about this topic because it's close to my heart. And the first question is, what does working strategically even mean when it comes to research operations? Who's gonna kick us off?
Carina Cook:I'm happy to.
Kate Towsey:Go for it.
Carina Cook:I think for me, working strategically, I I think of us being a proactive partner versus a reactive one and and working in more of that service model. I think working strategically means thinking that way. So how are we able to evaluate the landscape, look at research from the outside and understand those needs from the who, what, when, where and why. But then also the strategic planning piece. So like, how are we going to do this?
Carina Cook:So work with the teams to prioritize, to ideate, to support with building the efforts that will actually make the strongest impact in the long run.
Caitlin Faughnan:Yeah. I I totally agree with that. And I think it's a lot of that big picture thinking with the little picture in mind. Those little steps get us to that big picture. So identifying needs or trends early on wherever and being able to plan for that and act on those needs before it becomes a reactive response.
Caitlin Faughnan:Not necessarily just for the immediate UX research team, but also, like, our wider product org who all conduct research.
Pedro Vargas:Great. And stepping up a little bit, I would say that working strategically means to be able to talk to people who are one step ahead of most people in the company, which also means to understand the assets and how can we, as re ops folks, create, initiatives that talk to the company's strategy, to their goals, to their initiatives. How can we make, this to be a good, and a productive moment for the company, not only for our team?
Carolyn Morgan:I think another thing with this is also, really leaning in on that service design approach. Right? So not only, like, working with the research team, but also making them making them really your users. Right? So research and researchers and helping them to kinda get sometimes they don't know what they need.
Carolyn Morgan:Right? They they might not know what's coming down the line. So bringing that in and be like, hey. You know, like, there I know that one of your goals is x y z. Here's another thing we might wanna think of.
Carolyn Morgan:Right? And rather than just listening to what they say that they want and they need, you know, bringing it to them and making them aware of, hey. You know, you wanna scale. You wanna you know, this is your goal. Here's how you get there, and here's here's some other things you haven't yet thought of And really bringing that in and, again, really leaning on that service design approach where you're you're thinking of what they need a couple of steps ahead.
Kate Towsey:So is is this something that's actually happening in real life at the moment for you? Are there still challenges standing between you actually doing this?
Carolyn Morgan:go Go for it, Karen. Because we so our team just finished up a researcher experience project where we literally researched the researchers and interviewed them, mapped out their experience, and did a blueprint, right, of, like, here's what you have. Here's where your steps are. Here's the different layers. Right?
Carolyn Morgan:And here's how reops can kinda fit in, and we use that actually to identify the pain points of the researcher experience, and that drives our road map. Right? And so we've really, you know, dug in, and through that blueprint, we're able to see, hey. Here are some things that y'all are talking about, but we haven't yet put on our we haven't yet put in. So this is, you know, this is how we're gonna this is how we're gonna help you help yourselves.
Carolyn Morgan:And so in setting up those systems and processes. So that's kinda how we've done it, but we have a lot of support from our leadership team on that too.
Pedro Vargas:That's very interesting, Caro, because we have done something very similar, in our team. Now we are we have, like, 300 customers, if I may say like this. 300 people who do research in our company, in our specific, team. And we came up with a research general metric, which was based on the customer effort score. We ended up calling it a researcher effort score.
Pedro Vargas:It has the same calculation of the customer effort score. And the main questions there was were how easy was to do research in a company? What's the level of confidence that the people who do research have to complete the main research steps from planning to the impact measure measurements. So we have done something similar to that, and it got easier for us to show that reops is more than admin, I would say this.
Carolyn Morgan:Question on that, Pedro. So are you is the plan to redo this quest like, to to redo this benchmark and then, like, see, okay. Well, we've we've launched this and this and this, and here's how it's affected our researcher experience?
Pedro Vargas:Yes. You're completely right. We have done this two months ago. We went to do this, like, every 3 months, and let's see if the the the score changes or not, how the results are changing. And, also, if our efforts on doing some initiatives are generating impact in their lives, like, in their routine.
Pedro Vargas:Basically, that.
Carolyn Morgan:That's cool. That's so cool.
Carina Cook:I love that. Not just that you have metrics to measure, but that you've developed your own score. I would love to see that available in the future. But, yeah, to jump in on this question as well about, like, working strategically with leadership, I would say like yes this is always a 100% been the way that it's gone for me in the research ops space and it's largely why I wanted to get into research ops from research because of the strategic nature and opportunities that present themselves to us, and then taking it back to, like, making sure that the goal of that is to be proactive and thoughtfully plan the best way to support the teams, and that can look differently for everyone and every org based off of their needs at the time. But I found that in my experience, being that thought partner to vent to or solution with has always been very helpful for research, to help them build the thing rather than do the work for them.
Kate Towsey:So, Caitlin, we were having a really good discussion about, are you working are you actually working there's this idea of working strategically with leadership. But are you actually working strategically with leadership? And and if so, can you give an example of whether how that's happening?
Caitlin Faughnan:Yeah. So we are on that journey right now. We are not fully there yet. We are trying to get there. We've always had a direct line to research leadership.
Caitlin Faughnan:But as we've ironed out our processes and what we want the re ops function to actually look like and to grow into, we started to have those more strategic conversations, lending a little bit more knowledge and having more meaningful conversations with leadership opposed to before when it was born, like, firefighter situation trying to put out everything and manage what we had. Now we've moved on to that point of, okay, we've got these processes. They're pretty good. They're protecting us in the way we need them to and giving us time to work on other things. And now these other things are the strategic projects that we wanna see move forward.
Kate Towsey:Do you have an an example of something?
Caitlin Faughnan:Yeah. So when I joined, everything was a little bit more chopped up in terms of process. Now we have a full intake process. There's a triage system that gets implemented, and we have a grading system. So that grading system pretty much means that if something is below a certain grade, so grade 1 or 2, it means it's easy enough for the researcher to own that recruitment.
Caitlin Faughnan:And this was a conversation we had to have with leadership because before we did everything end to end, researchers didn't really need to have anything. And for us, that conversation was like, well, we are a team of 1. This needs to happen in order for us to actually work on all the bigger projects, to work on projects with legal and We can't do that while managing, you know, over 20 requests that all want our attention. You know, last week, I checked. There was 30 requests in.
Caitlin Faughnan:So now that we are having these conversations and researchers can handle their own recruitment, it makes it much easier for us to to show the value in that kind of process and to continue having more strategic conversations and move away from the REOPS has to do all of the those kind of granular tasks, and we can do more elevated tasks.
Kate Towsey:That feels like a really good segue into the question of how difficult or easy it might be to convince leadership that you, that that research operations is so much more than administration. Have any of you had an experience, good and bad, with with that in your current or previous role?
Caitlin Faughnan:I guess for me, you know, I joined my current company and when I joined, they had kind of tried to set up reops before. And there was still a big education gap about what reops could do, what it should do. Maybe it should go into this area or this area. So there was definitely, a learning curve to that process. And, you know, you have people who come out of very large enterprise companies, and they have an idea of, okay.
Caitlin Faughnan:This team does this. This team does that. And there's a lot of politics involved in that. When I joined, we were in still in more of a start up phase, so we had a little bit more freedom to decide how we wanted things to go. And I think even in larger companies, you have to go into thinking about re ups as a start up, especially when you're a t mobile one, because you've gotta do all of that groundwork, and you've have to have all of those difficult conversations.
Caitlin Faughnan:And, unfortunately, you have to fail at some things to learn what's actually gonna work. So we didn't just highlight all the good things. We tried to highlight where are we failing because those are things that need to be worked on, and we need to dedicate time to work on those things. And those become strategic projects. So we had so many complaints about having to work with legal for, like, sweepstakes.
Caitlin Faughnan:Process took over 2 weeks, a lot of back and forth, opening issues, getting approvals. We're like, this is a problem. We need to work on it. Now we have a process in place where researchers submit a form. It spits back out the rules to them.
Caitlin Faughnan:It takes them 5 minutes. That was a huge time saved. So even getting, like, 1 or 2 of those projects under our belt to show the value in reops was so important for us to actually then say, hey. Look at what we can do when we're given this runway to fly.
Carolyn Morgan:I think something you said is really important is that we have to be able to fail at some things to know what will work. Right? And then it's a continuously iterative process. We're continuously improving and always building, and you you really have to be I think in order for reops to to be strategic and successful, you have to be in an environment we're allowed to feel, and and that those mistakes or those you know, I I actually don't think that they're failures. I think they're just, you know, relentless forward progress.
Carolyn Morgan:You're just always making steps forward, but you have to have the ability to do that, and you have to have that trust. Right? And and I think in some companies, you you probably don't have that. I'm fortunate enough that in the in the team that I work on, on the organization I work on, what we're allowed to. Right?
Carolyn Morgan:And I think part of that is the support that I have from, like, our higher up leadership. And and also, so we can our re ops team was spun up, after our design ops team had already been set up. Right? And so our design ops team kind of helped to pave the way of what it looks like to be strategic, what it looks like to help show, you know, kinda shape the culture and and the work and what, what support looks like. Right?
Carolyn Morgan:And so you know? But we're still like, are we abstain? We're constantly failing, but we're also constantly getting better. And we have that that room to fail, and also that room to grow and and make things a little bit better. Just to jump in
Carina Cook:on that, I think a great example is also teams that or organizations that don't have research ops yet and they're looking to do that. And that's another way to show that parallel between, okay, this is the way things are working right now, but look at where it could go if you had a research ops team or research ops person. Come in with that strategic mindset and build things so that you're working smarter and more efficiently and more effectively and able to scale and all that. But I also want to touch on the point that Carolyn made about trust. I think that that part is also really important when you have leaders behind you that see your strategic value and can be your champions.
Carina Cook:I think it's really important to use that and leverage that. Whether it's, you know, making sure that you're working very closely with design ops or just other insights functions across the organization that see your value and can also leverage what you put out. So I think those are really important things to keep in mind, but also continue selling your pitch of why, why you're there, what research ops is, what value add, and do that as far and wide across the organization as you can, to help fix that lack of education piece or the lack of knowledge about, like, how far research ops can really go.
Kate Towsey:Pedro, did you wanna add something onto the end of that?
Pedro Vargas:No. I think, like, the challenge there, once we're talking about trust, is how can we get this trust of a, like, a new person on the team? And I think something that always helped me was to think about low hanging fruits. Like, what could we do to show the value of research ops in small amounts of tasks or deliverables that we could show that we exist, we are there, and it can be like a huge part of, how can we make the processes more efficient. I recall now an example of a small video that we have done in a company that I recently joined, which was to help researchers to use AI on a specific feat on a specific tool to help them to make the synthesis and analysis process a little bit more easier.
Pedro Vargas:And for some reason, it generated an impact that we are not expecting. So many people got involved. So many people asked us about, this tool that was already there for some months and nobody knew that. And those things, I think they can help us to get this trust, but, yeah, it's challenging.
Carolyn Morgan:I have a question for you all. And so we're talking about trust, and trust is, like, a very, key part to, like, billing this, like, that strategic partnership. Right? So I'm curious. So my team, WeWork, we're embedded with the research team.
Carolyn Morgan:Right? So, like, when we look at the org chart, we report into the director of research. Right? We don't report into design ops or operations or anything like that. And so for us, it's really, it's not easy, but, you know, for us, when we're successful, the research team's successful.
Carolyn Morgan:When the research team's successful, so are we. Right? And so we're building trust back and forth back and forth. And so I'm curious how does that look like for y'all's team? And, like, now that I've kinda dropped that hypothesis, is that something that you think influences how strategic you can be, in in, like, building building that trust?
Carina Cook:So I think that building the trust with the research team, at least in my experience, has been a little bit easier because we understand each other and we know we're working towards the same end goal. I think the piece of trust that I think is harder to build, but still equally important, is upwards and horizontally. So building trust with, leaders across product and design. And again, like other insights functions across the organization. So that they understand what you're here for, what you're there to fix, how you can support them.
Carina Cook:Even though you're a research operations team, so much of what you do has them in mind as well. Whether or not you have democratization in your strategy, we wanna make sure that everything that's being done by research ends up in their hands mutual respect craft relationships across the organization to help push that through as well. Because I think I think on the research piece, we're really lucky or at least I can speak to in my case that it's been very easy to build that trust with research because of that, you know, same impact and and same end goal. But it's harder to do it elsewhere. And that's probably the case for research as well.
Carina Cook:So I think trying to get beyond that across the organization really helps put research ops on the map as well in places that I don't think people, again, know of us or or know of our value. And and that's actually bringing it back to the education piece again.
Caitlin Faughnan:For us, trust has been so important, especially when you have a team of 1. You are the face of pre ops. Like, when they say re ops, they mean, oh, it's Cait on on the research team, that kind of thing. So it's almost like it's your own brand that you have to to carry through as well. So with us, the research team, it's been very easy to build trust.
Caitlin Faughnan:It's easy to have more transparent conversations with them. We also work with the designers. We don't have a dedicated design ops. It all falls on research ops. And I also work with product managers as well as our customer success and marketing teams.
Caitlin Faughnan:So starting to build the trust with those relationships is actually really stressful because we know the expectations of the researchers, and we're speaking the same language. When I'm speaking with designers or PMs, I have to adjust the language I'm using to be a little bit more flat and just over communicating. And that over communicating piece has really helped to build different levels of trust with everybody else that we're trying to communicate with. Because it's like, okay. Now I understand, and this is the steps that Cait's doing to help out on this project or to complete this piece of work.
Caitlin Faughnan:And that over communicating has really helped me manage projects because it's like, oh, well, if Cait's working on it, she'll post the updates as she goes, and I don't have to worry about needing to check-in on a project and say, what's the status of this? The status is already there because it's already communicated. So they can trust that either it's on time or if it's gonna be a project is gonna be delayed. I've said to them, hey, we're experiencing delays here. You know, we're looking at an extra 2 weeks, potentially.
Caitlin Faughnan:Just need you to take that into account. And that those things seem small and things that maybe everybody is already doing, but they have a lot of impact, I found, on other teams.
Kate Towsey:I'm curious in extending on that and going more directly to the question. What are the challenges that sit between research operations and a more strategic relationship with research? We've spoken about trust, but what else is there that you need to that stands in your way, and that you need to think about?
Pedro Vargas:So I have a point here. I think, and it's my perspective here, that people outside our bubble of the re ops bubble or the ops bubble in general, they don't really get the meaning behind scaling. Like, it's a process. It's something for like, that we should start now but the impact might be in the future. They want short term results.
Pedro Vargas:They want things they're, like, in their faces right now. And this is something that I think it's so much challenging for us because if we if we understand that strategic projects are projects like long term projects, we will end up, like messing things up. We should, at some point embrace, I can say, agile or some kind of methods that helps us to generate and show value or communicate more what we do behind the curtains, I think. I don't know if you agree with me.
Caitlin Faughnan:I definitely agree about showing things more behind the curtain. We recently brought out, like, a metrics doc to show different things that we are trying to achieve, and then it does include, you know, like, general participant information, those kind of numbers that people just wanna see, but as well as things like, oh, you're opening these issues and they're not labeled correctly. Why is this happening, and how is it gonna impact us further along? I've had people who are like, oh, that's your process, but I wanna follow my process. And then they teach people the bad process as well.
Caitlin Faughnan:And that's been very difficult to undo and to work with and to try and meet in the middle, but also, like, meet in the middle to guide them to the right process. Like, we have things set up for reasons. It's not just to protect ourselves and the research function, but also, like, our participants. Their experience matters a lot in over contacting governance rules. They're so important, especially internationally.
Caitlin Faughnan:And trying to keep people educated on that, on best practices. And following the rules is also difficult when you're trying to juggle all of these other things Because you also don't want to be coming across as, like, well, Cait's coming here to give out to me because I've done something wrong. So it's a very fine line to balance. And I don't know if any of the rest of you have had that experience as well. But I there's, like, the overall education piece on, like, what REOPS is.
Caitlin Faughnan:And then there's the education piece on why we follow what re ops has set out.
Carolyn Morgan:Yeah. And I think there's a part of scaling that I think scaling, you can only customize so much. Right? And if you customize everything to match what everybody wants, then you're not really scaling. It's just it's gonna end up being chaos.
Carolyn Morgan:And, like, things are not gonna be able to talk to each other. And that's the point of, like, scaling is that things are interoperable. Right? And you can can kinda grow and there's predictability. And there's not a predictability if someone's like, well, I like this to be in this thing.
Carolyn Morgan:You're like, awesome. Cool. That doesn't work for everyone else. Right? And so it is part of that the building with rather than building for.
Carolyn Morgan:So we're trying like, where a lot of our processes are, you know, we're building with and, you know, we've had a lot of shift over the last, you know, over the last year. So a lot of processes are changing, and we're just taking a lot from, like, change management too, and, like, building that change management into the scaling and, like, kind of helping people to understand. Okay. This thing we're gonna introduce today, you're not you're probably not gonna like it. It's not gonna match a 100% what you want, but here's why we're doing it.
Carolyn Morgan:Right? And, like, long term, it's gonna be easier, but, also, like, letting them know, like, yo, it's not a 100% ideal. It's not gonna match everybody, but it's gonna match most of people. So I think it really is an education, talking to people, bringing them in. Scaling is such a it's a weird thing because everyone has their own ideas of what it is too.
Carina Cook:I love the mention of the change management piece because I think that so much of research operations is is and can be change management from, you know, changing from a reactive to a proactive model or, you know, just moving away from the service model little by little. I think it's showing people that you might give them the instructions to do it rather than doing it for them and the benefits of that in the long term, you know, the whole teach a man to fish thing. So I I find that very interesting, and I find that to be a difficult part because very there's there's a lot of pushback for change. Organizations go through nonstop change and sometimes people are just overwhelmed by it. And so to be the person that comes in and is like, okay, well, we're going to change this model, we're going to change this process.
Carina Cook:You're going to now have to follow all these privacy laws that you didn't know of or do before. Sometimes feels like you're coming in as the bad guy. But, I think it's all about showing okay, long term gain, like we are going to be more compliant, we are going to be safe, we are going to be closer to our users, all the things that we're going to get out of it are gonna come in the end. And I think it's about kind of being that champion for yourself along the way because it is really tough. It is really tough to be that person.
Carina Cook:And sometimes you can be perceived as this person's coming to change everything we did, what was wrong with it? But hopefully there's there's some positivity at the end when you're able to show the value of, like, true research ops and the strategy that went behind it, and and and really show show true impact.
Carolyn Morgan:It's really about making research easier. And, like, when you so we found too, like, as we're scaling, as we're building out, we have a lot of researchers that are starting to work with each other that hadn't worked with each other before. And now they're like, ah, okay. Let's get out. Like, we have the same process.
Carolyn Morgan:We're on board. Right? We're starting to work with other people, and it's really making it easier to collaborate, easier to work, not, not having to do the same repetitive stuff. Right? But it is getting them getting that buy in for it.
Carolyn Morgan:And I think that's where, like, kinda circle back to the strategy and leadership question, but before, you know, getting leadership on board with it and helping to support with that change management and getting that message out too.
Kate Towsey:And I would argue also more valuable that, particularly in the recent, what's 3 years of layoffs, it's about how do we help research to be more efficient so the less money has been spent. At the end of the day, the bottom line is what everyone's gonna be looking at. And how do we enable them to deliver even more value into the organization, which requires a much more strategic approach with the research leadership or whoever your leadership is as research operations. Because as you've all said, just responding to someone's need for a tool or their desire for something that they feel for them is gonna make their lives easier. Or they're doing a diary study in a month's time so they want a diary study too.
Kate Towsey:Or whatever the the call is, it's not necessarily gonna help the organisation deliver greater value or deliver something that is perceived as greater value. Have you found in your work in in working more strategically with with leadership, are you at the point yet where you where you're having discussions about value? Which is a hidden question because it requires then that your leadership are having, are thinking about their research strategy and about how they're delivering value as research. Is there what are your push and pulls on this attention in this that you're feeling? If if any at all.
Kate Towsey:Have I silenced you all?
Carolyn Morgan:I'll come at this from... I'll have my researcher head on for a second, and then I'll pop my re reaps head on. So as a researcher, I'm always nervous when people say the value of research because it's like the insights and studies, they aren't really widgetable. Right? We can't say, you know, like, each insight is, like, $4 or something. Or, you know, like, it it's hard to put, like, a standardized metric on it.
Carolyn Morgan:And, also, it takes so long for our insights to actually make it to the end user often. There sometimes can be, like, literally 2 years. Right? Like, I've left companies before my research has made it. Like, the product of my research makes it to the end user.
Carolyn Morgan:And so I think part now here's where our rehabs hat comes back on. I think part of my being a good shepherd and, like, you know, work in reef researchers is kind of bringing that viewpoint to research leadership or whomever are saying, you know, like, oh, we need to have metrics for research. And it's like, okay. But what are those metrics? What are the things that we wanna measure?
Carolyn Morgan:Right? And then if I hear, like, oh, you know, doll you know, dollars for insights or whatever, then be like, oh, how are we gonna do that? Right? Like, let's let's really think about that and and working with them to get down to what they need rather than, again, what they want is really what they need. So so that's kinda how I would
Caitlin Faughnan:approach that. From our point of view, the I again, the the hairs on the neck go up when I hear value of research and things like that. And there's always the, oh, we need to share the insights. I'm like, if we can share the insights everywhere, how do you know who's digesting them? What are they doing with those insights?
Caitlin Faughnan:Because an insight on its own, which is the line in a book, it needs to be used if we're gonna bring any value to the end user. So our some of my favorite ones to showcase is we didn't build a feature based on the insights that we got. The feature could have been really far along in development, and we decided not to launch based on the research that we gathered. We love those kind of pieces for showcasing, look at what we have saved because we didn't launch this. We shifted our priorities, and now we're working on this.
Caitlin Faughnan:I feel like sometimes you need to bring them with you along that kind of journey to be like, look at what research found because we we ticked our boxes. We did it as we like, our process is laid out too, and we decided not to launch. Because, you know, especially when you have tools and they've got all these features and everybody you know, every persona wants to use a feature differently, and that's hard enough to to measure and to to work with. Wait. I I really love the we didn't launch this feature as a a show of value, which is weird in when you say it, but I feel like it really does show a lot of impact when you're looking at higher ups and you're talking to the product folks.
Caitlin Faughnan:And they're like, well, it makes sense now that we've seen that research was able to collect this information, and now we know how we can apply it.
Carolyn Morgan:And that's a good way to get to the bandwidth short. You don't have to wait 2 years for your for your insights to come to prod because this is never gonna happen. Solve that problem right there.
Kate Towsey:And I think there's something interesting in in, I mean, the word research is so broad, and I'm not gonna get into, you could do a whole podcast on what does the word research mean. But you can look at the value of the research practice. It doesn't have to be an individual insight or a report or a repository. And I think there is a very interesting strategic space for research operations to work with leadership on altering for the better the value that research has seemed to provide as a practice. Through things like how do we brand ourselves, how do we educate people to understand what research does?
Kate Towsey:And of course, then behind the scenes is research ops improving its value too. Have any of you been doing any work around, the branding or the perception of research as a practice?
Carina Cook:Yeah. I think outside of focusing on, like, the research itself, it's it's been about getting closer to our users or using evidence based decision making, as an organization. So it's it's about that mind shift from not doing that or basing, you know, the product on on on whatever is coming down the pipeline. But I think that's a way in which research and research ops can show its value. It's we got users in your hands so that you can speak to them regularly and learn from them regularly and have that inform what we do.
Carina Cook:Or we are creating data so that it can inform what we do going forward. And that's just about whole the whole thing of, you know, making sure there's confidence in the work that we put forward. So I think part of that pitch that you do across the company is also making sure that people are on the same page that, like, we wanna be user centric. So what does that mean? That means actually speaking to our users, and that means actually getting data to inform the work that we do.
Carina Cook:And I think that that's one of the ways in which we can show value without having to tie it back to a specific project. To Carol's point, it does take a long time to do that on a project by project basis. But we can show the value in the fact that our leaders are actually speaking to their users regularly and getting a lot from that.
Pedro Vargas:I have something to add here. I think in some companies, in some realities, there is a step before that, mainly bigger, bigger companies, which is the there's a hypothesis here. I think it's like an evidence in some of the companies, maybe our listeners here, will be like, they'll be represented, what I'm going to say right now, which is maybe the researchers themselves, they don't know what they're doing, like, among them. Maybe there's a researcher in the team a who is doing a great job, who is using a technique, a very different technique for to to do research. And there's another research on team b, which is doing the same thing.
Pedro Vargas:And, he or she is facing some problems on this. So I think our challenge here is to bring everyone together. And this is like I've talked about this low hanging fruits. Something we have done recently was to create a researchers' forum, which is to bring everyone together and to establish this community of practice. And it's quite basic, but if we facilitate it well, people will get, like, the results right away.
Pedro Vargas:Like, they will see, okay, you're facing the same problems as I am facing here, so let's talk. So there are different teams, different products, different segments, maybe. So I think this is a step before that that that maybe if if we don't understand that, I think it's part of the reops, process as well to to put everyone together into codesign. I think that's a keyword, to co design things, with the people who do research.
Kate Towsey:Let's take a super short break to hear from Ned Dwyer, the co founder and CEO of Great Question. He'll share his thoughts about the topic and we'll rejoin the panel straight after.
Ned Dwyer:It's critical for any research ops team to provide strategic support to their research stakeholders, not just the tactical services like recruitment or scheduling. And doing that strategic work is sometimes kind of a funny thing, I think, in re ops land. You know, you might not get asked to do it. It might not even be expected of you, but it will definitely have an impact on how you're seeing the organization when you start getting more strategic. I think the first thing you need to figure out is how to carve out time to think and work strategically.
Ned Dwyer:And often that means getting better at operationalizing the services part of your function. How can you make things more self-service? How can you automate things? It's gonna be hard to act strategically if you're back to back on recruitment and logistics. Then you need to develop a deep understanding of what are the goals your organization ladder's up to, what are the goals of the business, your research leads, and your department.
Ned Dwyer:From there, you can figure out what are the biggest problems that are getting the way of achieving those goals and what you're gonna be able to do about overcoming them. Next, we need to set up the right measures to demonstrate impact. What are we gonna measure? How are we gonna measure that? Where are we gonna bring it in?
Ned Dwyer:What are the dashboards we're gonna build? Even just defining these metrics is gonna require a certain amount of strategy because a long way to demonstrate impact. It could be something like Pedro's, you know, research efficiency score or time to recruit or monthly active users in your repo. Often, even just stopping here, getting this far is gonna have a huge impact on supporting your stakeholders' objectives. And from there, I think it gets much more organizationally dependent.
Ned Dwyer:You know? What is the next most impactful thing that you're gonna do to help support the business? But it's a virtuous loop. The more you're able to help achieve broader goals, the more responsibility, the more opportunity you get, more visibility. Ultimately, it's about collaboration and being proactive in seeking out and solving these opportunities.
Ned Dwyer:If there's one more thing I'd add here, it's that to be proactive in sharing what you're working on, the impact you're having, and what you're gonna work on next. If you wanna be seen as strategic, you need to be not only act as a strategic partner, you need to make sure that everyone else sees the work and the impact you're having too.
Kate Towsey:So Carina, earlier you had mentioned something that I find is is interesting is the term true research ops. This is a question for the group. Is there a distinction between what, people seem to, at this point in history, think research ops is versus the work that you're doing on a day to day basis?
Carina Cook:I think so. I I think it goes back to that education piece. I I think that any research ops role I've ever been in, I've had people say, so what what is research ops? Like, what are you here to do? What do you what do you do?
Carina Cook:And I've had this whole presentation of, like, what is research ops? But in in many cases, people are fully surprised and had no idea that it existed. And yes, it's it hasn't been around forever in terms of the title. But I think it's that education piece. I find that people are always pleasantly surprised to see how strategic it can be and all the things that actually happen in the background that you don't always see because it's an operations team and it's kind of the point.
Carina Cook:So I think there's a lot of value to continuing to educate on what true research ops can be, what's the long term value of it, versus I think what some teams have defined it as, which is admin focused or service model only or, you know, end to end coordination. We can be here to streamline a lot of those things, but also to make a lot bigger impact with actually bringing in systems and programs and just making everything you do easier.
Caitlin Faughnan:I always think it's interesting that when I say, oh, I work in research operations to anyone in my current company or even externally. A lot of people are, like if they don't have a research function to begin with, they're very much like, well, let's research ops. But marketing teams, legal teams, they've got marketing ops, legal ops, and people don't seem to have as many of the same questions that they do for research ops, which I think is so interesting. And research ops, yes, might be a newer concept, compared to, like, I guess, you know, marketing would be more of a buzzword team or legal. People just know what those teams do.
Caitlin Faughnan:Whereas, even at the research level, people don't know what the research team does, so they really don't know what the research operations team does. And trying to have those conversations and that education piece is definitely hard. I think it's so nice to see research operations though now getting a space in a lot of the different conferences that are happening because it's a very easy education piece to point people towards or talks that are happening, which I don't think we had, you know, as much of, say, 3, 4 years ago when I was kind of in research jobs for a bit, but still felt pretty new. Now I have resources that I can just send to people and be like, hey. Here's a quick video on all of these, like, high powered research ops teams and all the things that they've done and that we can do here too.
Caitlin Faughnan:And it definitely makes that conversation, I think, a little bit easier.
Kate Towsey:Let's move on to, we've got a couple more questions. This one is, if if a team is stuck in admin, what should they do to move into a more strategic position? What's your advice to them?
Carina Cook:Okay. Okay. So I would say first putting the processes in place to reduce the admin workload. It has to go somewhere. So, where can we streamline it?
Carina Cook:Where can we automate, hand off the responsibilities? I think that's usually one of the first steps when evaluating the research ops and research landscape is, okay, what are we doing right now? And what are these, as Pedro's comment, like, low hanging fruit or quick wins that we can, like, just fix quickly? So put a process in place for that or automate something that you were doing that you don't need to do anymore because there's a tool for that now. If admin is tooling focused, like training or developing resources, push that to the vendor.
Carina Cook:Like, use them for all that they are, as your, you know, customer success expert, and and give them the responsibility of doing that piece, for for your team. And then when all that is is off your plate and a little bit easier, then you can have the time to, you know, push those strategic initiatives or volunteer for those things that will show that your time is better served there and will make, you know, longer term more impact than those short term fulfillments of, you know, I'll just do the incentives day to day for you or, you know, I'll do the end to end recruitment. So, yeah, I'd say find a place for those to go first, fix those.
Caitlin Faughnan:Yeah. Yeah. I Yeah.
Pedro Vargas:I think it's
Caitlin Faughnan:You go first.
Pedro Vargas:Okay. Yeah. I think it's, like, to choose 1 or 2 key projects to work on. Like, try not to be committed with so many things at the same time. And there's also one thing to add here that sometimes you won't, be open to show a new way of doing things because there there won't be time to do that.
Pedro Vargas:So, like, the the key, like, the key thing here is to choose a battle. I would say that, and try to to choose the the one that has a higher impact connecting with the company strategy. I would say that.
Kate Towsey:And, what I love about that, Pedro, is choosing a battle or choosing those 1 to 2 key projects means prioritizing, which is so much a part of strategy. What are you gonna do? What are you not gonna do? Caitlin, did you wanna dive in?
Caitlin Faughnan:So I definitely agree, where possible to to pick those core projects. But, also, the processes are so important, to have in place to allow us to quickly get through tasks. And for us, tooling has played a huge role in that because you lose so much time doing the repetitive tasks, like email templates. There's always a way to simplify that and make it easier for other people to use, things like that. But we also we started with what we had.
Caitlin Faughnan:So we created a metric support that goes out every 6 months to kind of give us some backing. And we use things that people would understand and then highlighted other projects that have been completed that had high levels of impact because it's really hard sometimes to sing your own praises and to be like, look at what we did. Because even if you're a team of 1, a team of 5, sometimes it's always easier to shout about somebody else. If you're a team of 1 and you're like, look what Riops did, in the back of your mind, you're always saying, well, look what I did. And it can be really uncomfortable feeling.
Caitlin Faughnan:And trying to get over that feeling is something that that I go through every time I have to post a report or anything, will help with trying to make that case of moving away from admin or encouraging self serve models. It also lends goes back to that conversation of trust. We've shown that we can deliver and that it has a positive impact or any kind of impact. And it won't matter if that impact sits there and we don't tell others about it. Because without others knowing about it, they'll still only see it as, oh, it's an admin service or things like that.
Caitlin Faughnan:So it's the also just the the shouting about it and being uncomfortable sometimes in doing it.
Kate Towsey:Caro, did you have anything to add into that one?
Carolyn Morgan:Oh, I just wanna, like, double down on that prioritization. So I I kinda chuckled, when you asked the question because, like, literally, I I do this with with my team. I do this with myself. What do we not do? Right?
Carolyn Morgan:Because there's there's an in infinity amount of in infinite amount of work that we can do that will burn ourselves out. Right? So, like, what's the priority? And so working with your boss, you know, regardless of your boss or researcher, operations, whatever, work with them and get really crystal clear on, like, what are we doing? And that means what are we not doing?
Carolyn Morgan:And just that prioritization work is super critical.
Kate Towsey:So we're right at the end of of the session, and we've just discussed a ton of good stuff, really, really interesting stuff. And and I wasn't expecting burnout to come up, but it is such a key point. What is the one thing that you want listeners to take away? Pedro, I'll put you on the spot first.
Pedro Vargas:Yeah. So I would say that we should, find ways to create key initiatives that we can measure their impacts. And also that we should see re ops as a company which has its products. Like, when I I thought about this way, things got changed for me, and I saw a light in the end of the tunnel. Like, we say that UXers and product managers should follow the discovery delivery process, so we should do the same.
Pedro Vargas:We have our customers. We have people who do research, and we should get them on board on board with with us on that. And that's it. The repository is a product. A panel management, system is a product.
Pedro Vargas:So if we see things this way, I think it gets easier, and we can deliver deliver more strategic impact.
Caitlin Faughnan:Yeah. My key takeaway would be, we can't do everything, especially those of us that are a team of 1. You need to really take a step back and say, okay. If I can't do everything, what are the top priorities that I need to do will make my life easier in the long run as a re ops professional? What steps do I need to take to make those projects happen, and whose buy in do I potentially need for that to be successful?
Caitlin Faughnan:Sometimes we get so locked into our work, especially if a lot of it is focused on recruiting, scheduling, incentives, that we will need to remind ourselves that it's okay to take that step back and evaluate at a higher level so that we can be strategic in our approach and have those more meaningful conversations with higher ups, with other teams, even with just the core team of, like, hey. We need to do this so that we can be better, and then here's how we'll all benefit.
Carina Cook:Yeah. To Caitlin's point about we can't do it all, we can't. So educate your stakeholders and your partners about, like, the full potential that Research Ops has, across the organization, not just with research. And then to to both Caitlin and Pedro's points about, like, getting buy in and getting people on board, I I think it's also about getting involvement from other people to push things through. If you are a research ops team of 1, build those communities of practice, find your champion researchers that love this initiative or or wanna be very involved in privacy and work with them to push things forward faster and with more insight into what you're doing because, we can't do it all and and everyone is gonna benefit from these from these collaborative projects.
Carina Cook:So, yeah, get as much help as you can.
Kate Towsey:Did you want the final word, Cara?
Carolyn Morgan:I feel like well, I don't know, but I'm I guess I get it. I feel like I'm just gonna reiterate everything that Carina and Pedro and Cait said already, but also, you know, service design. Really, like, that that is if you're looking for a place, like, to get started and how to do this and not feel overwhelmed. You know, a lot of you know, I I've been in research for a bajillion years, but until I started looking at this from a service design perspective, it just felt overwhelming. Right?
Carolyn Morgan:But, really, you know, co design, working with folks, and looking at those needs, not the wants.
Kate Towsey:Succinct, and I couldn't agree more. A big thanks to our guests for sharing their time and expertise and to our sponsor, Great Question. Learn more about Great Question at greatquestion.co/chacha. That's c h a c h a. In 2 weeks, a different crew of ResearchOps professionals will tackle another great question.
Kate Towsey:So make sure to subscribe and tune in. This podcast is a limited edition series produced by the Cha Cha Club. We're a member's club for ResearchOps professionals. You can find out more at chacha.club.