Where do we go from here?
I have strong opinions about organizations with a research department but do not allow their research and operations leaders to influence product development.
EVERYONE does research. They just do. Stop fighting it.
Specialists are critical
Operations is critical
Research basics education is non-negotiable
Information silos are the slow death of innovation
Hire someone with the heart to build the bridges needed to break down silos, the vision to define the processes for that tactical work to exist in, and the experience to build the best teams for the job.
I am the owner, current executive director, an original team member of the ResearchOps Community and its industry-defining movement. I also run their associated ReOps Conferences. I am a Research and Research Operations Director who has held many roles as a leader, manager, strategist, consultant, and industry analyst in B2B user research and product development strategy.
A global community of ResearchOps and Research professionals discussing ResearchOps — the people, mechanisms, and strategies organizations use to scale their design and user research practice. Our community began on the 8th of March, 2018, with a tweet from Kate Towsey.
What are we doing now?
Spearheading one of the world's most successful open-source UX communities, I lead an all-volunteer workforce of hundreds and execute projects at a scale most researchers could never do in their "day jobs." I have planned, supported, and scaled hundreds of workshops with thousands of participants in 70+ countries using dozens of languages, which generated millions of data points in the past three years.
At a high level, the community's mission aims to answer the "what, why, and how" of the emerging field of Research Operations. To date, this has included:
Generative workshops that explore what researchers think Research Operations is.
Evaluative workshops on a global understanding of skills and career laddering for researchers with a value chain mapping
Large-scale and multi-method studies on how the research cycle fits into an organization's larger world of information and how to best generate, preserve, distribute, and license the data, information, and insights that research creates inside an organization.
Ongoing research that supports education on building knowledge management systems.
Ongoing research that supports the entire participant lifecycle and recruiting for research.
The ONLY conference that focuses entirely on research operations work and the professionals who do that work.
ReOps Conference started in 2022 in partnership with Learners in Brooklyn, NY. We’ve continued on our own and provided learning and networking for thousands of attendees.
CEO
2022 – Current
Cisco
Data Analytics & Research Operations Program Manager
2023-Current
I manage the events, roadmap, outcome metrics, and KPIs for the cloud customer experience research teams.
As a program manager I:
Partner with Research Leadership to define the UX Research teams' planning and road mapping process.
Defined and track the yearly/quarterly metrics and KPIs for research, helping the team execute to exceed those goals by 130% in the first year.
Own and program manage the data and behavioral analytics teams comprised of quantitative UX, data scientists, business analysts, QA engineers, and UX designers.
Own recurring stakeholder updates, serving as a bridge between UX Research and cross-functional teams and leaders.
Support the management of research requests and intake, sprints, backlog, retrospectives, and work with Research Leadership on prioritization.
15Five
Director of User Research and Research Ops
2019-2021
Launched and led the user research discipline at the Series B scale-up, including:
Research and research operations program management
Drove the weekly syncs with Engineering, Marketing, and Customer Success teams to understand research needs, tools integration, information flow, and capacity across the organization
Research vendor and services management
Defined career ladders and performance evaluations
Established a scalable recruitment process for existing customers and external participants that is more diverse, inclusive, and representative
While there, I directed the teams responsible for:
The redesign of the information architecture of the entire product
Refining and addressing product-market fit discrepancies that redirected business focus from a freemium model to cross-product tools integration and partner-selling
Defining and testing the product development process, from managing the expectations of executives' ideas to the release and monitoring of live products
iCIMS
Principal UX Research Analyst
2016-2020
I was the creator and owner of the user research process and management for internal and external facing products. I functionally built out the UX Research program within the design department of the product organization.
As such I generated and managed an internal panel of diverse user research participants that I sourced through a platform intercept to all users (over 250,000 unique users every 2 weeks). I introduced empirical user testing methods for concepts, projects, product modules, and feature updates. I implemented and directed the end-user and broader industry user persona development, the usability and partnered visual accessibility testing of products and services, moderated and unmoderated user testing methods, enabled journey and workflow mapping for teams that own the E2E development of their projects. I also provided SME feedback and heuristic analysis on the internal UX of the creation of the iCIMS design system and design kits for UI developers.
I was responsible for the development of cross-functional team training and with that the maintenance of an internal and centralized product-side user research repository combining qualitative and quantitative insights from customer service, surveys, user feedback, usability testing, and field studies. This included documentation of internal UX and product research process development, UX education, educational and product-based workshops, with documentation of UX research methodologies. I informed the overall product roadmap, owning the product-side UX research definitions, processes, and Design Thinking education for a cross-departmental UX strategy team.