Product Research Operations
How I turn user research from a per-project cost into a compounding asset: shared participant pools, repositories, taxonomies, and the operating rails that surround the work.
Research Ops
Research Ops, short for Research Operations, is a distinct discipline within the realm of user research that focuses on streamlining and enhancing the overall research process. It involves establishing effective systems, processes, and tooling to support and scale user research activities within an organisation.
By tackling logistical challenges — participant recruitment, data management, and knowledge sharing — it frees up researchers' time to concentrate on conducting valuable research and generating meaningful insights. In essence, Research Ops is the infrastructure layer that lets research compound.
Like Design Systems and Design Ops — and like any Ops — the objective is to gain efficiencies in research operations to increase the ROI of intelligence. The team has a process; the process is good; new teams adopt the process; the system improves with use. Quality goes up, lead time goes down, and decisions get made on insight that other teams can find later.
For a worked example of standing this up inside a 500+ person organisation, see my Thoughts piece on Kicking off Research Ops in large organisations.
