What is research ops and how do you actually build it?
There might already be a specialist on your team, or you might be a research team of one—whatever your situation, research operations can be built and scaled anytime. My experience building and scaling research operations has taken place at startups from Seed stage to Series B, and I've seen its impact across the team and the business: from supporting research sprints to product-market fit research and helping the team navigate the pivots that many startups face. Your future self and team will thank you for setting up research ops early and refreshing it often.
There are quite a few existing frameworks that you can leverage depending on your needs and approach—like Nielsen Norman Group's (NN/g) six pillars or ReOps' eight pillars. I definitely leveraged both—but I really believe that frameworks are just tools to help you make decisions and create processes — you'll need to map out where you are now and where you want to grow, and right-size a recommendation and approach for your organization, team, research maturity, and resources.
Let’s take a look at how I actually did it at a startup.
Discover & evaluate
01 Conduct research with stakeholders
02 Assess research maturity using NN/g framework
03 Map out tools and identify gaps
Phase 2
Get buy in
01 Get buy in from stakeholders
02 Align on the work ahead
03 Present findings & recommendations for tools, approach, and why now
Phase 3
Build the foundation
01 Create processes, templates (interview guides, research plans, report etc.)
02 Start a resource hub (choosing a method, what is research, research ethics, research vs interview questions, etc.)
03 Launch a Slack channel to share resources, socialize key findings or insights
04 Set up new research tools (Dovetail) and socialize with team
Phase 4
Scale & refine
01 Set up a research repository to house findings, insights, and templates
02 Create tutorials on how to use the repo and hold office hours for questions
03 Keep socializing and sharing out the work being done
Phase 5
Educate & empower
01 Deploy a survey to explore workshop topics and open research questions
02 Design and facilitate research workshops to align team and scale research
03 Continue to refresh and iterate on the foundations
Throughout this process, the team was genuinely excited about research because they could see the value of doing it regularly by talking to users and pausing to take time to explore and validate new ideas to build the right thing, at the right time. This whole process took about 6 months, and was refreshed often.
3 key pieces you can start planning, today
Workshops & training
It's always a good time for a workshop. Designing and facilitating workshops that are engaging and interactive can make research meaningful to others, removing the mystery and making it easily understood. Meet people where they are and take them on a journey, together.
Aligned with workshops, training or a knowledge hub is a critical piece that, when set up early and refreshed often, can support you and the team through pivots. These trainings or resources might look like how to choose a method, where to find all the templates or links to repos, what research does and why, and what the process or timeline of research done on your team looks like realistically.
Repository
Repositories don't just help researchers see what's been done and learned; they also help socialize research findings and insights across the team—giving more transparency and visibility into the process. Starting a small repo with some existing or upcoming research sets up research to scale and drives its impact across the business.
Research repos help align the team on the work to be done, empower others to see the very real impact, and bring the business closer to the user.
Templates
Templates = efficiency and consistency. They're critical for the team from day one.
Crafting templates for research plans, interview guides, notes, analysis or synthesis—even reports and presentations—all feed back into research maturity, support the team by letting them actually focus on the work to be done instead of setting up yet another doc, and create alignment and shared understanding across the team and organization.
You'll remove barriers by creating templates early and refreshing often.