How can I build a compelling business case to convince leadership to establish the first ResearchOps position in the company?
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 ResearchOps? This series is sponsored by Great Question, the all in one UX research platform. And I'm your host, Kate Towsey, and the founder of the Cha Cha Club and the author of Research That Scales: The Research Operations Handbook. This is episode 4.
Kate Towsey:In the studio, we have Shannon.
Shannon Lu:Hi. I'm Shannon Lu. I'm a senior research operations specialist. I work at IKEA in the Inca digital space.
Kate Towsey:And we have Bryna.
Bryna Tsai:Hi. I'm Brina Tsai. I'm the head of UX operations at Verily.
Kate Towsey:And last but not least, Emily.
Emily Wever:Hi. I'm Emily Weaver. I'm the senior customer outreach manager at Appfire.
Kate Towsey:All guest views are their own and not that of their employer. This is episode 4 and the great question we're tackling today is how can I convince leadership to establish the 1st research ops position in the company? So let's start right there. Emily, Shannon and Brena, how have you convinced leadership to establish the 1st research ops position? What are your stories?
Kate Towsey:Who's gonna dive in first? Emily, you've got your eyebrows up.
Emily Wever:Well, my I mean, I'm sure all of our stories are very unique. My my journey in this process has been very unique. I was hired as a recruiter for Appfire, and, we've undergone several, management changes and reorganizations of my of of how we wanna focus research. And now we're instead of being our own separate space, we're under the product org. So I noticed that what I was doing is I was recruiting, but also, we had no other structures.
Emily Wever:We had no we didn't have the structures in place around informed consent and how to actually scale research, even though we were being asked to scale research. And so I've I've had to I mean, I started in recruiting, but I've had to transition by just advocating for there is so much here that needs to be done, and somebody needs to do it. And coming from a background in with another industry where I was very heavily involved in operations, I could see all of those structures that needed to be put in place and then found the research operations community. So that's kind of a a nutshell how I I've started this. I'm still working on getting my own title change to actually reflect that I'm research ops as opposed to me as opposed to only a recruiter.
Emily Wever:So I think I'm on my journey for convincing leadership. I think I've convinced my immediate leadership, and now it's just in the HR gods' hands.
Kate Towsey:What industry were you in previously? Just out of interest.
Emily Wever:I spent, a couple of decades working in banking in the United States, specifically commercial banking. So there's a heavily, obviously, heavily regulated industry, very, very operations heavy. There are structures in place for everything you can possibly imagine in that industry. So coming to a place in technology where there are minimal structures and people really just, like, make stuff up, that was that was kind of a shock for me.
Kate Towsey:Actually, I remember when we first met, we chatted about that and, it was, you know, wild west compared to the banking sector.
Bryna Tsai:It's a
Emily Wever:little bit wild west compared to the banking, but that's not a bad thing. Right? I mean, it's it it allows the freedom to actually build the structures and the things that you want to do. And I feel like I have an advantage coming in in this particular role just because I do have that operational visibility. I've I've worked in that industry for so long.
Emily Wever:I'm like, oh, yeah. These are the structures you want. We just have to translate them into this.
Kate Towsey:I wanna sort of head back and really capture what you're saying there. So for you, the convincing is being changing you into a full research operations role. Is that right?
Emily Wever:Yes.
Kate Towsey:Right. And so what are the things that you've been doing to make that happen?
Emily Wever:It's been a lot for me about understanding what is important to leadership and management and then learning what those words are because so much of any industry is learning what the language is and then how to communicate the value to leadership. Because if they don't see the value in it, like why can't the researchers just do all of these things? Well, the researchers are trying to do research. And so you have to communicate and you have to find, you have to go digging for the data. You have to go digging for the metrics if you can find them, and and be able to communicate in the way that the management can hear that there's value in adding a research operations professional as opposed to just saying, well, the researchers can do all this work because they're doing it already.
Kate Towsey:Shannon, you're you're nodding wildly there.
Shannon Lu:Yeah. I mean, well, I'm also a big nodder in general. But, I mean, I personally haven't been part of, the part before, you know, having the role because a lot of the times I am, the one that applies like after there is, you know, posting, And, obviously, I'm an advocate for it because please hire research ops. I am a big advocate, obviously. But I have talked to, you know, multiple friends who are, maybe solo researchers or, you know, just starting a team.
Shannon Lu:And I think that is also part of that experience of, like, okay. People, when they start a research team, they're like, okay. I'm gonna start this team. I'm gonna do all these research things. But at eventually, you reach kind of a threshold where you're, like, as one person or as, you know, maybe a research team of however many until you get there.
Shannon Lu:You can only do so much. Right? And so I I've been part of that process where I've heard from friends where they're like, we really want research ops because we need more time, you know, we need more capacity. And, like, at the end of the day, people are also half doing jobs. Like, I always say it's, like, kind of like a spork.
Shannon Lu:Like, you're half a researcher and half an ops person, but you don't have that time to be fully anything. So that is kind of, I think, a lot of also besides the metrics, which obviously is important. That's also part of it where people are like, we don't have time to be doing full time jobs. Like, we need somebody else to come and, you know, help us progress our team, like, make us, you know, move to the next step of the the research kind of development process, I would say.
Kate Towsey:I think it's interesting that you mentioned the word full time job. And I think that's, in my experience where it's it's just a little administration on the side and then realizing that really it's not just administration, that it's actually systems design and it takes a lot of work and it's not just about the fact that it's a full time job in terms of the hours it takes, but it's also a full time job in terms of the fact that it's highly specialist work. It requires an operations brain and muscles to do. And so I think, from my experience and what I've seen, a lot of people be like, well, we'll get a researcher the research leader or whoever. We'll say, we're gonna do this bit of, you know, operation stuff on the side and then realizing, oh, hang on a second.
Kate Towsey:Actually, I need, like, real ops muscle here and time to get this job done. Breanna, is that something that you've you've seen or, you know, where do you where do you come from?
Bryna Tsai:Yeah. For sure. I mean, I think I'm a little bit, I think I'm on the spectrum, but, I've been really lucky to work at a lot of places where they already are convinced that they need research ops. But I was the 1st, GM hire at Verily. They were trying to have a research manager handle all of the operations related things, and they finally were like, we cannot do this anymore.
Bryna Tsai:Like, this is not our job as researchers and research managers. So I did get really lucky. They obviously opened up that headcount, and, we're really looking for someone who had the experience in research ops. I will say I think because Verily works in the healthcare space, it, like, became more evident very quickly. You know, we have to deal with legal and privacy concerns and regulatory concerns.
Bryna Tsai:And so it just is so much work. You know, they finally, they, they knew they knew they needed someone full time. So, you know, I was very lucky in that sense. So do
Kate Towsey:you think it's fair to say that the one way to convince that people get convinced, say that we're talking about decision makers here, really, the people who are gonna be able to go and get that headcount are convinced to get their 1st research ops hires through, getting their fingers burnt in the 1st place and realizing firsthand.
Bryna Tsai:Oh, for sure. Oh, for sure. I I always say I think people often hire research ops too late. Right? Like, it's always too late because they have to
Emily Wever:feel yep.
Bryna Tsai:They have to feel how difficult it is for them to realize. And so I don't I don't know many places that have realized ahead of time that they should probably hire someone.
Shannon Lu:Yeah. Yeah. Actually, I went through an interview process once where I think it was just the, research lead, and she was hiring her 1st person. And for whatever reason, bless her, she decided that research ops would be her first person because I think that, I think culture is something that is hard to build in general. And when you start a research team and you do all these things, like I said, have have to do all these things that is technically a full time job for most organizations, you you you run into some roadblocks when you build this huge team and then suddenly you're like, oh, wait.
Shannon Lu:We need, like, data privacy and we need consent forms. We need recruitment. We need all these things. And but they've already been doing their job for, like, 6 months and they're already used to a certain process. And then suddenly, you have to come in and be like, actually, you need someone to sign this first.
Shannon Lu:So you need someone to do this first. And it's so much harder to change a group, like, a year, 6 months, whatever after they've started rather than from the beginning where they should do that. But like we say and like you said, Kate, usually they unfortunately do it after they're like, we I guess we need it, when they should probably start from the beginning because it makes it much easier than to to, you know, have a smoother process, I think.
Emily Wever:The other thing that that I'm starting to anticipate happening is the audit process that's gonna come up. Right? We're building our we're building all of our processes now, and I can see because I've got, you know, the operational brain like you were saying. I can see 6 months, 12 months down the road where, oh, our our IT department's gonna come in, and if you have things in your key drive or wherever you're storing things that aren't supposed to be there because it's been determined that those items are out of compliance, I don't know what our process is going to be that hasn't been determined yet to to, you know, audit that, but that will also create some sort of pain for people who are doing research. So it's better, like Shannon was saying, to have those processes set up initially rather than lose all sorts of data and not and not know what you've lost because IT just came in and said, oh, we're auditing this and you can't have it.
Emily Wever:And now it's gone.
Kate Towsey:So let's say that on that point, let's say that a researcher or research leader there, they're listening to this right now and they're nodding and going, yeah. Yeah. We're feeling that pain right now. We need that first research ops hire. I'm convinced.
Kate Towsey:Get it for me. What I'm hearing is, a good place to start is for them to measure, measure the pain in a sense, I guess, find out what are the, where are the areas that we're feeling the most pain and more than just, it's like, I don't know, I'm going to pick 30, finding 30 participants a month or 50 participants or a 100 or whatever. Pick your number. It could be, the real pain to the business. So what value is the business losing?
Kate Towsey:Well, it can often be that because researchers are taking so much longer over recruiting, that's many hours of high paid salary, or mid paid salary, whatever you wanna put that, that's getting lost. And we could put a platform in, that allows that to happen much more quickly and many hours are saved. So for someone who is listening to this and they're thinking, yeah, I want that first research up's heart. I'm feeling the pain. What is the best thing for them to do next?
Bryna Tsai:Yeah. I mean, I think like you said, there is a piece you know, this measurement piece. It's always it's it's sometimes can be hard to quantify. And so I think that's why participant recruitment often ends up being the first thing that burns people because it it it's the one that feels like it takes up the most time and it's the easiest to see. Right?
Bryna Tsai:It's the easiest to say, hey. We're not able to do UX research. We, like, cannot get you users to talk to because there's no one who has the time to be getting this participant recruit, participants for our studies. So, I think that's the most obvious or often the most painful at first or sometimes the easiest to bring to, you know, business folks to to advocate for that headcount. But, you know, Emily was right.
Bryna Tsai:There's a whole bunch of other things that people don't even think about. You know, I think a lot about we're we're thinking a lot about our research repository. And, you know, the fact that our research archive isn't terribly well organized or people don't always know where to find it, so they don't go to it. And then we end up running the same research over and over. Right?
Bryna Tsai:Or people leave and they take knowledge with them. And then now you don't know what you've already done. You don't know what your past research is. You're just running the same things over and over. So you you just lost, you know, hours of researchers' time, hours of stakeholders' time, hours that you could be building products, you know, making decisions more quickly, with research you've already done.
Bryna Tsai:So, you know, it's just I think that's something that that we've thought a lot about recently, and not everyone really notices.
Kate Towsey:I think that brings up an interesting point of, I find that the, often the assumption is, well, we need to measure the amount of pain that's being felt and, how much time we could save, through operations. And the part that is not often thought of is how much value can we like, how can we improve the value that we get out of things? Yeah. Mhmm.
Emily Wever:The ROI.
Kate Towsey:Which is exactly, Brina. Yeah. Yeah. The exactly the ROI, Emily. Like, Brina, that's kinda what you're saying.
Kate Towsey:It's like it's it's not just about, making it easy to find research, but about how do we capture and save and make the most of the research that's been done. And so that's that could be a business case too.
Shannon Lu:Yeah. I think, oh, sorry.
Emily Wever:No. No. No. Go. Go.
Emily Wever:Go.
Shannon Lu:I was gonna say I think, I I always think of I mean, obviously, yes, saving money, saving time, that's really important. But I agree with you, Kate. Like, what what more can you do? Like, how how how do you bring your research team to the next step and and do more? You know?
Shannon Lu:Like, I think a lot of research, they're like, oh, it's gonna take, like, a couple a few weeks or a few months or whatever, and you only you're you're you just are used to, like, oh, I'm only gonna do, you know, a certain amount of research per year because that's, like, kind of all you have capacity for. But sometimes I I even think researchers don't even know or research teams or even leadership don't even know, like, how much more they can do. I remember asking once, like, you know, one of my researchers, in a previous job, What do you what do you need? Like, what help do you need from me? I was already hired, of course.
Shannon Lu:So so so they already knew there's research ops person, but that person couldn't even think of all the things that, could have been possible because she was so used to doing everything herself. You know, I think a lot of people often also come from an environment where they're their own program manager. They're doing all the tasks themselves. So they don't even realize that there's a possibility to even get help with some of these tasks. And so when I told her, I was like, oh, yeah.
Shannon Lu:I can absolutely help you with, you know, x, y, and z. She was like, what? She she didn't even, like, think about it because she was so used to doing so many things herself. So I feel like there's all these possibilities that can be, you know, you can be brought to the next level without even knowing, like, what are all the things that a research ops person can do, can help you with, you know, like, take these loads off your table so that you can then do other things. And I think that's something that's like it's not only things that you lose, but it's also the things that you can gain in that experience.
Emily Wever:Yeah. It it makes things scalable by having research that you can reference previously, by having systems in place to make sure that you can you can use that research that you've, you know, done previously that it isn't out of date for, you know, time or for consent purposes. It it creates so much as it creates a scalable repeatable process that creates efficiencies that actually ends up saving money in the long run. But you have to convince people about the long run. Right?
Emily Wever:I mean, everything is very short term focused in our world. And this you know, we're I I'm like the things I'm looking at now, the projects I'm looking at now, I keep having to tell people this is 6 months. This is 12 months. This is a next year thing. Like, I know that we want this yesterday.
Emily Wever:Also, that's I'm not even looking at that until 2025. And, yes, it's on my calendar to do, but that's not that's not a this year thing. It will be amazing, also not this year. So it's it's about creating that long term, I think, as well, encouraging that long term vision from leadership to say, we've got a good process now. We can have a great process in the future.
Kate Towsey:Yes. I'm sure everyone else is thinking the same thing. Yes. It does. It takes so much time.
Emily Wever:And so time. Is that
Kate Towsey:that question of how do you build how do you entrain that patience into a world that is not patient, that needs everything yesterday. Is this Brina and Shannon, is this something that you are feeling in your roles as well?
Shannon Lu:I think it depends on the the company, in organization. Like, in smaller organizations, I feel like, oh, when people want things, we're like, yeah. This is fast. We can get this tool. We can get this or, like, situation done.
Shannon Lu:If only there's 10 researchers or something, you know, it's a lot easier to to get something on board. But then I've been in large organizations where you sometimes just don't have that control where you're like, yeah, we wanna get something, but procurement's probably gonna take 6 months, and we need to sign this, and we need to do this, which totally fine. Like, I I I absolutely understand that, you know, processes are there for a reason. But I think also sometimes people don't realize, like, this is actually something that takes long, and it's not because of us. It's just because, like, operations is operations, and you have to rely on other groups.
Shannon Lu:And it's it's how it goes sometimes.
Bryna Tsai:Yeah. I think similar in my case, again, working in in kind of the health care space, I think, in fact, the company as a whole has a has a bit of trouble sometimes moving quickly. Right? We're very concerned about regulatory things and legal things and, people's private health information is is, really sensitive. So, I've actually worked a lot, with our teams to to convince them that we as a UX team, UX research team, we know what we're doing.
Bryna Tsai:We are very conscientious and mindful of participant data. Like, we want we have the same goals as them. We wanna keep it safe. And, you know, I think I spent a lot of time, you know, working with legal very closely to come up with a set of guidelines that we can use so that they don't have to review, you know, every single study that we're trying to do, even though that would be, I think, their preference and make them feel better. So I've done a lot of work just, you know, reassuring them and educating them on what it is UX research does and how we're already gonna be really careful with, you know, participant data and things like that.
Bryna Tsai:So, that's been really great that we've, like, gotten to a good place where, you know, they understand what UX is. They understand what we're trying to do. They can rely on us to to, you know, come to them with questions when we know we're not, you know, when we're not quite sure what to do in a certain case. And so, yeah, it's really funny. I I I do think that people often want things right now and that Mhmm.
Bryna Tsai:That's that's always how it's gonna be intact, but we've had a a kind of interesting side of that here here at Verily.
Kate Towsey:There's an arcade fire song called Everything Now.
Shannon Lu:It's a good song. I I
Kate Towsey:I anointed that my research operation song. We want everything now. I
Shannon Lu:want everything now. I needed everything now.
Kate Towsey:But, Emily, it does make me it reminds me of when when I was running a research ops team at Atlassian, there was a real balance between giving something now that was, that did a pretty good job because it proved value. It showed yeah. Yeah. I can give you value and I can give you some value now. But in giving that thing, not letting go of the bigger vision that you're working on because that's the thing that's really gonna give value in the long run.
Kate Towsey:And so there's always this balance of here's something that I that I want you to think is the full picture so you feel quite satisfied by it, but it's actually pretty easy to give to you. And then in the background, I'm working on this, like, mega thing that's going to be so satisfying. You have no idea how how satisfying it's going
Shannon Lu:to be.
Emily Wever:Yep. Yep. I'm actually using great question for that right now, and trying to build a customer panel, which is very challenging in the ecosystem I work in. So yeah.
Kate Towsey:You get the prize for vendors.
Shannon Lu:Good point. I was doing that. I was afraid. I think it's actually, a good point as well about, give it like, starting with something and then, like, having a program that does enough, but then having an actually, like, good program that lasts and, you know, works. Because I think the problem with not having research ops is probably a lot of researchers or teams, they set these things up once again as a part time job.
Shannon Lu:They do it as, like, oh, we have to have this, so let's just turn it out and throw it out there. But a lot of times they do it and they think, oh, checkbox, it's done. But like things like repositories, things like panels, things like that, they need maintenance, you know, they need to be changed over time. They need to be developed. They need to be like, you know, built into a different way.
Shannon Lu:Maybe if your company, you know, ships or whatever, like, it's not just one thing that you do and it's done. But I think oftentimes if teams don't have somebody or a team to manage that, they end up doing just enough and then letting it be. And it ends up being more work later on when we're like, oh, we wanna recruit, but none of these people actually still use the same phone number or still use same email or something like that. So I think that's also something to think about where, like, research jobs is not just like a checklist. It's something that should be once again a full time job that, you know, is developed and maintained over time.
Emily Wever:Yeah. That ongoing maintenance of things is so important. There are so many times where, in previous, in my previous life, I would build things because I thought they were cool. And I would give them to my team, and no one would use them. No one would care.
Emily Wever:And it would just, like, it would just die on the vine. And so getting the buy in upfront and then having that maintenance to keep the content fresh, to keep the content updated, so people can rely on it. Right? You basically become the reliability factor for all the information that you're storing.
Kate Towsey:Let's take a super short break to hear from Ned Dwyer, the cofounder and CEO of Great Question. He'll share his thoughts about the topic, and we'll rejoin the panel straight after.
Ned Dwyer:Anytime you're trying to convince anyone to do anything, it all starts with what's their goal. Are they trying to increase product velocity or overcome a competitive threat or maybe deliver more successful products to market? Understanding that is gonna help you understand whether or not you're gonna be able to convince them that hiring a reops person is gonna help them achieve that goal. A common goal here at Greg Question is leadership wants to increase the speed to insight. How can we turn questions into insights faster Maybe through a re ups team.
Ned Dwyer:To get to the heart of that matter is gonna require research. Creating a journey map. What is the process? Where are the bottlenecks? What is the impact of that bottleneck?
Ned Dwyer:A common one is research recruitment. It can be super laborious to, you know, identify sources and change for customer interviews. So how can you quantify that? It could be the impact measured in time. Each researcher is spending 20% of the week on re ops related tasks, which increases the time to insight by at least 20%.
Ned Dwyer:Or it could be money. Hey. We paid researchers x per year with 5 researchers who are paying a full time headcount just on re ups type tasks. Jeez. We could save a lot of time and money if we're able to, just hire someone that that was their full time role while also increasing research velocity, increasing research quality, and creating a better environment for attracting and retaining the best talent.
Ned Dwyer:Hiring a re ops person might not even be the first thing that happens though, and it's important to be prepared for that. You might start with maybe first switching someone to a purely ops role, going from research to research ops to demonstrate that this will actually increase research philosophy for everyone else in the team. Then maybe you're requiring a tool to help streamline some of this. And, yes, I'm talking my own book as the founder of Great Question, but this is gonna help you demonstrate that actually can do a lot with a little. We might start to spend 5 to 10% of our time on admin, but we can see how this improvement would happen.
Ned Dwyer:Then hiring someone, you know, it's clear what the outcome is then gonna be on that, to take on some of that extra heavy lifting. Ultimately, I think it's about helping your leaders to help yourself. If you can help solve their problems, they're gonna help you solve yours as well, and everybody wins.
Kate Towsey:Yesterday or the day before, we recorded episode 6. And so I can kind of see into the future and that I know what's coming up in episode 6. And we were talking about us being, like, I was trying to remember the names, like, knowledge ambassadors. And, Emily, you were saying, you know, keeping keeping the knowledge, keeping that reliability in check is so much a part of the job. Shannon, what I was thinking about in response to what you're saying is what I often see as well is not just research jobs being treated as a checklist of cool panel, tool procured, done, and then it sits there.
Kate Towsey:Now we're gonna go for library tool, done, sits there. And gets used for a while but then because it's not maintained, loses its value and then slowly dies on the vine. That was such a nice phrase, Emily. But also I feel what's very often missed is all the work that goes into making all of these siloed tools a cohesive system. How do you move from one tool to the next?
Kate Towsey:Now we're kind of going a little off topic here, but it is an interesting topic. Because research doesn't it's not just recruiting. It's also capturing the knowledge and then putting the knowledge into a space where you analyze and synthesize and then sharing it and then hopefully retrieving it at some other point, Brina, to your earlier conversation about repositories. And so that's a whole lot of work too. How do you this is actually on topic.
Kate Towsey:How do you sell that? Is that something that you can use as as business case? Or or do you think that's, like, more of a mature thinking for, like, a team that's already well established?
Bryna Tsai:I mean, I think you can definitely think about getting ahead of it or if you think to hire a research ops person enough in advance to think through it. Because actually, you know, we've talked about how people often hire research ops too late. And what I see is you could join a company and they've just tried to plug all the holes, all the operations holes with different tools. And you're right in that people don't think about the tools holistically. They just go, oh, shoot.
Bryna Tsai:I have a problem. Let me find a third party tool to fix that. Oh, shoot. I have this problem. Let me try and do that.
Bryna Tsai:And if you're in a big enough organization with a lot of researchers, there's also different researchers who run into the problems at different times. So then you get a researcher who will raise an issue that they're having, you know, and then no one's thinking about, okay. Well, what about, you know, the 50 other researchers that were that are on the team and what what issues they're they're they're running into? So I have, you know, come into places where there really is just this, like, hodgepodge of different tools that people use and everyone uses them differently. You know, no one has like put together guidelines on, you know, what are the best tools to use for what kinds of projects and, oh, when do you wanna, you know there is not a process for, okay, you run the study and then you wanna, like, upload it to these tools for these things.
Bryna Tsai:You know, there's it it is a little chaotic and it is very kind of like Band Aid y. You know, it just kind of slap a Band Aid when it when it comes. So, it would be really nice, you know, if you hire a research ops person enough in advance that they can kind of think through the entire program as a whole, instead of in in bits and pieces.
Kate Towsey:Or when they first your first one arrives into the chaos of the hodgepodge tool mess, the spaghetti junction, to give them that space and time to be able to sort it out. I I I've been in positions where, you can come in and even if there haven't been a ton of tools, there's been like 1 or 2 really badly procured tools that are really expensive. And just in chopping it out or renegotiating or sorting it out, been able to save 100 of 1,000 of dollars within a short amount of time.
Bryna Tsai:For sure.
Kate Towsey:So, I mean, if someone, I guess, is wanting to ask for their first research ops hire, I guess you've kind of have to do that little bit of work to figure out what are the things that they could cut if someone were to come in and work it out. And if you could say I think we could say x 100 of 1,000 of dollars a year in reorganizing our tooling stack, that could be a pretty good place to start.
Bryna Tsai:Oh, for sure.
Kate Towsey:Yeah. And I
Shannon Lu:think that goes back to, you know, having reasons to ask the leadership for it. If you're like, hey. If we can save you, like, 500,000, you know, on this tool, we can do so much more with all these other things, and we can even pay a person to be hired to, you know, do the actual job of maintaining the tool or something like that. And I think that that's a really good point of balancing, like, not only the tool itself and how it's used and, you know, what exactly the whole tool stack is, but also how does it work for your organization, for your budget, you know, for your situation. I think that's something that like, working different companies, there's always different things that I think about, like, tools that work for 1 company, one organization.
Shannon Lu:It's not the same for every organization. Like, you don't necessarily need something for a team of 3 versus a team of, you know, 500 or something. So, I think that's that's a good thought as well of, like, how how do you balance everything together?
Kate Towsey:That reminds me of something that I think is very unfortunate in our yet emerging space, of research ops. And I always wanna caveat that with that research ops has actually been around its official role for a good 20, 25 years now even possibly in places like Microsoft. But in terms of being like a wide widely known role, it's pretty young sort of 5 or 6 years now. But it's often assumed that you will hire a research ops person and they will come in and take over doing recruiting for researchers being the most obvious example. And I always look at them and I think it's really unfortunate because you now are, you're not actually saving money.
Kate Towsey:Like, you just cannot save money that way because hiring someone to do in recruitment in house becomes extremely expensive. And people who do that will then go, well, I didn't see any of the efficiency and money saving that is promised by research operations. I'm just seeing another really expensive headcount who is not able to keep up with my researchers because my research team is growing and they're not able to keep up. And so it breaks my heart because I think, well, if you were to hire a systems designer, an operations thinker who would come in and not just hand like hand over the stuff that the researchers don't have time for, don't want to do. It's annoying.
Kate Towsey:It's the heavy administrative work of research, which I argue that recruitment does not fit into that bucket necessarily. But if you were to hand over, in the sense that it should be a really a craft of how do you craft the the cohort of people you're gonna meet. But more about what are all the the trip points or the repetitive points or the parts that we shouldn't have to constantly be redesigning or redesigning the wheel in order to get done. And you get someone come to come in and map all of that and understand here's where people keep repeating or keep, or could we could be automating this thing. And so it's instead about smoothing out the process for researchers to do things on their own than just try to do it for them.
Kate Towsey:And I think that if you take that mindset towards your first operations hire, you can argue for really big value, that they can be saving hours of researchers time, like 100 of 1,000 of dollars of money, because they now have been able to have the time to look at the systems. What often happens is they come in and then they're thrown knee deep into administration, recruiting, and don't ever get the time to look at the systems.
Emily Wever:Yeah. I've I've recently, because my my primary role right now is recruitment, and it's kind of like the research ops is all all the other stuff I do. I've, I've only recently started with one of my colleagues building a literally a schedule of this is when I can recruit. These this is my capacity, and I am frequently asked, well, what if I need something when you're already booked for that week? Or what if I need something and, and it's an emergency and I, you know, I need it for this project and and I forgot or whatever the, you know, whatever the situation is.
Emily Wever:And I'm like, I I get to be empowered to say no and that there are alternate things. And also, perhaps we right now, we have a managed model, but we're you know, I'm I'm dabbling with kind of a self-service model with some of our external vendors as well. I just wanna make sure people are trained and feel comfortable doing it. But, no, recruitment is, I mean, I it's it's it's takes all the time. It takes it takes all my time and, that's why we put me as I have a schedule now so that I actually have time to build out all of our legal processes and all of our other template processes and all of the other things that we're building now in our team to help facilitate our researchers doing more and better work.
Emily Wever:So yeah. No. Recruitment is, I I am, again, being somewhat new to this, I was, I don't know why I was shocked, but it is shockingly challenging.
Kate Towsey:Because what can happen is then someone comes in, like, you know, you come in and if there's no systems there and you're needing to just keep administrating, you don't get time to sort out the systems and you're not actually operating smoothly. You're not even so it's so good to hear that you're you've got that time to start building the systems beneath you and beneath others. And then as you say to your earlier point, that can take 2, 3 my experiences, it can take like up to 3 years sometimes to really see that deep value come out. We go like, wow, this is a whole different organization now.
Emily Wever:Next year is gonna be so much fun. I I'm like, I know it's only July, but next year, I'm like, oh, man. The place we're gonna the place we're gonna be 12 months from now is vastly different in my in my vision anyway, is gonna be vastly different, and the efficiencies we're gonna have are gonna be are gonna be numerous, you know, different from where we are now.
Shannon Lu:I laughed when you said, research ops or your your role is the recruitment and then everything else because I feel like I kind of define research ops is that sometimes when inevitably people ask me what exactly do you do, and I'm like, well, you know, researchers do the research. And then as research ops, we do everything else, like, everything else that's needed, you know, to to to help the researchers do better research or even do research at all in some cases. But I think to your comment and point, Kate, I I feel like oftentimes people think the word operations and I think, oh, this is a support role. This is a role that, like, they're gonna be doing the things that, you know, we need help with and we will sign, which, yes, that that is true in some sense. But I also would hope that people and teams think of research ops as also a partner.
Shannon Lu:Like, you know, they're growing their research team, but the research ops should also be part of that growth, also be part of the strategy and, you know, all of the decision or not, I guess, not all of it, but the decision making processes as well. You know? Like, it's not just, oh, the researchers, you know, decide these things and then they tell ops, like, hey, we need this. It would be nice if both are discussing together, you know, and coming up with how best to work and, you know, build the team as as a unit. You know?
Shannon Lu:And I think sometimes when we think operations, we think it's it's not so much that, but it is. It's true. You are, like, a strategic role, hopefully, and that's also the way to make it more successful, I think, as well.
Bryna Tsai:Yeah. I totally agree with a lot of things you all are saying. I mean, you know, Kate, we talked about this earlier. Participant recruitment is just the most visible part of or maybe visceral part of, research ops. Right?
Bryna Tsai:Just the thing that people think about most.
Shannon Lu:But I
Bryna Tsai:do think it's like a you know, participant recruitment is just a very small piece of research operations. It is a totally different role to do participant recruitment. I mean, I I know it's really hard to scale, but we still have, you know, separate folks who just on our team who just focus on participant recruitment. And we need that here because, again, all the regulations and legal stuff and privacy stuff, it actually is just hard to not have a an actual person who knows all of those things, working on personal recruitment. But, even with them, I mean, I, again, feel very lucky to work with a really great group of researchers who really buy into that concept of us being partners.
Bryna Tsai:And the fact that even our participant coordinators are not people they, you know, task with things. It's not like, oh, I have a study. Like, please do everything I ask you. They really do hear about our opinion on screeners. You know, they care about what we have to say about their participant criteria.
Bryna Tsai:And so they are really great partners to us, and I think really, embody that. And I am really grateful for that.
Kate Towsey:I completely agree. And and actually, there is an episode, I forget not at this point which one it is, on being more, like, how do we become strategic partners to research and kind of really grow, that relationship. We've got time for one more theme. And, this is the one that I I thought of because I think it's an important one. I often find that, when someone is has gotten a head count, somehow, you know, particularly, in more recent years pre all the layoffs and and the kind of state of the industry in recent times, And it felt like there were a fair few headcount going around.
Kate Towsey:And, you didn't have to have, like, you had a pretty good argument for a headcount, but it didn't need to be rock solid necessarily. Is that what you were experiencing in that sense until, like, 2022? Or was that just my world? That might maybe that was just my world.
Bryna Tsai:Yeah. It's like, I think we've always needed to have a really strong education brand.
Shannon Lu:I think I think part of it depends. Well, once again, I haven't been part of the discussion process, but I do think part of it depends on maybe research as a whole, their relation their their reputation and a company. Right? Like, I think the companies that, you know, people are like, yes, we want research. Like, this is such a great organization.
Shannon Lu:Please keep doing it. Then they're more supportive of, oh, yeah. You just need some help? Heck yeah. Like, hire a person to help you, you know, grow the team.
Shannon Lu:But I think for some companies, which unfortunately is is reality of our, field is some people are skeptical. Like, they don't know the value. They don't really understand. And then that's when you're like, I think you need to give me numbers. I think you need to give me, like, a really good, you know, sell for why we need this, we need this role in the organization.
Shannon Lu:So, yeah, I I think it really depends. I've I've kind of been in both types of organizations.
Kate Towsey:I'm thinking, the first hire, I often hear people going, well, I'll just hire a research ops person with not a lot of definition around what they are. They're just gonna parachute into the organization and solve problems, problems. And they will, yeah, fix everything. And you see the job descriptions. Again, I mentioned this, I think, in in episode 6.
Kate Towsey:And these sort of sort of bucket list job descriptions and someone who's got many years of experience in these jobs. And that's great. I mean, at some point, that could be could be the right hire. But I wonder if it it could be really helpful. Well, probably I should say, I think it's really helpful.
Kate Towsey:When a research leader or someone who wants to hire their 1st research ops person looks at strategy and goes, actually, the place that we could add the most value with this headcount, this one first headcount we're gonna get is in, I'm gonna say, the repository piece, Brina, to your earlier notes around, like, really adding value for that. And so then your first hire isn't a generalist research ops human being. I mean, as useful as we and those kind of people are, but you could be going, actually, I need to go out and find a repository librarian archivist, someone with that kind of experience who might not have a ton of research experience or experience even in research operations but can apply those skills into the space. So that could be your first hire. I think there's often an assumption that your first hire needs to be a research ops expert.
Kate Towsey:Now there is a caveat to that because it can be very helpful to have your first hire as a research ops expert who knows all about the space and seeing the whole field. What are let's assume someone's got their headcount. What are your thoughts around the who do you hire as your first hire?
Bryna Tsai:I think that's such a tough question, Kate, because I I agree that I think you can you can, you know, think a little bit more about what you actually need as a team and then hire someone who's an expert in that. But I think it's very hard to find a research leader who might know enough about research ops to identify those things. You know, I think it is often the case you kinda hire a generalist and yes, you kinda hire someone and give them a job description that is like 5 people's jobs. But I think you get someone in, you know, it that happens all the time. And I I've I've done this.
Bryna Tsai:I've looked at job descriptions. I've talked to people in interviews, like recruiters or even hiring managers at interviews, and they're telling me what they're looking for. And I'm like, you know, that that's 3 to 5
Shannon Lu:people's jobs. Like, that's not a one time job. I I don't know
Emily Wever:what to
Bryna Tsai:tell you. Like but, you know, I'm glad you're you're starting with 1. I think everyone has to start somewhere, so that's great. But and, you know, if you get someone who's a generalist or who's been in the industry, you get someone in to really landscape, you know, the situation, kind of ask people what their different pain points are, take a look at the organization at a whole, and I think they can then decide what maybe future hires are. I know I know that's hard because you're then you're asking for more headcount.
Bryna Tsai:But, you know, the hope is you can get someone in who can, you know, help you make that case for for another headcount or 2. Or, you know, and then you have to get that person to say, okay. Here are the things I can focus on right now. Here are the things that have to be worked on in the future, but they can kind of prioritize your your list of a million things.
Emily Wever:Fascinating for me to be in this industry now because I started in 2022 right before everything exploded. So maybe not the best time to change industries. I don't know. And came in again as a as a recruiter and then through multiple management shake ups and reprioritizing and reorganizations and were settled now, really took the previous experience that I had after, you know, many years in a heavily regulated industry, and I can see so many parallels into the processes that I wanna set up here. I was having a meeting just a couple of days ago, and we were discussing status buckets or some you know, something for ticketing.
Emily Wever:And I'm like, oh, yeah. No. We need that. I remember using that in my previous life when this would be the circumstance, and here's the circumstance it applies here. So there's so many you know, I always thought that banking was a very specific field and it is a very specific field and that my knowledge base was very narrow and it was.
Emily Wever:And I've learned an amazing amount of stuff in the last 2 years, but I have been shocked at how much of what I knew and what I did just working in an operations heavy industry, I translate into what I do every day here and what I recognize needs to be done every day.
Kate Towsey:Something that's come. Yeah, something that's come up a couple of times, again in episode 6, that's fresh in my mind because I recorded it a couple of days ago we were speaking about 2 of the the panelists came from, or 2 of the podcast guests came from a hospitality background. And so working on all the operations in hotels and they were saying there's just so much, it's just systems.
Emily Wever:Just systems.
Kate Towsey:It's more systems and getting people to partner and play play really well together and build great value together. And so it's all the partnership work, it's the actual technical systems, it's the process, it's the flow. And so they could bring everything from hospitality into this world as well.
Bryna Tsai:Yeah. I think that's totally true when I say, you know, you should hire someone. And first, you can kind of get a get a look at everything. It doesn't have to be you're right. It doesn't have to be, like, a research ops, you know, specialist or someone who's been doing it for a long time, but just someone in operations.
Bryna Tsai:Because I you know, researchers have a different job. They do a totally different thing. And so they're just just not something that they always think about. So, I think you're totally right, Emily. I mean, it doesn't need to be someone who's been in this industry for a really long time.
Bryna Tsai:It just has to be someone who
Emily Wever:Not that that isn't super valuable to have those years of experience because it has taken I mean, the the amount of study that I've had to do to bring myself up to speed in this job has been, it's been a lot so that I can even feel like I am competent to, you know, be here. So
Shannon Lu:We're very nice. I also think, research ops can be different in every single organization. So even if you're like, oh, we have you know, we want this type of person, and we need, like, research ops experience or something. But then, actually, maybe it's not even the same as, like, you hire somebody that has research ops background. Maybe it's not even the same as the company they had before.
Shannon Lu:You know? Like, the teams are different. The industries are different. Even, like, I'm international now. I I used to be based in the US.
Shannon Lu:Like, even being in Europe is much different than being in the US. And, like so the the role I feel like what I maybe one of the things I like I love about research ops is that it's, you know, I'm always learning something new. It's always something different. So I feel like it's a very open role as well. Like, of course, you know, be able to do some of the things that are on the checklist of, operations, but at the same time, like, there's so much room to to grow and bring in your own expertise and, you know, like, make the role what it should be for for your company.
Shannon Lu:You know? It can be different than than other people.
Kate Towsey:Is there anything that you wanted to talk about that we did not talk about today? That your final moment to share your wisdom.
Shannon Lu:Please keep hiring research ops people. I know you didn't say that. She has a aid. Even if
Bryna Tsai:you're thinking about it, even if you're just thinking about it or you're not sure, like, the right answer is to justify yourself to help you. You know, I'd say, like, ask around, ask our group, ask the community. Like, people will tell you, you know, how to help make your case and things like that. But I yeah. I'd say if you're you're on the fence, you know, just hire just hire someone.
Bryna Tsai:They will help you. I promise.
Kate Towsey:I love that note of you don't have to do it alone. That's very recent charms
Emily Wever:for a week.
Kate Towsey: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.com/chacha. That's c h a c h a. In 2 weeks, a different crew of ResearchOps professionals will tackle another great question. So make sure to subscribe and tune in.
Kate Towsey: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.
