Rosenverse
A Selectively Scrappy Approach to ResearchOps

This video is only accessible to Gold members. Log in or register for a free Gold Trial Account to watch.

Log in Register

Most conference talks are accessible to Gold members, while community videos are generally available to all logged-in members.

A Selectively Scrappy Approach to ResearchOps

Gold
Thursday, November 8, 2018 • DesignOps Summit 2018
Share the love for this talk
A Selectively Scrappy Approach to ResearchOps
Speakers: Megan Blocker
Link:

Summary

Megan Blocker will talk about how to decide where to invest your precious time and attention for maximum impact. In other words, where is it most important for your team to get serious about ResearchOps, and where is it okay to stay scrappy? How can you grow sustainably by picking and choosing your battles? It all depends on your goals, your context, and your priorities. We’ll talk about a framework for making those decisions, and about how applying it worked for our growing team.

Key Insights

  • Scaling research requires balancing skill levels, organizational scale, culture, and leadership buy-in.

  • You don't need formal research titles to do research; skills can be distributed across designers, PMs, and others.

  • A small research team serving a large organization can leverage apprenticeship and education models to expand impact.

  • Building a large, engaged user testbed quickly is possible with minimal resources and has strategic benefits.

  • Leadership buy-in is signaled not just by budget but by leaders seeking out research to guide decisions.

  • Organizational culture shapes how you implement research — entrepreneurial cultures allow quicker experiments, hierarchical ones require stakeholder management.

  • Developing reusable tools, templates, and playbooks helps scale quality research across a growing organization.

  • Scrappy grassroots efforts can lead to formalized, systematic research programs over time.

  • Continuous storytelling and advocacy are essential for gaining and maintaining leadership support.

  • Research scale and focus need continual reassessment as team size, culture, and buy-in evolve.

Notable Quotes

"I realized that dedicating my time and energy into something that wasn’t going to be used was not a good use of my time."

"Research skill and talent can be present in many different kinds of people, you don’t have to have research in your title."

"In a hierarchical culture, you ask permission; in an entrepreneurial culture, you ask forgiveness."

"We made a 250-person testbed grow to 1200 people in under a week just through one email campaign."

"If you want access to those names, you got to come through us and show your research plan, which helped us ensure quality."

"We focused on interviewing and synthesis because those methods were most likely to be employed by our product managers."

"Offers of championship from leaders, like 'What do you need from me?' are strong signs of buy-in."

"Our education program isn’t just basic info—it builds empathy and literacy across the whole product team."

"Scrappy grassroots methods never fully go away; you always need to ask where you can get scrappy next."

"Stakeholder analysis and managing stakeholders is critical in hierarchical cultures to maintain trust."

Ask the Rosenbot
Dawn Ressel
Full-Stack User Experiences: A Marriage of Design and Technology
2016 • Enterprise UX 2016
Gold
Nina Jurcic
The Design System Rollercoaster: From Enabler and Bottleneck to Catalyst for Change
2023 • DesignOps Summit 2023
Gold
Phil Gilbert
A Consistent Culture of Design
2015 • Enterprise UX 2015
Gold
Lija Hogan
Contexts of Use: A Framework for Connection
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Mark Templeton
Creating a Legacy: the ultimate experience
2017 • Enterprise Experience 2017
Gold
Michele Marut
Research Repositories Reconsidered
2019 • DesignOps Community
Bob Baxley
Theme 4: Discussion
2024 • Enterprise Experience 2020
Gold
Sara Logel
Your Colleagues are Your Users Too
2023 • Advancing Research 2023
Gold
Nicole Wright
Democratizing Research at HoneyBook
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Sheri Byrne-Haber
Accessibility at Scale
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Anna Nguyen
Why Our Voice of the Customer is Better Than Yours
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Louis Rosenfeld
Coffee with Lou #3: What Makes for a Successful UX Conference Presentation?
2024 • Rosenfeld Community
Shawna Hein
Create a Cohesive Civic Design Practice Across Agency, Vendors, and Contracts
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Meaghan Waters
Lack of Product Thinking will Doom Your Legacy Modernization
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Catherine Courage
The Enterprise UX Journey: Lessons From the Voyage & The Opportunity Ahead
2015 • Enterprise UX 2015
Gold
Melissa Eggleston
Practical People Skills for Building Trust on Teams and with Partners
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold

More Videos

Lavy Kumar

"Bringing tasks directly into meetings lets you work where collaboration is happening without jumping between tools."

Lavy Kumar Kat Temple Shan Sebastian Tara Jensen Jenn Chou

Future of Work

June 9, 2021

Andreas Huebner

"The pandemic pushed us to be creative, and it’s been fun for users to participate remotely in the design process."

Andreas Huebner Amy Takata Craig Brookes

What Is It Like To Be Part of The UX Team at Compass?

March 11, 2021

Ricardo Martins

"Startups struggle daily with pricing, and conjoint analysis is the single most underrated tool to find optimal prices."

Ricardo Martins

Unlocking the power of advanced quantitative methods

March 12, 2025

Monty Hammontree

"The fastest way to gain influence is to get somebody else promoted."

Monty Hammontree

The Future of UX Research

December 3, 2020

Benjamin Real

"We didn’t have the maturity of the practice itself to specify the impacts of losing design ops until it happened."

Benjamin Real

Showing the Value of DesignOps by Not Having a DesignOps Team

October 21, 2020

Kate Towsey

"Some people have been doing research ops a lot longer than the term has existed."

Kate Towsey

Ask Me Anything (AMA) with Kate Towsey

April 2, 2025

Steve Portigal

"The weakest insight method might win simply because of the relationship to the power structure."

Steve Portigal Chris Chapo Kelly Goto Christian Rohrer

Discussion

May 13, 2015

Sam Proulx

"Offering the ability to save your progress allows users with disabilities to complete tasks on their own time."

Sam Proulx

Online Shopping: Designing an Accessible Experience

March 28, 2023

Sam Proulx

"Involving people with disabilities throughout the product development cycle is crucial, from prototype reviews through to acceptance testing."

Sam Proulx

Prototype Reviews, People With Disabilities, and You

October 1, 2021