Summary
One of the hardest parts of building a knowledge management system is getting leadership buy-in and getting your team to use it properly. Join Kevin and Sarah to learn about their journey from passion-fueled side project to research-only management to fully funded knowledge/project/insights management initiatives (including an on-staff research librarian!). In this talk you will hear real-world examples of how they struggled to show how this was one of the most important things to be doing. They will share examples of how one team is leveraging the work to scale their research capabilities and provide rapid evaluation for the entire company. You will also hear about the accelerated growth and value that has come from connecting their system with the greater design org and even product management. Through all of this they will share actionable takeaways on how to show value early, what not to do, and how to use a system to amplify your teams’ work across the organization and help your Ops team scale.
Key Insights
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LinkedIn's UX research team grew from 18 to 53 researchers between 2016 and today, requiring new operational systems for scalability.
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Initial reliance on Google Sheets for project tracking became unmanageable, prompting a custom Airtable solution with automated unique project numbers.
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Leadership resisted off-the-shelf tools like Jira due to concerns about team perception, pushing the team toward custom-built internal tooling.
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Participant recruitment leverages LinkedIn’s product data warehouse to create opt-in pools, supplemented by ad hoc and vendor suppliers.
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Prior to 2019, incentive distribution was manual and error-prone; onboarding Ethnio centralized incentive management, improving participant satisfaction and policy compliance.
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A status workflow integrated with Slack, Figma, and Airtable reduced redundant status updates and improved cross-team communication and leadership reporting.
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Kevin’s team conducts rapid evaluative research testing six different designs every two weeks across three business lines, made possible by Ops foundations.
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Inconsistent tagging and taxonomy in research insights led to the hiring of a dedicated research librarian to ensure consistency and enable better knowledge management.
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A consolidated planning workflow bridging UX research, product design, and content design replaced numerous spreadsheets, increasing visibility and prioritization efficiency.
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Scaling research maturity demands balancing centralized, rigid processes with flexibility, strategic partnerships, automation, dedicated roles, and inclusive change management.
Notable Quotes
"Broken processes aren't scalable."
"We don’t even know what we don’t know or what we do know."
"If you want to get to the moon, you have to build a spaceship."
"The larger your organization gets, the more centralized and rigid your processes ultimately need to become."
"Project numbers were finally able to be automatically generated after certain actions were taken during planning."
"Researchers used to issue and manage incentives manually, which was decentralized and inefficient."
"Doing more research leads to so much learning that we can't keep track or reference it effectively, which causes duplication and less impact."
"The research librarian equals consistent taxonomy—without that you can't build a reliable insight repository."
"Change management is hard. Start somewhere simple, start early, and include the right voices in the room."
"Partner with someone passionate about operations who knows the pain points, and you’ll create better processes together."
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