Summary
Join Great Question CEO Ned Dwyer, Emily Stewart from TravelPerk, and James Wallis from Brex as they explore the evolving relationship between DesignOps and ResearchOps. Ned will moderate a discussion covering best practices, common challenges, key differences, and what these two disciplines can learn from one another. This session will offer valuable insights for professionals navigating the intersection of design and research, helping them better integrate these processes within their organizations.
Key Insights
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Research ops roles often precede dedicated research teams, especially supporting designers first, as seen at Travel Perk.
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Brex transitioned from a dedicated research team to embedding research capabilities within design ops to promote democratized research.
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Research ops and design ops share common goals of empowerment, scaling, and enabling better collaboration despite focusing on different domains.
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Organizational culture and leadership background influence whether research ops or design ops are emphasized first.
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Measuring ROI in ops roles is challenging but can be approached by linking research insights directly to strategic decisions and roadmap priorities.
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Democratizing research requires providing non-researchers with tools, education, and consultation to reduce bias and improve research quality.
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Cross-functional collaboration, such as involving marketing or PR teams in research activities, brings fresh perspectives and greater impact.
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Effective research repositories should proactively push relevant insights to users rather than expecting them to seek out data.
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AI and tools like Figma integrating developer and design functionalities may drive future efficiency in design and research operations.
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Teams often blend research ops and design ops functions as maturity grows, suggesting these roles may converge or require integrated teams.
Notable Quotes
"Research ops was actually there before research at Travel Perk, which I hadn't personally come across before."
"Brex moved away from a dedicated research function to empower designers, PMs, and marketers to do research themselves."
"The challenge is to empower others and make collaboration and craft scalable to allow people to do the best work they can."
"Sometimes research ends up being conducted for the sake of research, resulting in insights that don’t drive outcomes."
"All members of senior leadership at Brex participate in continuous discovery at least every month to build customer empathy."
"You have to meet people where they are instead of expecting them to use an entirely new tool to find insights."
"Non-researchers running research can bring their own biases, so support and education are vital to improve research quality."
"The idea is shifting from research ops being just operations to research enablement — supporting people throughout the research journey."
"Different disciplines bring new ideas on how to promote outcomes and share insights, making cross-functional collaboration exciting."
"If you want designers to look at a spreadsheet, draw it in Figma rather than expect them to sign into Google Sheets."
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