 Did you know that there's a tried and tested way that allows you to get more value out of the user research you have done without necessarily doing more work? Sounds too good to be true, right? Well, stick around, because in this episode you're going to learn all about the field of research ops and how that potentially could change your perspective on the research from now on. Here's the guest for this episode. Let the show begin. Hello, my name is Kate Tausie. Welcome to the service design show. This is episode 189. Hi, my name is Mark van Dijn and welcome back to the service design show. On this show, we explore what's beneath the surface of service design. What are those hidden and invisible things that make all the difference between success and failure? All to help you design great services that have a positive impact on people, business and our planet. Our guest in this episode is Kate Tausie, a respected thought leader in the field of research ops. And she's also an advisor. Next to that, she runs the cha-cha club, a members club for research ops professionals. Okay, you and I know that without research, there is no service design. Developing a deep understanding of the needs and desires of the people we're designing with and for is a cornerstone of our practice. But you and I also know that research is one of the hardest things to get proper time or funding for. Research is unfortunately still often seen as a necessary expense that should be minimized rather than a smart investment. Knowing that this situation isn't going to change anytime soon, it's worth asking the question, what would be ways that we could make our existing research efforts more impactful and effective? Well, it turns out that there is already a passionate community of experts who are already working hard on having answers to this question. It's called research ops and Kate is on the very forefront of this movement. In this episode, Kate is going to help us understand how we, as service design professionals, can benefit today from the work that's being done by the research ops community and also how research ops desperately needs our service design expertise. So if you stick around till the end of this episode, you'll walk away knowing how you can spend significantly more time on actual research rather than the associated overhead, which systems and structures you need to put in place to harvest the fruits of research that has been done previously and why hiring a librarian has been one of the best things Kate has done in her career. So that about wraps it up for my introduction. I hope you're ready because we're going to jump straight into the conversation with Kate Tauzy. Welcome to the show Kate. Thank you. It's so good to be here. I'm happy to have you on. I don't think we've addressed the topic that we're going to address today somehow, which is quite bizarre. If people stick around till the end of the episode, they'll know why. But before we give too many spoilers, Kate, you have a very interesting career and an interesting journey. Could you take us to the moment where you are today and share a little bit about what you do and what your current role is today? It's a long and secure story, but essentially today I'm a research ops advisor. I run a community called the Char Char Club, which is for research ops professionals, full-time research ops professionals. I'm writing a book at the moment. Those are the things that are most taking at my time. I love to educate people about what research operations is and is not. And I find my strength in working on strategy with companies to help them understand how do you actually deliver research operations into an organization so that it scales not just how many people are doing research, but so it scales the value of research in the organization. There's so much that I could say about that, but one of my lessons that I'm trying to learn in the last couple of months is how to end a sentence there, as opposed to continuing my thought because I could talk about it for at least another 50 minutes to an hour and many hours more. And we will, we will. And that's something I'm practicing as well, getting to a full stop. Kate, one of the questions that I have on the show for all my guests, and I'm curious to hear your thoughts about it, is if they recalled the moment they heard or learned or got in touch with service design, was there a moment for you? Yeah, there was. I was doing work actually when I first came across or kind of became aware of the work of researchers and their need for operations. And that was at the Government Digital Service, which was a revolutionary part of the UK government that started around 2010 or something like that 2011. I could be corrected on the date, but I was working for them as a consultant in 2013. As a side note, I'd been asked to work with them because I was at that point in my career a content strategist. And they needed someone to help figure out they had 40 odd researchers working across government who are producing amazing research. And the sort of evergreen problem of many research and operations teams or research operations teams is where do you store all this information and this amazing insight so you can keep reusing it. And so they asked me to come in and try and solve that problem. And while I was trying to solve that problem, I ended up building labs and doing a variety of other operational things around recruiting and all sorts of things. And it was here at the GDS at the Government Digital Service that I met service designers and really got to see firsthand how incredible design can be, never mind service design or visual design or UX design or any of these other words we've got, just pure design, delivering things that in government you're not necessarily looking to delight. I mean, it's nice if you do, but just to make things really functional, how service designers and researchers and UX designers and sprint managers and so on and service managers and everybody could really work together as a complete team and how critical service design was to that process and taking that zoomed out view of what does, how does a service flow? What steps come after which steps right from what do people assume what are they doing now and what should we design in the future? And I was very blessed to work with some really incredible service designers. And so I was spoiled by getting the cream of the crop right at the start of my journey. Nice. Yes, there was and is still the GDS a very influential space for our community. So cool. Interesting to hear people's backgrounds, including yours. Kate, we have a lightning round to get to know you as a person next to the professional. Five questions. I won't go any deeper on them. Just the first thing that comes to your mind. And the goal is to finish a sentence. So I will start a question and then you need to finish the sentence. You haven't prepared, but are you ready? Yeah, ready. Shoot. So the first sentence for you to finish is something that always makes me smile. Something that always makes me smile is food. Okay. If I had unlimited resources, I would study language, particularly Hindi. I speak a little Hindi. It's rusty these days and Urdu, which is quite close to Arabic. And so then I would kind of think I'd move around the world. You can get Spanish from Arabic. So that's what I would do. Okay. The next one is the most important quality in a friend is the ability to listen, which is why it's quite good to hang out with researchers because they're professional listeners. All right. Sentence number four. The best part of my day is when I go for a sunrise walk on the beach, which is around five minutes from my house. And that's most days. Making me jealous over here. All right. The fifth and final one. Finish this sentence. The world needs more. The world needs more play. Okay. Thank you for completing this rapid fire lightning question around. That was always, yeah, it's always good to hear a little bit more context that we usually don't get. So let's maybe transition into what we want to explore today together. And that's the topic of the intersection between a research ops and service design. You have a quite distinct and outspoken perspective on the intersection between these two aerials. Yeah, sure. I feel that service design is absolutely fundamental to delivering research operations. It's often assumed that research operations is an administrative role that when you hire a research operations person, they come in and what they'll do is they'll take over the procurement and the more clerical tasks involved in getting research done or even actually do the participant recruitment for researchers so they don't have that headache. And I use the word headache ironically because recruitment, although it is one of the biggest pain points for researchers, the job of research operations is not to just take that away. It's such an important craft aspect of doing research, but it's to design services that enable researchers to do their own recruiting and many other tasks that are involved in organizing and doing research and sharing research beyond just the doing, also the sharing and the proliferation of their knowledge. We set up services that enable them to do it much more efficiently on their own. We set up systems and this is where service design is so critical. At its heart, research operations is about designing services. I find that a lot of research operations professionals, they don't have service design skills. They do the best that they can. But wow, is it powerful if you can train your team up on fundamental service design skills and give them the mindset that one of the first things you've got to do is not just go out and research researchers as the meta quip goes, but to do that research of the entire group of stakeholders that are impacted by a particular service and to move from there. Like do service blueprints, look at the user journey, the beautiful structures that come from service design. It's a wealth of knowledge that research operations professionals should be taking advantage of. It's very interesting because you mentioned that the research ops community doesn't have a lot of experience with service design or service design hasn't fully emerged in that area. I feel exactly the opposite or like I'm on the other side. Within the service design community, I'm not hearing a lot of conversations about research ops while research is like a fundamental element of service design. For people who have been ignorant and living under a rock for the last years and haven't come across research ops, maybe it would be helpful for us to understand a little bit more about what is research ops exactly and how... No, let me take a full stop here and apply my last... What is research ops? Is it able to... Can you summarize that in a few sentences? Yeah, the funny thing is, as I mentioned, I'm busy writing a book about not what research operations is, but how do you scale research? I think it's going to be something like 85,000 words, but I am able to summarize it into something much less. A research operations is all the systems and services that are required to help people to do research, engage with research, take part in research, and continue to consume the research that's been made long after it was actually done, mostly pointing in that sense to a research library, but there's many other ways that research can be shared in the long run. What a research operations professional will do and should do is come into an organization and understand what is the strategy around research. It's worthwhile, Mark, just looking at that definition of what research operations is to take a moment to pause on the word research itself, because research can be anything from, and this is really dependent on your context, your lens, your profession, whether you're a product manager or a service designer or a full-fledged PhD researcher in social sciences, you're going to have a slightly different view on this, but broadly speaking, I feel in the modern business world, the kind of big companies that hire research operations, people and teams, research can be anything from a bona fide trained researcher doing very serious, well-planned studies with a cohort of research participants to a product manager or a designer or an engineer for that matter, wanting to just have a chat with the customer once a week. If you go back to what the word research means, it's about gathering understanding, even the word insight, which is so such a popular word used as a noun in our world to point towards this insight, this negative information or this report even is potentially called an insight, gives you the indicates that research really is about giving new knowledge and new understanding about something. So research operations is about all the operational aspects, the tools, the training, the services, the money, the metrics, the reporting, the people, the hiring, all of this sort of stuff, I'm repeating a few things in there. The compliance is a really big piece in research because research has captured a lot of data that is needed to run a research organization or research practice, which is what I'm going to go back to so that it is efficient and effective and also respectful and compliant. It doesn't get into trouble with international privacy regulations on the way. In a nutshell, that is what research operations is. I want to quickly go to the practice word before I go to the full stop. I use the word practice because again, and particularly recently with many, many layoffs across the sector in the last year and a half, a more diverse range of people are doing research. And so for me to silo research operations to looking after just a research team is limiting to the profession of research operations, and it is not actually accurate to what many, many research operations teams have been tasked with doing. They are looking after everybody, product managers, designers, service designers, UX designers, like put any prefix you want on the front of designer and research teams, of course. And so practice can be all those kinds of people. All right. Thank you for that. And that definitely helps. So in my layman's terms, it's just a way to take research to a more professional level to increase the quality, the consistency. When I think back about in to my days when I was doing research, we did good research, but it was often pretty scrappy and improvised and ad hoc. And it sounds like this, there is a whole profession and a whole field, whole community that is focused on making this more repeatable, scalable, increasing the quality. That would be my explanation. That's right. And that's great. And it's getting that less friction. And so operations doesn't mean to say that a researcher can't arrange their own research. But when you've got 40, 50, 100, sometimes even 300 people, and if I talk again about a practice, it can be pretty quick that you've got across the organization, between across disciplines, many hundreds of people doing research. And if each of them have to reinvent the wheel every time or figure it out on their own every time, it's so inefficient. And so, again, going back to the service design piece, our job is to come in and spot those repeated pathways. I love this point. I've actually written a chapter around this. I've got pretty good words for it. Everybody can walk their own path. But our job is to find the desire paths or the car paths and operationalize those because they're the highways and the byways. It doesn't mean to say that everybody's always going to be going along those main roads. Some people might want to go down little alleyways or laneways occasionally to get to where they need to go. But when we look at where the most people are needing to go, what are the big needs that they have? And we set out operations so that they don't need to kind of keep reinventing the wheel. And hopefully they get things done much more quickly, much more compliantly, and hopefully more effectively as well. There's one extra thing I want to add in there because what that sounds like is it's all about efficiency and helping more people do more research. And for a long time without knowing it, I assumed that. And over the last year or so I've come to really understand that there are many opportunities and operations to deliver services that scale the value of research in the organization without more people needing to do more research. And one of the primary ways of doing that, or two of the primary ways of doing that is through a research library that's highly searchable. That is, you know, like so research goes in there. And then over time, you can start to do secondary research across multiple reports done on the same thing. You know, in service design, maybe you've, I'll go to a GDS example, researching someone's journey through the judicial system is a tough word to say at eight o'clock at night. And so, you know, maybe there's been many studies done across government on something similar, visiting rights or things like that. And so a library can help bring that knowledge together without actually doing more research. And the second example of this is having a way for teams to engage their audience across the organization and like get a big audience together, have town halls that are well attended, have templates and ways of sharing their research out that they reach a big audience. And so again, it's not more research, but about really getting the most power out of the research that's already been done. That's great. And I think so many of us listening to this conversation will start googling and sort of be very excited that there is a whole, again, profession and community who's focused on this because this is definitely one of the big pain points, how do you maximize the value or the impact of the research that has been done or that potentially is being done. You mentioned that you're thinking around this has evolved in the last year or so. We're really curious. What's the story behind that? Like, did something change? Did something click? Did you experience a case? What happened? Yeah. I, four and a half years ago, started working with Atlassian. It's one of the reasons that I moved to Australia was the reason I moved to Australia. I wouldn't be here otherwise. I no longer work for Atlassian. I left maybe eight months ago now. But that was a real, it was a sandpit, a playground to take the theories of what research operations was. As a consultant, you kind of land and you do some things and then you leave and you kind of build something that is in effect a bit siloed. And as service designers, you would well know that things are never siloed. Even if you think they are, they never siloed. They're all interconnected. And your job is to understand all those connections and not to get so bogged down on the connections that you don't get anything done. But once on the ground there and having the space and the team and the support to be able to do some really interesting things and to scale research services out to 500 people, between three and 500 people, at the end of the day, on a quarterly basis, 250-ish people would be using our services in one way or the other. And that was with a team of 10 people. So very scalable. I started to realize when you're looking at the regular metrics of how many people are using your services? What are they achieving? What is your impact as an operations team? We did quarterly operating reports and an annual operating report to be able to track that. Then I started to look at, okay, this is interesting. So we're recruiting so many participants. We've got so many consent form signs. We've got so many videos being stored. We've got so many people sending out thank you gifts. And they're doing this much more efficiently through our services. We're getting anecdotal feedback to be able to support that. And also they're coming back for more. Very similar to what a product manager might do or a service manager might do in terms of tracking their service. But it's at that point that I started to think about what can we do here that is not tied to usage of the SIN? How do I put this? It's not tied to one-in-one-out sort of thing. And that's when I've been speaking with my manager about a research library. It's something that we had been speaking about for many years. I've worked with her at Government Digital Service and we hired a librarian, Alison Jones, who is exceptional and has done an incredible job of the library at Atlassian. It's one of the most robust research libraries I've seen anywhere. And I can only take credit for hiring her and letting her loose. And that really started to show even, and I left just before it was launched, but even at the start, you could see that now we've got something that really supercharges the value of the research that's already been done. Our metrics now they're not only based on getting more research done, which is when you're just measuring recruiting, number of reports that have been created, all these other metrics, you're tracking how much research is being done. And this was starting to track how are people engaging with existing research, which just got me thinking, where else can we be doing more of this? Because now we really are scaling research because there is very little additional cost in bringing that research together and then creating really beautiful refined knowledge out of the knowledge that already exists is like, it's next level. I hope that you're able to share a bit more about this with us because this sounds intriguing and poses a lot of questions. Can we dig a bit deeper into this research library? Yeah, let's dig a bit deeper. I'll let you know when I've reached the end of my ability to share. And then we'll sign an NDA. So you sound really excited about this and it seems like sounds like a game changer. What do you feel was different about this library and what was maybe the secret to making this work? Because I've heard a lot of us try to set up a research library, which almost always fails and failing in the sense that it lacks adoption. I think that's the biggest challenge. So what was the secret in this case? It's a very easy answer. So I'm going to go to a story. Certainly when it comes to researchers and possibly this is also applicable for service designers, there's a lot of angst when someone who is not a full-time researcher thinks that they understand research and will just go, oh, it's fine. I'll just recruit someone off the street and have a chat with them and that's my research done. And I can do research because it's really easy. I can have a chat with my friend so I can also do research. Imagine, and Mark, you could correct me, that service designers might be have a similar problem. I don't know where someone might just pick up things and go, oh, I've read a book and there's a service blueprint. Now I know the double diamond. I can be a service designer. So very often you hear valuable and valid is the word I'm looking for angst from researchers who feel that people outside of their immediate of their discipline misassume the value and the extent of their knowledge and skills. What I think is ironic is that researchers very often do this and as a service designers, it sounds like as well when it comes to incredibly specialist and incredible skills like librarianship. So the secret source of the success of that library is that I hired a real librarian. We didn't assume that we could make it up. I'm not a librarian. I learned that in 2013 when I worked at government digital service to try and sort out their content. And I realized that my content abilities were really great when it came to like CRMs and designing great CRMs and doing all that sort of content stuff, tone of voice and all that sort of stuff. But I was no librarian and I was no archivist, not even close. So my biggest advice in getting a library that actually works for you is hire a librarian. They have years of training, years of knowledge around how to do this work well, how to build a system that is adopted because when you go to it, there's trustworthy content in it. And when you search, you find what you are looking for. There's nothing like success to fuel adoption. And they also know that a library needs to be maintained. You don't build a library, develop a taxonomy, and then go great job done. Now, we've got a library. It needs constant maintenance. It's like a garden. It needs to be regularly garden, which is I'm sure you know a term that is used regularly in the taxonomy world. You need a full-time horticulturalist. So that is the number one tip that I can give you. Second to that is that in the research world, we have a lot of very expensive tools now, repositories, libraries, things like that. And there are excellent tools out in the wider world that are way cheaper. And they are library tools because surprise, and this is going to sound patronizing, I don't mean it to, but we've had a library since ancient Egypt and before, libraries are not a new thing. And there is an entire industry built up around creating libraries. And research is not special. We don't need a special library. We just need a really good library. The tools that are out there tend to be really good as tools for community of practice. I call them campfires where you can gather your immediate crew around, and you can bat insights backwards and forwards, and you can chat about them, and you can really kind of get down to the nitty gritty of what it is you're actually looking at and talking about. But when it comes to the final artifact of research, the research report, or whatever format that takes, a slide deck or whatever it is, then you need something really structured and a lot more draconian. Campfires can be pretty loose. Taxonomy can be free flowing. It can be folksonomy. But when you get into the library land, it needs to be a structured, tightly held taxonomy that works because someone is in control. It's run by a dictator. It is not the democracy of the campfire. Yes, that makes a lot of sense. And I think this is also a mental, mostly a mental shift that needs to happen to acknowledge that a resource library is probably something that needs to be created and maintained by an expert. And that it's not just, I don't know, a Google doc or a Notion document or whatever doc tools we have these days. It's not about the tool. It's about the structure, the methodology. I'm still curious. How does that impact adoption? Because I can see information being searchable. That's already step one, information just being available. Is there a secret to adoption? Because just having the information is probably not enough. Alison Jones, I'm sure she's working with us right now at Atlassian. And she'd be the right person to talk about this. But I won't let the question go empty or go unanswered. It's again such a critical part of the person who owns the library. A library needs a full-time owner because to your point, you can't just build the library and walk away. Mechanically, it needs to be kept up to date. The focus of content changes that needs to be kept up to date to the changing context of the research that's going on. But also, someone needs to be in charge of driving adoption. And that can be roadshows answering a service desk where people drop a line to say, hey, do we have anything about this? If you've got that resourcing to be able to actually do, it wouldn't be like a full literature review, necessarily a full dig into the content. But it might just be pointing to some top results or something like that. You need to do trainings to help people understand how to use the library. Again, part of the service, going back to service designers to understand where does the library sit within the greater ecosystem? And why do people come to it? And what services do they need before they actually land on the library to encourage them, help them to use it? Are you going to run it as a self-service library? Are you going to do a full service library where people drop a ticket and you do all the work in the database? What kind of service model are you going to even put around the library? And that's going to have a lot to do with the culture in the organization. With the audience, your intended audience, if your intended audience are C-suite level employees or executives, you're hardly going to say, well, there's the library over there, just help yourself. You're probably going to put in something full service, a really nice polished report comes to them. But if you're looking after 5,000 or 10,000 or 100,000 people in an organization, you want to go with a very good self-service model. So it's looking at those pieces to really understand how you drive adoption so that people can succeed. And again, as I said, if they succeed, they're going to keep coming back for more. So yeah, it would be, it's actually a really good question for people like Allison, who are building these libraries in organizations, and there are so few of them out there that are really working and scaling that I think it's going to be a real role model. Correct me if I'm wrong, but what we're hearing here, and it starts to click slowly, but surely in my head is that my question about adoption is just a service design question. If you treat research or your resource library, not as a static object, but as a service towards the rest of the organization, you should actually design that service. And then when you design it correctly, adoption shouldn't be an issue. Does that make sense? That it makes complete sense. And I think you've very beautifully summarized a lot of what I've said already, but just in like a small sentence, I should steal that from you. Yes, what is, you know, early on I said that research operations is often assumed to be the clerical work or the administrative work of doing research. Researchers need a lot of tooling. More than designers, probably more than service designers, because there's so many moving parts of the logistics. But what often happens is operation specialists get stuck in the procurement phase and then procured done, thank goodness for that, and then moving on to the next thing. And it can be easy in the rush of things and with pressing demands to forget that the tool itself, it's a service in itself, but it's a service owned by your vendor unless you've built it yourself. And it sits within the ecosystem. And it's the job of research operations to do the service design piece of understanding this asset that I'm putting into the organization needs to, the image I get is like the heart sits with arteries and veins coming towards it. And it's got muscles around it and lungs and all sorts of things. And it's all perfectly coordinated. And so where does this particular tool sit? And what kinds of veins and arteries does it need in order to hook it up to the system so that it is now part of the living organism? Yes, that makes a lot of sense. And at the start, you sort of made a pledge that research ops would benefit from a bit more service design mindset attitude, methodologies. I'm not an expert in research ops at all, but I would expect that they already have adopted a service design mindset. What do you feel is missing? And maybe do you have a story that exemplifies where that's missing? Research operations is still quite a young profession. A lot of people think that I invented research operations. I could probably write that one for a while, but the truth is, and I regularly admit this, that research operations has existed in a few forward thinking organizations like Airbnb and Microsoft. Notably, I think it's around 20 years or something they've had a research operations team of some size. Airbnb, I think, is 12 years. Salesforce is, again, more than a decade. Facebook and places like that have had some form also for much longer than my mark on that profession. However, those were isolated incidents. And in 2018, I started the research ops community. I no longer run it, run by some other wonderful people and have been since 2019, and ran a project called the, what is research ops? Hashtag what is research ops? This is still when Twitter was Twitter and it was cool. We missed those days. Thanks, Elon. But that really put research operations on the map. And now we're in a place where there are many people across the world doing research operations, and those teams are growing and really getting more structured behind them. But as a profession, we're still finding our feet as to, we're finding our identity. We're in our teenage years. We're still trying to understand who are we? Are we punk rock? Are we goth rock? Are we hippie? Like what are we? And part of that is also trying to understand what are the skills that we need in order to do the job the best that we can. I think that's one of the reasons, along with the fact that research operations people are so busy and so in demand, just like their fellow researchers that they're often working side by side with, many people, you know, there's just so much demand that there's very little time to kind of stop and do what I do, which is have the time to contemplate and interrogate what is this profession. So that's what I bring to the space and to the field. So for a story, when I had grown my research operations team at Atlassian to, I think at that point, we might have been seven people and we eventually grew up to 10 or 11 at some point. And I worked with a really wonderful agency on some stuff called Paper Giant, a really great agency service design or sort of strategy agency based in Melbourne in Australia. And they had a really strong service design backbone to how they worked. And so at that point, I realized that although I was trying to think as things as like service, that the individuals on my team who were incredibly skilled in each of their areas, whether it be marketing, technology or participant recruitment or finances, whatever, when they did something, it would be done as a silo and there would be a sense of like tick box, I've like delivered this thing and there would be not a lot of consideration as to how it fitted into the bigger picture. And so having had my experience at the GDS with amazing service designers, I asked Paper Giant if they would come in and run a 10 week masterclass with us. And it was really eye opening for the team. Some of them who had worked in research operations for some time to learn about these skills and see them, you know, service design is so mature and it's framing of you've got amazing tools that are well published and great communities and fantastic books, things that we don't have. And I noticed once we've done that 10 week training that although we didn't always have the time to do all of the service design behind something, there was a much greater sense of awareness around how you have to think about how something fits into the bigger picture and that your stakeholders aren't just the one obvious stakeholder that there's actually a whole lot of people who should be included in your design. And finally that the work that we were doing was actually a design job. I actually can't believe it's taken me this long to get to this critical point that it is a design job and not a clerical job, which is incredibly empowering for people who are working in operations because it's a creative job. And I noticed that it was difficult for people to sketch and to draw and create. And it took me a while of even after that course is saying, give me the map. It doesn't need to be pretty. Make it a mural. I don't care. Sketch it on paper. But let's start to make these things that we're doing visual so we can understand them better. I don't know if that answers your question, but it's certainly what was on my mind. Yeah, thank you for sharing. And yes, that definitely answered it to an extent and also inspired some new questions over here. I think I'm starting to get a better grip at what you mean with the fact that it's not an administrative or a clerical job because when you're considering research to be a service towards the rest of the organization, it's not just about managing the processes. It's also about designing those processes, putting them in place, strategizing about them, seeing how you can add most value. And once they're there, of course, they need to be maintained and sort of kept up and running. But it sounds like the conversation so far has mostly been focused on that management aspect rather than the more strategic aspect. Like how do we show up as a research ops profession inside organizations? Yes, so a story I've been writing this book for some time now and I have, it's 11 chapters. I could be 12, I'm forgetting now, but I've got three chapters that are written, but they need work. And recently, I nailed chapter one. I was thrilled with that. My editor loves it, which is always good. And I love it too. And the second chapter, I thought, wow, I've nailed chapter one. I'm going into the second chapter with it full of gusto. And it is a chapter about strategy in research and research operations, and I spend possibly 80 hours over a week and a half just spinning wheels on this. But I have to get it right because strategy is so important. And this is where it's so difficult because strategy is important in everything. You know, if you want to have anything of success, you need to have strategy behind it. But it's extra important to have this chapter in the book because over the years, I've run workshops. There's one particular workshop called designing a research ops strategy. And I've been running it since about 2018. And I've had something like around about 300 research leaders and research ops people come to those workshops, predominantly leaders, even up to director level. And I've been stunned because in order to have a research operations strategy, you need to know what you are going to operationalize and why, which means that you need a strategy for research. And so I'd asked research leaders to come to the workshop prepared with, even if it wasn't a formally written research strategy, with some really good notes about what their research strategy is. And over the years, I've been stunned to learn that they didn't have a research strategy, many, many didn't have a research strategy, didn't know what I meant. And really that I would need to step back to what is this, how do you even make a research strategy because it's difficult to operationalize something if you don't know what you're, what you're going to operationalize. And with COVID everything, you know, I didn't do workshops for some time. And last year, I did another workshop in Europe. And I thought, wow, it's like four years later. Obviously, that's not going to be a problem anymore. And it wasn't my best, best workshop, because I assumed that people would be working on research strategy now. And still, it was a room of maybe 45 people and 35 didn't have a research strategy, didn't know what it was. This it has to change, you know, in order to, to operationalize, you need to know what you're going to operationalize. Now, the last point in this is, is that I think that this gap is because many leaders have, have made the assumption, or just gone into an autopilot where in order to do more research, I miss hire more researchers. And I miss make recruiting easy for them to do so that they can do more research more quickly, and they can be happy. And then we must have a library so that people can find the research. And that's it. And so the entire focus of the strategy is like growing the research team, which means hiring more researchers, which means getting in to the right, you know, friendship with stakeholders who want to flip your head count, so you can get more research, a research head count, and then more research done. But a strategy should be really, if you, if you boil the strategy down to hire more researchers, then it's pretty easy to see that that's a very limited strategy. And so there's incredible scope to look deeply at a strategy and trying to understand what are the goals of the organization, where could I place myself to get the most stakeholder buy-in, not just for hiring more researchers, but for supporting various initiatives around research. You know, there's so much creativity in that. And again, there's that word creativity. And I think a lot of us, and I say us because I've certainly been in this space myself, have gotten stuck in a bit of a rut with our work and have missed out on the play, a word that I used right at the start, and have missed out on the ability to be creative in what we do, to think really laterally, to try different things, and to devise operations that really help to deliver on those plans. I probably go off on a bit of a tangent because this is such an important point to me. And service design is such an important part of trying to understand how do you actually live on these strategies so that they stick, that they really stand on their own two feet. That was definitely a good point to emphasize the importance of strategy and putting that in place, and that it's really hard to do a good job when there is no strategy. Now, what we're hearing from your story is a sort of very clear call to action to the research ops community to dig deeper into service design. We are a service design community listening to your story. And I'm sure some of us would love to engage more with the community out there which is called research ops. What would you advise us to do if after this conversation we are interested in connecting with our research ops folks and peers? I'd like to say as an introduction to that question that I think there's huge scope for service designers to train research operations professionals, but also to consult. It's not always the budget to have a full-time service designer in a team or the need sometimes. But one of the most valuable things I've managed to do is hire a service designer at the start of a project to come in and actually map out what the service is all about, what does it want to achieve, who's at stakeholders and so on and so forth. So there should certainly be, particularly as the research ops profession and the research profession matures and starts to understand itself as a service and a business within an organization or as an agency, a research agency is a business. It does have to have these inner workings in place for service designers to become more involved in research operations. I suspect design operations and possibly even DevOps can say the same thing, but I'll stick to my own place for now because certainly this is where we have very complex systems. I mean they are hugely complex and so it's a really interesting landscape to practice some of those skills. When it comes to connecting with research ops professionals there are two primary ways to do that. The one is the research ops community. I mentioned that although I started it in 2018, I stepped away from it in 2019, but it is there and thriving and it's a really good place to meet thousands of people who are either research ops professionals but also research leaders who would just be the kind of people who might be smart enough to hire and a service designer to work on their team. The second place is, I run a, it's an invite only community so it's not open to the broader public but you could always reach out to me if you are desperate to speak to someone or understand I'm happy to have a conversation, but there are also 120 people in my club. It's a cha-cha club who are full-time dedicated research ops professionals who might be interested in just sharing a bit more about their world. I think there is a lot of opportunity for the two communities to start to share backwards and forwards and to learn from each other, certainly from research operations. I mean a wealth of tools that service designers offer us. And vice versa, so this is such a valuable and interesting conversation to have here on the service design show because again, research is one of the most important aspects of the service design process and to know that we can deliver higher quality and do it an easier way and not to sort of reinvent the wheel and yeah it's very valuable and it's also great to hear that there is a community out there waiting for our help to actually do their work. So yeah it sounds like an obvious win situation over here. Before we start to wrap up I'm really curious you're writing a book, you have a private community, you're maybe still consulting. What's next for you? How do you see your role evolving and how do you maybe see research ops as a practice evolving? Next year, early next year I'll finish off my book and then I'll get back into advising and running workshops and speaking at conferences and doing whatever pops up. But there are a couple of areas that I would like to offer some value to the research and the research operations space apart from running my club and building up the confidence and the structure around the profession. One of those is in really telling the story of what are the big challenges that are happening in the research world. Long ago, well perhaps not long ago but who knows the COVID time, it's that quantum time, we can't keep track of it. But it feels like the conversation in the research profession is moving on from what has moved on from methodology and it is more interrogating how does research drive impact and or in business terms how does it deliver value into an organization? And with the recent downturn in the economy, a lot of researchers, I think it's almost 40% of the research industry has been laid off, which is a staggering number. And I'm hearing more and more now that there are more silent, what I call silent layoffs going on with they're not these big announcements but people being let off in one way or the other. And so there really has been a serious knock in the face to interrogate how does research really cement its place in an organization and make sure that the value that is delivering into the organization is tangible. And so where I think I could offer value is telling the stories about what people outside of research think about research. There's often spoken about friction with product managers. Why? What do product managers want? What are their assumptions? Like what do people think about research? As you can tell from my voice, there's still some forming going on around what that is. But I used to be a journalist, used to be a radio journalist. And my full time job was to tell stories not from my point of view, but from what other people are thinking. And not always to have the answer but to provoke a conversation about these things. So I think that could be something really interesting I'd like to get to. Otherwise it's going to be business as usual for me, workshops, conferences, advising, strategy, coaching, and running the Cha Cha Club, which takes up a good amount of my time. Some of the things I'm working on with that just briefly is a state of research ops report. It's currently working to see if I can get a sponsor for that. I might just be on the brink of that. To bring out something that really helps us understand where is research operations, how many people beyond my club are working in research operations, what are the biggest concerns that are there, and what are the salary bands and that sort of stuff. It's starting to look at how we bring shape into also the kinds of skills, so that conversations like this aren't potentially surprising, but we have a templated competency framework for research operations that someone can pick up. So there's a few things like that on my mind that, again, could bring shape to the field. I'm sure that somebody in the audience right now and the listeners is inspired by your story, and they would love to learn more and dive deeper into this topic. What are some good places to start, and maybe if they want to continue this conversation with you, are there some ways to do that? Great. So the primary way to get in touch with me is LinkedIn. I am on Twitter, but you probably won't find me there all that much or X. So LinkedIn, number one place to find me. If you message me, I don't get back immediately, but I will get back to you for sure. To learn about research operations in general, once a quarter, I run something called Cha Cha Talks. It's a public event, so you can join it. It's for free, and it features Cha Cha Club members as hosts and as speakers, and they are incredibly smart people, like just amazing, and they have done some incredible talks in the past. So if you want to learn more about research operations, absolutely come and join one of those. The next one will be coming up in November, right at the end of November, I think the 28th of November this year. If you want to find out more about the Cha Cha Club, visit chacha.club. Yes, it is like the dance moves. It's not a dance club. It's a professional club. It stands for cheerleaders and chums because research shops professionals need a cheerleader and they need a chum. They're often on their own. So it's like kind of like the Lonely Hearts Club band for research jobs. Otherwise, there's my website as well, katetowsy.com, and you can contact me via my website. So a variety of ways, and I would love to hear from you. We'll make sure to add all the links in the show notes. Kate, thanks so much for coming on. I learned a lot and it was very helpful. I wish I had this information a few years back in my career, but you know, never too old to learn. So I'm going to make a guess that this isn't going to be the last time you and I connect on this topic. And yeah, but for now, just thank you. Thank you for what you're doing and thank you for coming on and sharing your stories. It was such a pleasure. And I hope it's not the last time that we connect on this topic or any topic or even building communities topics. Kate has definitely got me thinking and excited about the value the research jobs community can bring to service design. I'm curious to hear from you. What's the one question you have for Kate after hearing our conversation? Leave a comment down below and we'll try to get all of them answered. If you've made it all the way to the end of the conversation and you enjoyed it, please click that like button not to feed the YouTube algorithm, but to let me know whether or not we're on the right track by addressing topics like research jobs here on the show. My name is Mark Fontijn and I want to thank you for spending a small part of your day with me. It's an absolute honor and pleasure. Please keep making a positive impact and I look forward to see you in the next video.