A Selectively Scrappy Approach to ResearchOps
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."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"Sometimes it’s reasonable to consider your design as strategy and ship a piece now and other pieces later."
Scott Jensen Sarah Delaney Carmen LiuShort Take #2: UX/Product Lessons from Your Industry Peers
December 6, 2022
"Designing services increasingly span these blurred lines between our digital and public worlds."
Sarah BrooksTheme Three Intro
November 18, 2022
"Whatever you were a year ago, whatever you believe design ops looks like today, don't let those be moment prisons for you."
Jon FukudaTheme One Intro
October 2, 2023
"If you have a question at the end of a presentation, please put that question in the thread associated with the talk."
Bria AlexanderOpening Remarks
March 29, 2023
"Depersonalizing the situation is a huge winner in nearly any hard conversation."
Joshua GravesWe Need To Talk: Navigating Conversations with Your Boss (Part 1 of 3)
April 14, 2025
"We had to allow people to grieve first before we could make a plan for healing."
Kyria Stephens Marlon KernerPower to Heal: Civic Design in the Aftermath of Tragedy
November 17, 2022
"Architecture is like the original UX because it’s all about user experience and how people move through a space, which relates to how we design products."
Caitlyn Hampton Monica Lee Jina YoonCompass 101: Growing Your Career In A Startup World
June 11, 2021
"Please don’t implement the Spotify model. It works for them, it won’t work for you."
Louis RosenfeldDiscussion: What Operations can teach DesignOps
November 6, 2017
"The hardest part was losing my identity of being someone who works in tech after so many years."
Rachel GarbExit Interview #7: Facing a blank slate in retirement when constraints are all you’ve ever known
August 5, 2026
