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."
Dig deeper—ask the Rosenbot:
More Videos
"We’re not building to build, we’re building to learn."
Maria SkaadenContinuous Design: One eye on the horizon and the other on the next wave
November 8, 2018
"Nobody wants nothing. Nobody says, can't, what the hell get in my office? How come you did not do anything?"
Dan WillisEnterprise Storytelling Sessions
May 13, 2015
"You don’t have to take notes because we have an incredible note taker capturing everything."
Bria AlexanderOpening Remarks
January 8, 2024
"The constraints in enterprise pushed us to focus more on an employee-centered approach for product decisions."
Catherine DubutBridging Physical and Digital Spaces: Approaches to Retail Service Design
March 18, 2021
"Communication and processes are the core focus areas where design ops teams invest most of their efforts."
Angelos ArnisState of DesignOps: Learnings from the 2021 Global Report
October 1, 2021
"Switching sideways from management to principal IC was a leap of faith but ultimately gave me more impact."
Edward CuppsThe Principal Path: Journeying from Management to Individual Contributor
June 11, 2021
"Providing alternative content is often a kinder gesture than any lengthy alternative text could be."
Abby CovertStuck? Diagrams Help
October 27, 2022
"We try to find ways to have fun together remotely — like virtual holiday parties or online games."
Jilanna WilsonDistributed DesignOps Management
February 26, 2019
"During grief, our creative mind shuts down; fear, safety and security rule the day."
Maria GiudiceEmpowering change: Reigniting purpose, passion and impact in research
March 13, 2025
