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Cultivating Business Partnerships to Grow Research Ops
Summary
Key Insights
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Research Ops teams must deeply collaborate with marketing and communications to craft compelling participant narratives and distribute research invitations effectively.
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Legal teams are critical partners for ensuring GDPR compliance, especially for participant consent, incentives, and data deletion policies.
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Self-service research models help scale recruitment efforts beyond resource-intensive high-touch processes.
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Building and maintaining a large participant database (e.g. 25,000+) on platforms like Salesforce takes years but creates operational efficiencies.
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Frontline teams such as sales and support can be leveraged as powerful, low-effort sources for feedback and participant referrals.
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Research labs should prioritize researcher comfort with soundproofing, natural light, and quiet locations to improve study quality.
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Partnerships with IT, sourcing, and security ease vendor contract negotiation, tool license management, and data privacy assurance.
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Transitioning Research Ops from a UX org to product strategy aligns the function closer to product development, focusing solely on research stakeholders.
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Relationship management with partners is a significant, ongoing time investment and a critical skill for research operations success.
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Community ecosystems, such as partner and user groups, offer additional channels to recruit participants and collect product feedback.
Notable Quotes
"Partnerships are more important than ever as we're reminded each day how connected we really are."
"You need to demonstrate compelling reasons why they should work with you and hook your champions and advocates."
"Marketing can help you distribute invitations for research because they have broader access to customers that you might not have."
"Legal impacts just about every aspect of research Ops, from GDPR to incentives to internal documentation."
"If you have the opportunity to secure space for labs, even if you don't need it now, snatch it up—the real estate does not come easily."
"Self-service research frees you up from recruitment overhead and lets you focus on other Ops initiatives."
"Research operations is like an API that sits between researchers and the rest of the organization and the world."
"Relationship management is a skill that you can take anywhere, in research Ops or even working at a hotel front desk."
"Our participant database has been growing for seven years, and building it has taken time and many channels."
"Creative collaborations often yield the best results, so don't shy away from being inventive in building your research Ops practice."
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