From Passion to Execution: A Story of Evolving Research Maturity at LinkedIn
Summary
Key Insights
-
•
Inefficient project tracking using Google Sheets was replaced by a custom Airtable base with automated unique project numbers, improving scalability and reducing duplicate entries.
-
•
Leadership resisted using standard service management tools like Jira for research project tracking, fearing it implied UX research was a service team taking orders.
-
•
Participant recruitment leverages LinkedIn’s data warehouse for opted-in users, enabling quarterly bulk recruits that account for 80% of recruiting needs.
-
•
Participant incentives were decentralized and error-prone until onboarding Ethnio enabled global culture-specific rewards, automated delivery, and compliance tracking.
-
•
Implementing a status reporting workflow integrated into tools researchers already used (Teams, Figma) drastically improved status accuracy and reduced manual effort.
-
•
Rapid Lab, a biweekly evaluative research program across three lines of business, tests six designs every two weeks, made possible by foundational operational improvements.
-
•
Connecting research assumptions, participant feedback, insights, and business impact in Airtable enables leadership to track research impact and identify process issues.
-
•
A research librarian role was critical to maintain a consistent taxonomy in the insights repository, preventing chaos from multiple inconsistent tagging styles.
-
•
Consolidating planning workflows across multiple design functions into a single Airtable interface addressed visibility, prioritization, and capacity planning challenges.
-
•
Scaling research ops requires strategic partnerships, custom tooling, centralization with flexibility, automation to reduce human error, and ongoing iteration as the organization grows.
Notable Quotes
"Broken processes aren't scalable."
"The biggest pain point in my life was tracking research projects through a disjointed flow of Airtable, Google Docs, and hand-curated emails."
"The only way to get a project number was through Airtable, which allowed us to further evolve the process."
"Researchers used to issue incentives manually, running on an honor system that was error-prone and inconsistent."
"Ethnio allowed us to track participants' total compensation and set annual caps, reducing fraud risk and improving compliance."
"We simply told leadership we don’t even know what we don’t know or what we do know, leading to a research insights repository."
"The research librarian equals consistent taxonomy; without that, you can’t build accessible and searchable knowledge."
"In a large organization, processes must become more centralized and rigid to scale, though flexibility and team needs still matter."
"Start somewhere simple, start early, include the right voices, and build foundational components you’ll reuse over and over."
"Go find a partner in Ops who has a passion for operations and pain points of inefficiency, then build something great together."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"Everybody involved in product making should have empathy for each other, not just for the customer."
Monty HammontreeThe Future of UX Research
December 3, 2020
"The hustle does suck, and Gen Z is doing this other thing over here, arranging in healthier ways."
Deanna ZandtThe Unspoken Complexity of “Self-Care” with Deanna Zandt
July 21, 2022
"Even the best-designed public-facing tools need operational and policy support to succeed."
Shanti Mathew Natalie Sims Natalia RadywylCivic Design at Scale: Introducing the Public Policy Layer Cake
December 9, 2021
"Allowing others to experience research firsthand can convert them into advocates for hiring more researchers."
Kathleen AsjesResearch Democratization: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
March 10, 2022
"Color tells you where to look. That’s why color in data visualization must be intentional."
Theresa NeilJust Build Me a Dashboard!
April 9, 2019
"There are over five hundred tools that call themselves survey software on G2, making it one of the largest software categories."
Aleksandra Korczynska Caroline Jarrett Justyna ParmeeSurvey Tools
March 12, 2026
"If a task is labeled urgent it immediately sets my brain off into fight mode and I won’t be able to think about anything else."
Jessica NorrisADHD: A DesignOps Superpower
September 9, 2022
"Designers can be really paranoid and very precious."
Gretchen AndersonScaling the Human Center
June 8, 2017
"We must humanize how and what we measure and recognize as impact."
Frances YllanaTheme 2 Intro
September 24, 2024
