From Passion to Execution: A Story of Evolving Research Maturity at LinkedIn
Summary
One of the hardest parts of building a knowledge management system is getting leadership buy-in and getting your team to use it properly. Join Kevin and Sarah to learn about their journey from passion-fueled side project to research-only management to fully funded knowledge/project/insights management initiatives (including an on-staff research librarian!). In this talk you will hear real-world examples of how they struggled to show how this was one of the most important things to be doing. They will share examples of how one team is leveraging the work to scale their research capabilities and provide rapid evaluation for the entire company. You will also hear about the accelerated growth and value that has come from connecting their system with the greater design org and even product management. Through all of this they will share actionable takeaways on how to show value early, what not to do, and how to use a system to amplify your teams’ work across the organization and help your Ops team scale.
Key Insights
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Inefficient project tracking using Google Sheets was replaced by a custom Airtable base with automated unique project numbers, improving scalability and reducing duplicate entries.
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Leadership resisted using standard service management tools like Jira for research project tracking, fearing it implied UX research was a service team taking orders.
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Participant recruitment leverages LinkedIn’s data warehouse for opted-in users, enabling quarterly bulk recruits that account for 80% of recruiting needs.
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Participant incentives were decentralized and error-prone until onboarding Ethnio enabled global culture-specific rewards, automated delivery, and compliance tracking.
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Implementing a status reporting workflow integrated into tools researchers already used (Teams, Figma) drastically improved status accuracy and reduced manual effort.
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Rapid Lab, a biweekly evaluative research program across three lines of business, tests six designs every two weeks, made possible by foundational operational improvements.
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Connecting research assumptions, participant feedback, insights, and business impact in Airtable enables leadership to track research impact and identify process issues.
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A research librarian role was critical to maintain a consistent taxonomy in the insights repository, preventing chaos from multiple inconsistent tagging styles.
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Consolidating planning workflows across multiple design functions into a single Airtable interface addressed visibility, prioritization, and capacity planning challenges.
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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."
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