Rosenverse

Log in or create a free Rosenverse account to watch this video.

Log in Create free account

100s of community videos are available to free members. Conference talks are generally available to Gold members.

ResearchOps AMA with Kate Towsey & Jake Burghardt
Thursday, October 16, 2025 • Advancing Research Community
Share the love for this talk
ResearchOps AMA with Kate Towsey & Jake Burghardt
Speakers: Kate Towsey and Jake Burghardt
Link:

Summary

Join us for a ResearchOps Ask Me Anything (AMA) with Kate Towsey, author of Research That Scales, and Jake Burghardt, author of Stop Wasting Research. This is your chance to meet two of the most influential voices in research operations. Ask them your questions, get practical advice for tackling your own research challenges, and explore what it takes to make research impactful and scalable.

Key Insights

  • Research operations is fundamentally about systems thinking and operationalizing research as a verb, not just a noun or role.

  • Successful knowledge management requires human curation and editorial oversight to maintain quality and taxonomy.

  • Building research repositories should be prioritized by organizational goals, focusing on key business areas rather than dumping everything.

  • Community and peer support among researchers reduce anxiety around sharing work and increase engagement.

  • AI tools for research discovery require well-structured, high-quality input data and cannot replace human decisions about relevance or quality.

  • Research repositories function best as two tiers: an engaged ‘bohemian’ campfire for active teams and a centralized ‘corporate’ library for lasting knowledge.

  • Incremental, Lego-like building blocks approach to research ops infrastructure allows flexible scaling and replicability across projects.

  • Engagement in contributing to repositories depends on delivering value back to researchers, such as visibility and impact.

  • Collective research knowledge takes time to build trust and shared identity among disparate teams.

  • Dedicated librarians or taxonomy experts are essential for maintaining repository structure—community-managed taxonomies tend to fail.

Notable Quotes

"Everything is really a system. Even punk rock had systems to enable it."

"Operations is a verb. You’ve always been operating — the role just invites you to do it better."

"Research waste turns into research wealth when insights are properly activated inside organizations."

"A library that contains everything is not necessarily useful because everything is not useful."

"We don’t have to try and do it all at once — build prioritized pillars of knowledge by business focus."

"You need someone human deciding what information is good enough and tagged well for AI to surface it."

"Campfires are tribal, engaged knowledge spaces, libraries are corporate buildings, organized and curated."

"Researchers are shy about sharing work because they worry about being judged — peer and management support help."

"I don’t believe any group collaboratively keeps taxonomy tidy — you need a dedicated librarian."

"Flexible Lego block operations let you build the shape you need when and how long you need it."

Ask the Rosenbot
Amanda Kaleta-Kott
The Joys and Dilemmas of Conducting UX Research with Older Adults
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Jacqui Frey
Panel Discussion: Integrating DesignOps
2018 • DesignOps Summit 2018
Gold
Ariel Kennan
Theme Two Intro
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Maria Giudice
Remaking the Making Company: Moving from Product to Experience
2016 • Enterprise UX 2016
Gold
Kate Koch
Flex Your Super Powers: When a Design Ops Team Scales to Power CX
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Mariesa Lenz
What Beekeeping Taught me about Product Teams
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Chelsea Mauldin
Let's Talk About Money
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Ebru Namaldi
Designing the Designer’s Journey: Scaling Teams, Culture, and Growth Through DesignOps
2025 • DesignOps Summit 2025
Gold
Shelby Switzer
Making Space for Community Knowledge-sharing in a Distributed World
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Rebecca Buck
Mission: Keep Talent in Research Roles!
2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold
Kristin Skinner
Theme 2: Introduction and Provocation
2024 • DesignOps Summit 2020
Gold
Sam Proulx
Understanding Screen Readers on Mobile: How And Why to Learn from Native Users
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Jack Behar
How to Build Prototypes that Behave like an End-Product
2022 • Design in Product 2022
Gold
Kathleen Asjes
Research Democratization: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold
Uday Gajendar
From AI to Zeitgeist: Theory as the design antidote to AI hype
2025 • Rosenfeld Community
Jorge Arango
Design as an Antidote to VUCA
2019 • Enterprise Community

More Videos

Bryce Benton

"Public data has a life of its own; it is sometimes one thing, sometimes another, depending on context and display."

Bryce Benton

[Demo] AI-powered UX enhancement: Aligning GitHub documentation with USWDS at Austin Public Library

June 4, 2024

Isaac Heyveld

"Communication is an integral part of the chief of staff role, whether with leadership, the org, or partners."

Isaac Heyveld

Expand DesignOps Leadership as a Chief of Staff

September 8, 2022

Peter Van Dijck

"We’re not teaching the model anything; we’re improving our prompts and context."

Peter Van Dijck

Hands-on AI #1: Let’s write your first AI eval

October 8, 2025

Lada Gorlenko

"The pandemic track was the I told you so moment for those of us designing remote tools since 2006."

Lada Gorlenko

Theme 2 Intro

June 9, 2022

Nicole Umphress

"We used Trello in a new way, creating boards for each week with cards representing tasks participants could complete asynchronously."

Nicole Umphress

Delivering Design Education During a Global Pandemic: Lessons Learned

June 9, 2022

Paul Pangaro, PhD

"Conversation is 21st century design; it's how we share values, align intentions, and coordinate action."

Paul Pangaro, PhD

Systems Disciplines: Table Stakes for 21st Century Organizations

June 6, 2023

George Abraham

"The Ab Builder is a collaborative workspace where designers and developers have synchronized component libraries and themes."

George Abraham Stefan Ivanov

Design Systems To-Go: Reimagining Developer Handoff, and Introducing App Builder (Part 2)

October 1, 2021

Liza Pemstein

"We don’t have dedicated user researchers, but designers and PMs conduct most research here."

Liza Pemstein Jane Davis

Scaling Research Via an Ops First Model at Clever

March 27, 2023

Joseph Meersman

"Playbacks are stakeholder-focused meetings that sell the work’s story and drive buy-in, different from critiques focused on craft."

Joseph Meersman

Sweating the Pixel: Scaling Quality through Critique

June 10, 2021