Log in or create a free Rosenverse account to watch this video.
Log in Create free account100s of community videos are available to free members. Conference talks are generally available to Gold members.
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."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"With AI, phishing will get worse; attackers will craft messages users are more likely to believe."
Heidi TrostTo Protect People, You Have to Protect Information: A Human-Centered Design Approach to Cybersecurity
January 23, 2025
"Incentives influence behavior strongly, and lack of awareness about them leads to decisions misaligned with desired impact."
Sheryl CababaExpanding Your Design Lens with Systems Thinking
February 23, 2023
"You can’t just break apart these components and type; instead, you change their properties to adjust labels, colors, or icons."
Jack BeharHow to Build Prototypes that Behave like an End-Product
December 6, 2022
"AI decision-making on behalf of billions of people isn’t just scary; it’s terrifying and dangerous, so ethics must be embedded."
Mitchell BernsteinOrganizing Chaos: How IBM is Defining Design Systems with Sketch for an Ever-Changing AI Landscape
September 29, 2021
"If roles and responsibilities aren’t clear, scope starts to grow legs and we end up on rabbit holes that dilute the original project."
Séamus ByrneAligning Teams with Choreography
January 8, 2024
"People eat with their eyes before they eat with their mouths — polish makes a big difference."
Dave Hoffer Joanne WeaverUX Job Search AMA #2 with Joanne Weaver and Dave Hoffer
May 21, 2025
"Avoid walls of text and create visual hierarchy to ensure scanability by using headers, sections, lists, and images."
Gabrielle VerderberDocumentation Your Team Will Actually Use
October 3, 2023
"When sharing prototypes that aren't accessible, facilitators may need to control the prototype and follow user directions."
Kate KalcevichIntegrating Accessibility in DesignOps
September 23, 2024
"Turning the research lens on both the ‘in here’ organization and the ‘out there’ customer reality helps reveal misalignments and opportunities."
Robin BeersResearch as a Catalyst for Organizational Transformation
March 12, 2021
