Revisit ResearchOps 2.0, a five-part audio documentary exploring the evolution of research operations, AI, scalable systems, and the future of research.
Not long ago, research operations meant booking participants, managing spreadsheets, and making sure the cameras worked in the usability lab.
Today, ResearchOps professionals are designing complex research systems, managing organizational knowledge, and figuring out how artificial intelligence fits into the research process.
That's quite a career transformation.
About a year ago, User Interviews partnered with The ChaCha Club to produce ResearchOps 2.0, a five-part audio documentary exploring how the profession got here and where it might be headed next.
Hosted by Kate Towsey, founder of The ChaCha Club and author of Research That Scales, the series brought together ResearchOps practitioners, research leaders, and industry experts from organizations including Microsoft, IBM, Adobe, LinkedIn, Intuit, and User Interviews.
The conversations were candid, sometimes funny, and occasionally uncomfortable. They explored everything from AI agents and research platforms to layoffs, burnout, and the challenge of proving the value of work that often goes unnoticed.
A year later, those conversations are worth revisiting. Particularly as AI accelerates the pace of research and raises new questions about who—or what—will conduct it.
Here is a look back at the five episodes and what we can still learn from them.
Episode 1: The evolution of ResearchOps
ResearchOps wasn't always a recognized profession. In its earliest days, the work largely involved supporting usability labs and recruiting research participants, often with little more than spreadsheets, email, and determination.
The opening episode traces the profession's evolution through three generations: the pioneers who solved immediate operational problems, the systems builders who made research scalable, and the emerging architects designing AI-enabled research ecosystems.
Featuring perspectives from Erin May of User Interviews, Garrett Tsukada of Intuit, and Casey Gollin of IBM, the conversation explores how purpose-built research technology freed operations teams to tackle bigger challenges.
The takeaway: ResearchOps is moving beyond helping researchers conduct studies toward helping entire organizations learn from customers and act on those insights.
Episode 2: Leveraging AI for research superstardom
What happens when AI becomes another member of the research team?
This episode takes an unusual approach to answering that question: AI actually helps co-host it. Kate collaborated with Claude to write portions of the script, with ElevenLabs providing the synthetic voice.
The experiment provides a fitting introduction to conversations about AI-powered research repositories, automated participant recruitment, research synthesis, and autonomous agents.
Experts from Microsoft, Workday, LinkedIn, and User Interviews share practical applications alongside cautionary stories, including an AI system that invented participant quotes.
The discussion also explores whether synthetic users could ever replace real customers.
The takeaway: AI can dramatically expand research capacity, but someone still needs to provide context, establish guardrails, and evaluate the results. That creates opportunities for ResearchOps rather than simply eliminating work.
Episode 3: Taking a platform approach to ResearchOps
Buying another research tool doesn't necessarily solve a research operations problem. Sometimes it just creates another disconnected system.
Episode three explores an alternative: treating research operations as a platform that connects tools, data, workflows, and people.
Garrett Tsukada explains how Intuit developed a research platform that connects participant recruitment with compliance and other business requirements. Casey Gollin describes how IBM makes research insights available beyond the teams that originally generated them.
Both examples illustrate a shift from providing individual services to building systems that enable others to work independently.
The episode also examines the tradeoffs, including vendor dependencies, technical complexity, and the risks of overengineering.
The takeaway: The goal isn't to build the most sophisticated platform. It's to create an interconnected system that makes research easier to conduct, insights easier to reuse, and business impact easier to demonstrate.
Episode 4: Building enduring systems amidst constant change
How do you build something that lasts when the organization around it keeps changing?
Layoffs, reorganizations, shifting priorities, and emerging technologies have made stability increasingly difficult for research teams.
This episode explores how ResearchOps leaders at LinkedIn, Cisco, Workday, and other organizations have responded.
One particularly useful example comes from LinkedIn, where reorganizing research around strategic initiatives rather than individual business units helped the team plan further ahead while remaining flexible.
The conversation also challenges a common operations instinct: saying yes to everything.
The takeaway: Resilient research operations depend less on rigid processes and more on clear priorities, strong relationships, and systems designed to adapt. Understanding the business is just as important as understanding research.
Episode 5: The people of ResearchOps
Behind every successful research system is someone who figured out how to make it work.
The final episode turns its attention to those people—and their surprisingly unconventional career paths.
There is Daniel Gottlieb, who moved from studying primate behavior into leading research operations at Microsoft. Others arrived through anthropology, fishery engineering, project management, and UX research.
Their stories reveal a profession built around curiosity, empathy, problem-solving, and an almost irresistible desire to make things work better.
But those strengths carry risks. The episode examines burnout, the difficulty of setting boundaries, and the challenge of making invisible operational work visible to leadership.
The takeaway: ResearchOps succeeds because of the people behind the systems. Recognizing their contributions, investing in their careers, and protecting their capacity to do meaningful work are essential to the profession's future.
The next chapter of ResearchOps is already underway
Looking back, the most striking thing about ResearchOps 2.0 isn't how much the profession has changed. It's how many of the questions raised throughout the series remain unresolved.
How should organizations manage AI-generated research? Who is responsible for the quality and governance of increasingly automated workflows? How can research insights become more useful across the business?
These aren't simply technology questions. They're questions about people, processes, and organizational priorities.
And that's precisely where ResearchOps has an opportunity to lead.
As Casey Gollin observes in the opening episode, even as technology takes over more operational tasks, what remains is "thinking, and planning, and making change."
Listen to all five episodes of ResearchOps 2.0 to hear how the people building the future of research are answering those questions—and what their experiences might mean for your own team.
Additional resources
- Webinar: 8 tips to build a quicker, easier research practice — Learn practical ways to streamline participant recruitment, organize research insights, and build repeatable workflows that make research more efficient and scalable.
- Guide: What’s included in a research operations job description? A ReOps hiring guide (+template!) — Explore the skills, responsibilities, and career expectations of modern ResearchOps professionals, with a hiring template and 30/60/90-day plan.
- Podcast: Slowing things down to speed up research with Jared Forney of Okta — On Awkward Silences, Jared explores how AI is reshaping ResearchOps, why governance matters, and how to balance research speed with quality and human judgment.
- Blog post: A blueprint for scaling UX research — Discover five practical strategies from experienced ResearchOps leaders for scaling research, improving access to insights, and demonstrating greater business impact.
