Why central repositories are key to scaling research with Kate Towsey
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What is the focus of research operations?
Welcome to the Insights Unlocked podcast. I'm Nathan Isaacs, Senior Manager for Content Production at User Testing. And joining us today as host is User Testing's Leah Hogan, Principal for Experience Research Strategy. Welcome to the show, Leah. Thank you, Nathan. And our guest today is Kate Towsey. Kate is a research ops advisor, coach, and educator. She's the author of Research That Scales and founder of the Cha-Cha Club, a members club for research ops professionals. Welcome to the show, Kate. It's really great to be here. All right. Awesome. I am so thrilled to be having this conversation, Kate. And, you know, for a long time, I've been waiting for your book. So I was one of the first people to preorder it, and I've been sharing it with everyone. And I think really to start the conversation, I would love to hear about your journey, because
You didn't start as a research ops manager, but you're now I think one of the leading voices, if not the leading voice in the research ops space. And I'd love to just understand, like, what got you there? I think like many people who work in insurance firm, I've heard people, my father is in insurance and he said, nobody chooses an insurance job or career. You just land there. And I think it's very similar with research operations. I hear from so many people who have started in hospitality, sometimes not even in the operations department of hospitality, but they've been working at the front desk and learning how to engage with people, how to run systems, and then kind of working into other places within hospitality. And then they found their way through some strange circuitous journey into research operations. And then, of course, you get more direct routes, like researchers who actually realize one day, it's the systems that I really love.
In fact, I want to, you know, they start organizing their own systems, and they fall in love with that aspect. And then they They do more and more until they're actually doing no more research anymore. And then they get the research ops job title. So my journey was not dissimilar in that I have a background, in fact, in fine art, very much not related necessarily to research ops. Although, and I argue this in the book, it's often mistaken that research operations is an administrative kind of purely logistical job, but it's really a design job. And so I get to express a lot of my creativity and ways in my life in research ops in the sense of designing systems, of designing culture, fine art, and certainly the type of fine art that I studied was conceptual art.
And the focus of that is all about how do you create a, the word I'm coming up with is a feelable, a tactile experience for people that shifts how they understand the world. What an amazing definition of what it is to design systems for research, systems for understanding and knowledge. From there, the whistle-stop tour is I worked in journalism. I've worked in – I've even worked as a yoga teacher for some years. I've worked in insurance too. I've done a bunch of things. But things really shifted when I came back from India in 2004 and a friend of mine who had started a – a small e-commerce store that was selling Vedic books, books from India. And it was about, I think Amazon had been around for a few years or something.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What is the focus of research operations?
0:49–6:45
2
How has research operations evolved over time?
6:45–15:31
3
What role does trust play in research operations?
15:31–21:21
4
How can systems thinking enhance research outcomes?
21:21–30:44
5
What challenges do researchers face with AI?
30:44–37:02
6
How can organizations embed research into their culture?
37:02–41:37
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Insights Unlocked
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