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Product Thinking
Episode 208: Scaling Research Ops to Drive Organizational Change with Kate Towsey
00:52:33
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- [00:00]
Kate Touzzi
Like saying that water is your most valuable asset, which most organizations will say knowledge is our most valuable asset, but then not building a dam for it and thinking of tributaries and understanding where it's going, it's just leaking and you don't even know where it's going. And then you're all sitting there thirsty all the time when you're making the big decisions. You really need robust, reliable knowledge being well tested and there are definite, like highly skilled people who know how to get there. But what we need to do as research is look down the line and go. There are lots of different forms of learning and forms of gaining knowledge. We cannot monopolize the relationship with the customer. What we need to do is operationalize it. The trick for an operations person, I'm sure you experienced this too, is deliver some quick things, keep people on board, show them the long term vision and constantly try and encourage patience in getting there. Because what you're building is not just something that's going to fly away the next day. It's like some real robust structuring that you hope is going to be valuable for a decade or two or three. Even.
- [00:59]
Melissa Perry
Creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day to day interactions with developers. It's about how an organization supports products as a whole. The systems, the processes and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers. With the help of some boundary pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions, we'll dive into this system from every angle and help you think like a great product leader. This is the Product Thinking Podcast. Here's your host, Melissa Perry.
- [01:35]
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. Joining us today is Kate Touzzi, an independent Research Ops advisor and educator. Kate formerly was a Research Operations Manager at Atlassian and she started Research Ops at the BBC. She founded the Research Ops Community and the Cha Cha Club of Global Operations professionals. She recently published a book all about the great work she's been doing called Research that the Research Operations Handbook, which we're going to dive into today as well as talk about how ResearchOps helps product managers and how it works well with Product Ops. But before we start to talk to Kate, it's time for Dear Melissa. So this is a segment of the show where you can ask me any of your burning product management questions. Go to dearMelissa.com and let me know what they are. Here's. Here's this week's question. Dear Melissa, in the early days of our product, our CEO and sales team pushed us to Have a broad, complex system. The problem was that we were always being lean and not raising a series A or B. This put a lot of pressure on the team at the time, but we've managed to make it a relative success with some high profile customers, good retention and good ratings. Now we have customers who expect us to keep deepening in all areas. We still get pushed to build more features in more directions. What advice would you have for narrowing the focus without alienating customers and prospects? So one thing that's interesting to me here is that you say that all the customers want you to deepen in all the areas. I would try to dig in here and try to figure out why. What are they trying to achieve with the deepening? What can't they do right now that they would like to do? Figure out what that value is. See what you can actually deliver on. For the company too, you need to have a strategy. If you were basically just building what the customers asked for forever, you're kind of setting the tone that you were like a consultancy, right? An agency that were building them customer software. You have to change that relationship. Now it's still about understanding their problems and helping them get what they need from it. But you have to have some expectation about how you're not going to do everything. So your company needs to have a strong vision and a strong statement about what you are going to handle and what you're not going to handle. So that comes from a strategy and from communication on that. And it sounds like that might be missing in the organization. I see a really common theme with a lot of startups where they'll build something and they might build something super complex like you're talking about and they'll go out and they'll try to sell it to everybody. You get a couple really big clients on there. And now those clients though may have some similarities, but they might actually be different needs as well. So now you've got like client A saying, hey, I need you to deepen in X, Y and Z over here. And then you got client B saying, you know, features 1, 2, 3 over here. This part of the thing is my problem. You want to go back and study what kind of people are actually using your product and what they're using it for and make sure that there's a firm direction there. Are you solving the same jobs to be done for everybody in a way where it's going to scale to a lot more users, or are you just kind of building piecemeal for the biggest users who are yelling right now? That's what you really want to figure out. Now, I've been in this situation, too. I've worked with a company where I was setting the product strategy, and when we looked at all their customers and how much money we were spending on custom software, let's say, for them, or responding to their needs, which weren't super strategic, we ended up putting together this document, which we called the sales debt of the organization. And we said, what do we contractually commit to that was off our roadmap or straying away from our vision? And when we looked at it, the largest company that we had was a huge amount of sales debt. Like we were building custom features for them because they were yelling the loudest. Now, we still wanted to protect that revenue because we didn't want them to churn. It was a significant portion of it. But we had to go back and start to have hard conversations with them about what they really needed or start charging them more. So we said, okay, you could still have that, but the price is now increasing. Right. This has to go up. So use the tools that are at your advantage here. If they want custom software or they're asking for things that are off roadmap, can they pay to play? If it's something that's in line with your vision, and if it's not in line with your vision, you have to be firm and say, we're not really going into that. That's not where we want to look at. So I would look at all of your customers and again, make sure that you have a good icp. Make sure you know who that ICP is and make sure that you're not just building for anybody who wants your product, but people that it's going to scale too. Right? You want to make sure that there are other people who are going to want the same problems to be solved. So you can keep scaling in that direction, having these hard conversations to a customer. They're used to it. People who buy software, they're told no, no by other people all the time, right? So you have to expect that they've had these conversations before. If you're solving their biggest problems, they're going to stay with you. If you're not solving their biggest problems, they will start to look elsewhere. So I. So I'd look at your competition, I'd look at what else their alternatives are, but I'd also try to figure out if they're asking for all of these things, what's the value they're going to get from them, and are they willing to Pay for it. Right? That's really what's going to come down to. That's going to help you prioritize a little bit more. But again, go back and make sure all those customers are not just a bunch of very distinct, very different types of profiles. Make sure that they're, they're a target customer, that you can scale this stuff to others, and that's going to help you prioritize what to actually build. So I hope that helps. Good luck with this challenge and anybody else listening out there, please go to dearMelissa.com and let me know what your questions are. Now it's time to talk to Kate. Hi, Kate. Welcome to the podcast.
- [07:01]
Kate Touzzi
Hi, Melissa. It's so great to be here.
- [07:03]
Melissa Perry
I'm really excited to talk to you all about research ops, especially because I'm getting a lot of questions about product ops and research ops and I'm a huge fan of this field, so. So, Kate, you have deep expertise in research ops and you just wrote a book called Research that Scales. Can you tell us a little bit about what led you to research Ops and what led you to writing the book?
- [07:24]
Kate Touzzi
So, like many people, I fell into research operations. The very short version of it is, is that I was a content strategist working in London as a consultant. And Lisa Rakel, the eminent research leader, I had done a project with her and she said, hey, I need a content strategist in government. She'd moved on to working with the government digital service at an amazing time in its history. The GDS was about 2013, and for me, I call this the Woodstock days of government because it was creative and innovative and a small agile team. It was an amazing place to be. So she said she was growing quite a big research team or bringing researchers together from across government. There were about 40 of them at the time, seemed to remember. And she realized that they were producing all of this amazing research content and the age old or the evergreen problem is it was disappearing into the ether once it had been used. So she figured, not unwisely, that a content strategist might be able to come in and fix the problem. When I arrived, I realized as a consultant that I was not going to be able to fix the problem because it really actually needed a bona fide librarian or information scientist. And it was just a pale beyond the kind of skills that I had. But as a consultant, anyone who has been consulting will know you do not say that you've got nothing to offer when you've been, when you're in a contract. And so I ended up building a research lab for the gds. I come from a music. You might see bass guitars and guitars and drums and things in the background. So I have a history in radio production in music. And so I was just thought, this is great. I get to play in the audio space and build a very hi fi lab. Which I did. And then after that, we launched the GDS User Research Blog, which kind of brought in my editing and content strategy work there. Then I got stuck into video libraries and then into participant recruitment panels. So I ended up just doing all of these different parts of at least the tooling aspect of research operations. And over the time, I was writing blogs on the newly minted user Research blog, the GDS blog, and people from across the world were reaching out from places like Etsy or Amazon, places like that, to have a chat with me about it. So by the end of about three years of working on these various projects and having a lot of fun with it as well, I realized there are a ton of people who are interested in this work and are thinking about it, but there's no framework around it. There doesn't even seem to be a name for it. I was wrong about that. There was a name for it. But I started the research ops community, which I stepped away from in 2019, and brought all these people together to really kind of talk about what is what is research Ops. So that was kind of how I wended my way into this profession that is now widely known as research operations, through the work of the what is Research Ops project that I launched with the research Ops community and all that kind of stuff. But many people don't kind of start in research operations. Maybe in five years time, people wake up and go, I want to be a research Ops professional, but people come from social sciences, from hotel, you know, the hospitality industry, from a lot of people from hr, because they know a lot about dealing with people and recruiting and systems, oftentimes from service design, from research as well. So, yeah, I'm just like one of everybody else who's kind of found my way into this really intriguing space.
- [10:46]
Melissa Perry
So for people who are not familiar with what research operations is, what is it? How do you describe it?
- [10:52]
Kate Touzzi
Yeah, my definition of it has changed over the years. I look at it as the systems design that sets up all of the infrastructure, services, everything that is the culture that is needed to enable not just a research team to shine, but to enable an entire organization to benefit from the knowledge that engaging with customers or users generates. Really, that's what it's all about.
- [11:17]
Melissa Perry
And when you're thinking about why organizations need research ops, what problem does this solve?
- [11:24]
Kate Touzzi
Again, my point of view used to be quite narrow. I think you all know this. Being a two time author, writing a book is the best way to form your thoughts around something. And the reason it takes so long to write a book for me at least, is because I go down all these rabbit holes around what do we actually mean by research, what do we mean by operations, what do we mean by what we're doing? And so that's really broadened my scope in terms of what is research even and what are we doing with operationalizing research. And really when you dig behind the, the, the kind of rote phrases that we use or the rote words that we use, it's all about knowledge and learning and specifically learning about what our customers or end users. For those who don't work in a customer centric organization, I'll stick with customer from now on. You know what they need. So we we wanting to dig up all that knowledge about what they need. But digging it up is one thing. The next thing is like enabling people to access that knowledge when they need it. Because we all it's everything needs to be of the moment. And then more than that, we want them to be able to absorb it easily. It, it appeals to them, it's easy to engage with. It's there at the right time and it draws into their central nervous system so that they have a deep understanding of that knowledge. It's within them now. It's their knowledge. It's no longer knowledge on a piece of paper or in a report or in a researcher's head. It's their knowledge. So at some point in the future, all of this knowledge is consolidated within them as the repository of it. And they can make really smart decisions. They might not even know where all these bits of knowledge have come from necessarily, which is a tricky thing for research teams. How do you draw the lines between an executive or a designer or anyone or product manager making a brilliant decision? It might be something that they've picked up over multiple different experiences in multiple different ways.
- [13:12]
Melissa Perry
When you think about implementing Research Ops 2 in an organization, where do people.
- [13:15]
Kate Touzzi
Typically start implementing research ops in an organization? Typically people will start with the most painful part. Most often that's participant recruitment for everybody. Whether you're talking about research operations for product managers in the product operations space, which is what I'm so intrigued by is really when are we all going to get together and just figure out the completeness of what people in product organizations, which you're either service or a product, we're all delivering the same thing. Ultimately it's all products and services. And so product managers have a hard time getting hold of people to talk to, learn from them. Researchers do, designers do, and sometimes execs or C suite heads up, they want to spend time. Occasionally it might be a quarterly ritual to spend time with customers and they will have a hard time doing that as well. And they want a certain type of VIP customer. So that's the biggest pain point that tends to innovate someone to think about operations and then if they don't succeed on their own because they get a wonderful tool in the place and in place and it just doesn't quite deliver what they're wanting, then they might look at bringing in an operations person to sort that out. The second thing I'm seeing is a more recent theme, which is a wonderful thing to see, is knowledge management. The very heart and soul of research is knowledge. As you know, I've already spoken about and it's. It's a madness to me. I've said this a number of times. I'll keep repeating it until it becomes not an issue anymore in the profession. It's a madness that. That is not the primary thing that we're thinking about. The entire point of research is to be able to gather knowledge and provide knowledge, and yet we don't manage it at all. Very few people have knowledge managers in their team. But that is becoming more and more an impetus for getting research operations in place is how do we, how do we manage the knowledge that we're creating? It's not just about creating knowledge. How do we show value to the organization because we have managed our knowledge well.
- [15:14]
Melissa Perry
That is one of those critical pieces in product management that when I saw research ops be implemented well, I went, oh my God, why do we not all have this?
- [15:24]
Kate Touzzi
You know?
- [15:24]
Melissa Perry
And it just makes it so much easier to like be able to read interviews that have already been done with customers. I might answer my question or be able to understand that if a team like all the way across the company did something already, they may have learned something that I need to learn too. And it amazes me that at scale, so many companies just don't have that. It's just a free for all. You're like, oh no, you have several hundred teams. Like they could all just be on an island by themselves.
- [15:51]
Kate Touzzi
Yeah, it's like saying that water is your most. I've never used this analogy, so it might fail, but let's try it. It's like saying that water is your most valuable asset, which most organizations will say knowledge is our most valuable asset but they're not building a dam for it and thinking of tributaries and understanding where it's going. It's just leaking and you don't even know where it's going and then you're all sitting there thirsty all the time.
- [16:12]
Melissa Perry
Yep. I think that works pretty well.
- [16:14]
Kate Touzzi
Yeah.
- [16:14]
Melissa Perry
Yeah, I like that. It's so true. And where I've seen it struggle too is that especially for product managers. Like because the two parts that you're talking about, right. Because it's hard to get in touch with people, they just won't do the customer interviews. They're like, oh, nobody's answering me. It's like, well how many people have you contacted? Like five, six? Like I can't get the opt ins. Right. There's so much time that goes into actually recruiting people for a, you know, for any kind of research that they just give up a lot of times. And then we'll just be like, I'll send out a survey, I'll get five responses. And you're like, that's not the type of research we need to do. So they won't do the research or somebody did the research and they don't share it. So in the absence of all that data, what happens to product management is they just like start making guesses. Yeah.
- [16:59]
Kate Touzzi
And because there's so much else going on and what I've loved about reading your book, the most recent one, is about product operations, I'll add that in, is really getting an understanding of the, you know, the wide remit of product managers in terms of managing business and thinking through all the numbers and it's running a mini company within the company, there's a lot to do. And then if you're not going to have to be recruiting participants on top of that and it's really difficult to do, it is going to fall off the back of the bus, literally. But what I feel is that, you know, sometimes I've seen where the relationship between research and product isn't good. And when I say research, I mean either the researcher that is within that team or the research organization as a whole. When that is not good and there's a lack of trust from product that the research coming out is relevant, well timed, true, trustworthy, all those things, then the relationship can fall apart. So even if there's a ton of research being done, if all those things aren't in place, particularly the timing or even the format of it. If those things aren't really dovetailed to the product manager's needs, they still don't feel like they've got the research but they're so busy they can't kind of stop to try and fix it all because they've got to just keep rolling and running.
- [18:11]
Melissa Perry
Yeah.
- [18:11]
Kate Touzzi
The other thing that I think is really fascinating about product is that typically in organizations, particularly with the kind of rise of people who do research pwdr and product and designers and researchers and everyone being empowered often by a research ops team to do research on their own, it's often lumped in. A research ops person is hired and it's like, well, you must just build tools that everybody can use. It's a good start. It's better than nothing in place. But what I've found is that product managers have very, very different needs even just in the recruiting real than a designer or a researcher would. I have, I've said that so many times and I'm waiting for someone to pick up on it. What I feel and I'd love to hear your your point of view. Melissa Product managers, they like need like a dating app for customers because busy want to go on to like a Tinder or Bumble style thing. I want to filter and say I'm interested in people who are battling with checkout at the moment or dark mode and their profile's there and I want to speak to someone who's available next week and they can flip through and quickly find I've already done the filters quickly find that one person instantly hit a button, set up a date done. And maybe it's not like a full research cohort with like analysis and synthesis and the whole nine yards which takes, you know, a lot of time and and skill that might not be natural to the product manager. They're getting to meet a customer and have a chat on a regular basis without needing to go through the standard research recruitment protocol which is come in, create your screener, take these boxes, do this filtering. Brilliant processes for getting together a solid cohort for a full research study, but not great if you're just wanting to bump into a relevant customer next week.
- [19:53]
Melissa Perry
Yeah, I think everybody's going to be demanding the thing that you just described. So I hope you want to build it. I think like so I think there's two phases of this, right? And the product managers who, who are usually launching a feature, let's say or trying to figure out how to optimize a feature that might be out there or fix a known problem. They want exactly what you're talking about, right? It's like I want to meet somebody who's experiencing this problem right now. And then there's the phase of like probably where a lot of the user researchers come into, of I'm building strategy, right. So I'm actually doing this deep dive into our market segments and our customers in those, you know, know in those segments. And I want to understand deeply what problems do they have, what gaps are not filled, what our competition isn't doing, what they love about our product, what they hate about our product, how they're actually using our product right now, right? Like are they using it in ways we didn't expect? Can we take that opportunity for this segment of the market and expand into it? If we, if we did it better with the product or if we marketed better, there could be leverage, those types of things. So there's that type of strategy for product managers which typically I'd see like more senior PMs do like it's director level, VP level, CPO level there, but some senior ICs will start a product or, or be in charge of that as well. Sometimes if it's like an innovation team or somebody building net new there. And then those studies, I think they want the targeted research like you're talking about. I need to talk to people in this type of Persona, this type of segment. These people could be problem related, it could be anything like that. But then it's let's go talk to 8 to 10 people, let's digest it, let's see if they have the same trends and go back on it. So I feel there's two, two different needs for, for the phase of product development that you're in.
- [21:32]
Kate Touzzi
Yeah, that's, that's really interesting. And, and what I'm seeing in terms of trends, I've spoken to a few people over the last few weeks just to kind of sense check this and it seems to be coming through as not just a version of Kate's world, but something that is wider. And so what's happening is because of all the layoffs in the last two, three years, now we're seeing that the researchers that are remaining in organizations are being moved from doing a lot of tactical research. So they'd be going in and kind of doing the day to day research for a design or product or whoever. But they're being moved up into strategic research spaces and that's where their time is being put. And then people who are doing research, the pwdrs are doing the sort of Day to day research, which for designers would be more working on cohorts to do usability testing on flow that they're working on for product and wanting to just check in with customers sends check something that they're feeling right now they need. The dating app tool that I wish someone would build. I could probably be a billionaire if I build it. I built it, you know, and have that hard road of going through a startup. But I'm quite happy just being a consultant and an author and a teacher. And so what's happening then is the agencies who would typically have been hired to do all that strategic research, they're being oftentimes pushed out the top because the internal research teams are forging that more strategic relationships. Sorry for the agencies, but I do think this is a really magical space because how does our tooling and our operations shift to enable researchers to really work hand in hand with product to do that amazing strategic research in a way that is really timely. Like when they need the information to put the strategy together. It's all there, it's including all the quant that they need, the qual that they need and there's the full picture. And we're operationalizing the variety of people in a product team to be able to do the nuanced type of research that they need to do. Not just across methodologies, are they doing a diary study, an unmoderated and moderated field research, but across who they are as a function. Like as I said, designers work differently to researchers, work differently to product, which works differently to market research as well.
- [23:38]
Melissa Perry
I like the trends that you're seeing like emerge here. And do you do. How do you feel about research being leveled up into the strategic part and how, how do you think like the research community feels about that? Is it like a good shift or is it a, is it like, no, we want to own all the research everywhere shift?
- [23:57]
Kate Touzzi
I think there will always be people who are very comfortable with how things were and don't necessarily want to change. And I think that's especially true. I'm late 40s, I'll be very happy to admit. And so I think that you know, when you're coming to a part of your career where you're like in the middle of it, if not like looking at the next 10 years of it and then thinking what would I do after that? And it's been very comfortable, like maybe you don't want the change so much. But I think. And there's also just personalities. Some people are just very happy with how things Went and don't really want it to change. But there are a lot of people who are going, wow, there's real opportunity in here. Researchers have been, I have heard endless numbers of researchers over the last 30, 13, 15 years saying, oh, I'm just here doing like this sort of like feature testing all the time. And you know, I've done so much study and I'm really skilled at doing more nuanced work. Well, here's the opportunity. I think it's an incredible opportunity and I think those that are willing to kind of look ahead and see the gap that is, that is there and dive into it. And for me, what it is, is instead of research operations, I'm biased because I'm a research Ops fan, of course, and guru. So. But I think this is, you know, even if I put that aside, instead of bringing research operations as assistants, which has been a problem all along, Research operations, as I'm sure you will heartily agree, is not an administrative assistant job. It's about designing systems, understanding the business. It should be a strategic design role. And so when you bring in those sorts of operations folks to get them to do that work at a high level, and now you're looking at how do we leverage research across the organization by enabling all sorts of people to meet with customers at the level that they need to spread the knowledge that they've got. Enabling people to come to a really well organized resource and engage with the knowledge that we already know, to come to events and immerse themselves in custom experiences, really beautiful, well curated ones. All these levels of experience that you can create and bring people together, create culture around. And then we get to use our amazing, honed, sometimes university degree skills to do this highly strategic work that is going up to the C suite that's really having an impact on how the company runs and the direction it's going in. I think that is like, wow, like, what an opportunity. I'm looking forward to the next five years when there will be people who grab that opportunity with both hands and really make it shift.
- [26:25]
Melissa Perry
I think it's fantastic for the research community too, because I usually get questions from people who are like, how can I justify the value of research? Or how do I justify my role? And I know I've also been told a lot that there's a ton of angst between the research communities and the product management communities because a lot of researchers were laid off and because they were like, well, product managers can go out and talk to customers too. And there's a lot of people who are like, no, they're not going to do it right or they're not going to follow all the rules to do it. Like we're needed. And I've always been of the mindset that we do need good user research. But I, I have personally benefited from it a lot, especially at the strategic levels. Like when I would go into organizations when I was an interim cpo, right, with products labs, a lot of times we'd have to figure out very quickly what was the biggest problems for the customers in these organizations. Like they would be invested in, you know, through insight. And then we'd go in and we're like, let's get the lay of the land. We're like, what are customers happy with? What are they not happy with? And how do we get just like a good snapshot of where our opportunities are when it comes to product? And there I'd partner with a researcher who would go out and we'd say we look through the product, we look through all the metrics and we'd come up with some hypotheses. And then she would go and target the customer segments that we wanted to talk to, talk to 10 to 15 people and come back with a digest that was like, hey, here's what's going on with our customers, right? Like you're, you're wondering if you can move up market or you're wondering like what's the different problems in a mid market segment versus the enterprise or if there's opportunity there. Like here's the customers that we talk to. These are like, you know, good. Some of these were not good Personas, like we just cut them out, right? These ones were good ones. Here's the trends we're seeing and we would evolve that into a product strategy or we'd evolve it into a good spot for when we would hire full time CPOs in eventually. But for them to hit the ground running and understand like, hey, this is what my customers are feeling. And to me, that was so valuable to have like a strategic researcher there because she could surface up the problems and you know, talk to the customers and come back and like digest all these clips and help me be able to watch them. And we'd go back and forth and I'd be able to connect it back to the product side and the business side and say, oh, you know, this isn't really what we thought it was going to be or this was not what we thought intended or there's an opportunity over here and if we can leverage this, we could, you know, build X, Y and Z to do it. And between the two of us, we could get to a really good spot with that product strategy or like a good hypothesis of where to start or how to actually like prioritize a roadmap in the meantime. And I don't think executives are taking enough advantage of that with researchers.
- [29:01]
Kate Touzzi
I completely agree. And I think some of that's been, you know, research is still relatively young. I mean, tech is still still relatively young. Young in a way. But I remember, you know, like 15 years ago having big teams of researchers and organizations was not very common. I mean, aside from the Googles and the Facebooks and et al, those sort of spaces, research ops in fact existed in those spaces 20 years ago. Just very unknown, but and possibly not the framing that I would give it of the sort of strategic design of services that will spread knowledge, which almost sounds biblical, as I said, I think. But yeah, it's as, as research, I do wonder. It's been a tough time and I don't want anyone who's in the research space listening to this. I'm just kind of rolling over it and going, it's all good, like, but there's opportunity in everything. That that happens really is my optimistic view. And I think this has been a bit of a jolt to go. Certainly it was a jolt for me to go, you know, writing a book, I'm writing a line and things are going great. Research is scaling. I started writing the book. It was like amazing times. Everybody flying around, snacks in offices, just like, you know, teams growing. And about halfway through, sort of two years into writing the book, I started in 2020, 2022, everything started to fall apart. And I'd been writing this very like, happy book about how do you scale research? I have to, I rewrote half of the book because I had to have like a moment of reflection of like, wow, I'm writing a book about. It's called research that scales and research is descaling at a rapid rate around me. And why? Because I can't write a book about how you scale research if I don't address why it's rapidly descaling. And so it's been a lot of soul searching to really look at, like, what have we been doing? And I think a lot of that, you know, you mentioned, I'm sort of going in a bit of a circle round now about your comment, but you mentioned the word value earlier. How does research show value? And because research is knowledge, which is like this ethereal thing and the real value you want to deliver is that someone has all of the knowledge within them, whether they got it from one report or multiple reports or many experiences, have that knowledge to make smart decisions. And as you know from your story, you, you know, you had those decisions, you had those, all the knowledge you needed to make those strategic decisions and feel content that you were in a good space. So really, for me, you cannot monopolize knowledge. You cannot say, well, I am the only person that should be spending time with customers and I'm the only person with the skills to be able to do that. You can say that about specific ways of generating really reliable knowledge. Because in that instance, in a strategic instance, when you're making the big decisions, you really need robust, reliable knowledge being well tested. And there are definite highly skilled people who know how to get that out of the right people and blah, blah, blah, and that sort of amazing stuff. But what we need to do as research is look down the line and go, there are lots of different forms of learning and forms of gaining knowledge. We cannot monopolize the relationship with the customer. What we need to do is operationalize it. That's a pretty cool little saying. I should stick with that one.
- [32:07]
Melissa Perry
I love that, like that, the whole little, the whole thing you just said, I thought was amazing. And I couldn't agree more. Like in the organizations I've worked with that have been the most successful and again I get these questions like should product managers do user research or should user researchers do user research? And there's all this infighting, right? And I've always said from the beginning it depends, like you should be working together though, no matter what. And when I same with UX designers too. Because UX designers will say, well, I'm in charge of user research if there's no user researchers. So I'm like, no, nobody's in charge of being the person who talks to users, right? Like you all have to talk to users, but you might choose to do different types of communication with users. Like if I'm a product manager, like you're saying, and I want to dive deeper into a problem, understand how they're using something a little bit more and try to connect that back to like a business opportunity, maybe I'm going to go do a one on one interview, maybe the UX designer is testing the prototypes with people, maybe the user researcher is doing strategic market segment analysis and diving into if there's opportunities there, what are the big problems and competitive analysis, Maybe the product manager is doing competitive analysis. Like nobody owns all of that. But I think if we all collaborate better, we could work, work better together on it. And I think research ops is really like a great way to start thinking about democratizing that research too. Yeah.
- [33:27]
Kate Touzzi
And I think, you know, like the role that I see for a head of research, the most powerful role that I see is being bunny ears, the owner of how knowledge is treated across the organization. Again, customer knowledge. And so they can be designing because there are, you know, like the times to do a survey and there are times not to do a survey. There are ways to gather certain types of knowledge that. And I've seen plenty of examples where non researchers have gone, we'll just survey. And it's a terrible idea. It would have been much better to have done like a qualitative study with three people than do that. And so this is where researchers have such great, their own knowledge of like, how do you gather knowledge in the most like, most efficient and reliable way? How do we provide the pathways and services so that people who want to do that can go down the right path easily? And I think having a head of research who has got all of that amazing methodology knowledge in them, combined with strong operations, who are strategists and designers, together they can work with all the stakeholders, with every bit with product design, with everybody to understand what they need to learn, when, at what times of the year, what, what sorts of customers they need. And layering on top of that within the organization. We're focusing on expanding to Canada, but we want to expand to female influences in Canada making something up. And so how do we operationalize for that specific thing as well, someone who can have that overview of all of these pieces and then be rolling out the right tools and structures and training and pathways that it becomes easy for people to do the best that they can do. Because you're right, like product and research have been rubbing the wrong way for a long time, long before layoffs in the augmented spaces that I've seen where it's like, well, because it feels like researcher hanging out in an ivory tower and they're trying to cut me off from the customers I'm trying to deliver goods to. And they're telling me that I don't have the smarts or the skills to hang out with them and I need to do that in order to do my job well. So I think it's a really great time now for those relationships to, to shift in a, in, in a direction where everybody works together for the same goal, to understand customers, to make good decisions ultimately for most companies to make more money and like to be bland for most people, it's to be successful in my role, to get promoted, to have a nice life.
- [35:50]
Melissa Perry
I, I think it's going to be so good if we can get to there. So I'm hoping people are gonna listen to this and get there. When you were just talking about rolling out the right frameworks, the right tools to be able to do do this, what are some of your top life changing tools or frameworks that you've seen that helps organizations actually scale research effectively?
- [36:10]
Kate Touzzi
So one of the key things is self service. It's a simple, simple thing, a self service model. I've seen many organizations who have wanted to scale research and there's two things that they're missing. The biggest one is a strategy. They want to scale but they don't have a strategy. You can only scale something that is a system only system. Scale research itself does not scale in my book. It's cheeky. Not many people have picked up on this, but it's called research that scales. The very first chapter is its contradiction. It says research does not scale, systems do. And it's true. You cannot. Research is not a thing. You can't point at research, it's knowledge. So you cannot scale it in that sense. And it's not even a repeatable thing. Knowledge is not a repeatable thing. It's always completely unique and if it's codified. So how do you scale it? Well, you have to build a system and a system has to be specific and then you can scale it. But for specificity you have to have a strategy. So one of the biggest things you can do to scale anything and certainly to scale research, is to decide what is our strategy, what are we doing more than we're doing, what are we not doing, where are our priorities? Strategy is a tricky word because it's so misunderstood. So often you'll see even big companies who have got these hand wavy future focused strategies that mean nothing really. And when you dig underneath, if you happen to kind of be invited to dig in, you'll find that there's no grounding. Like they haven't done any planning as to how they'll actually deliver the strategy. It's just some vision for the future. A strategy is really just what is our opportunity right now that we're not that we can grab and we should prioritize to grab because it's going to do some amazing stuff for us. What are the things that are blocking us or frustrating us or slowing us down? Let's get together a practical plan to fix Them. It is literally that simple. And so in a research context, or even any context, product design research, where you need to learn about your customers and you're finding that you've got a problem, you're being blocked. Have a look at why you're being blocked. Let's go to that common one, recruiting. It takes too long. We've got to work through this. This is a common one for product. As we mentioned earlier, it takes too long because I've got to go through this tool, I've got to do screeners, I've got to select blah, blah, blah, blah blah in order to find one person to talk to next week. Come up with a strategy. What is your plan? How are you going to fix it? If that is your biggest problem and it's the thing that's stopping you from learning so that you can make progress in the direction of the product, then that's what your strategy is. We're going to prioritize that and fix it. Number one thing, once you've got the system and once you're building the system, you can build scaling into that. The other thing, just on the note of scaling is it's often thought that everything has to scale, especially in our world, which is faster, bigger, everything must be faster and bigger all the time. Not everything has to be scalable. It's quite. It's hard work to make something scalable. So you might look at a system and go, actually we're recruiting VIP customers and it's always going to be a small cohort. It's going to be like two customers a month, 24 people a year. This is not a big system. It doesn't even have to be scalable. So to be very careful about what you actually decide to scale. It's very. Finally, because I could talk about these things for ages and I'm. One of my promises to myself is to get more succinct over time. But the final thing is what often happens is that people will hire someone to come in and offer recruiting and they will set up full service systems. As in someone will, I did this. This is the only reason I know about this, is that I did this six years ago. I hired someone to come and do full service recruiting for all Atlassians when I was still running the research ops team at Atlassian. It is completely unscalable and very, very expensive. And so really your first port of call for delivering scalability and organization, once you've decided what you actually want to deliver is to set up systems that are self service as A start. Allow a canteen style service right at the beginning. You'll deliver something that's pretty basic. It won't be everybody you know, you're not, it's not a restaurant, you come in and order exactly what you want or for the a la carte menu you kind of get what you get if you're vegan or gluten free. I'm gluten free, sorry. You're probably not going to be catered for right now. That's coming down the line. But you'll have something, just something to get you like from nothing to something. And then later on you can start to understand where do we need to offer a bit more service here? We need to put in the special dietary requirements or we need to put in an ala carte offering for the special people who come for this particular thing. And so really to start slowly with self service and then look for the opportunity to offer a hybrid or a full service later on.
- [40:47]
Melissa Perry
When you were at last name, where did you start? What was your like small thing that you put out for people?
- [40:53]
Kate Touzzi
Small thing? Well once I'd shut down the full service recruiting system that was like not even a system, like I realized pretty within three months it was going to be a complete fail and swallowed my pride and shut it down. The first thing was getting a. We're blessed these days there's so many amazing recruiting tools out there which are designed to work with the sort of research design requirement. But it's a start. And so we hired, we procured one of those, set it up as best as we could, put in some basic training around privacy, you know, like what is a consent form, how to use a 20 minutes on demand training. We didn't even have to be there. Once you did that training you could get access to the tool because you got like a little certificate that was handled by it. We didn't even have to do it. And so you were opened up without needing to find money. It was all paid for like we'd already got forecasted and got all the funds in place for it. You could go and then you could start recruiting people pretty quickly and easily. Not perfect, but a really good start. So that's the number one thing if you're looking at recruiting with knowledge management. Number one, hired a librarian, a real librarian who actually knows what they're doing with like taxonomies and structured taxonomies and, and you know, someone who studied this for five years and really understands the whole thing. And she put up a Google spreadsheet initially which for her was quite like, you know, that's a step down from running a real research tool, library tool. But it was a great way to just start gathering all the information we have and also understand what are the, you know, like an mvp, what are the sort of, you know, lean operations, what are people's needs around knowledge, around the organization. And eventually we moved into a bonafide research library tool. So those are the, you know, speaking of recruiting and knowledge management being the two biggest things, you can start out.
- [42:39]
Melissa Perry
Pretty simple when you think about research ops and product ops. Right. So I wrote in the book a little bit about the research ops function and you know, what we did at athenahealth and what Jen Cardello implemented there and then at Fidelity. How do you think these things work together? I write in the book, if you have a good research ops teams, please do not reinvent the wheel. What can research ops do to work better with product ops and how do you see the divides between these things?
- [43:06]
Kate Touzzi
Yeah, I wish there wasn't a divide at all. I think there is currently a divide because they're both pretty emerging spaces and people still getting to grips with what they're doing, never mind with what others are doing. But I am seeing more and more research ops folks asking about product ops and trying to understand. I see that products. Have you got such a strong muscle around business acumen, MBA level business acumen. We don't necessarily have that. We need that. So that's a great exchange. We've got a huge amount of muscle around data privacy and around the system set up to be able to recruit participants, manage knowledge, move knowledge around the organization, socialize things, set up cultures around knowledge exchange that I think could be very useful to you. So really it's a yin and a yang. And once we all get to see that, we can come together and work in harmony. I know in your book Product Operations, one of your pillars is research and insights. I finished reading a couple of months ago. Yeah, exactly. And that's where we sit. So, you know, one of the entire pillars is research operations. So I foresee. And this is happening already. It's not like this is like looking way down the line that more and more teams are created that have product operations, research operations, and then design operations working like absolutely, like dovetailed. There's just no distinction between them as one team that enables an entire developed product organization to have the knowledge that they need, have the business intel that they need to be able to make good decisions. And all the design, you know, the design operations folk, they do Such interesting stuff too with, in terms of getting the designers figma and all the practices and structures and design patterns and design systems that they need to be able to do their work really effectively. It's an amazing trio. Why we don't see this more and more often, I don't know.
- [44:57]
Melissa Perry
Yeah, it's kind of similar to the trio that we think of with the user researchers, product managers and, you know, or designers, I mean product managers and engineers, but user researchers in there too. I feel like we all have to work together as a product team. We'd say too, in the product ops world, go work with sales ops people too. I think you pull them into the tree like you pull them into the ops group. Maybe we need like an ops guild.
- [45:21]
Kate Touzzi
I think they do because there's also like marketing tech, you know, like Martech.
- [45:26]
Melissa Perry
And then there's the, the market. So the, the customer and market insights piece. Like there's the market research piece and people always ask me, what about product marketing? And I'm like, if they're doing that piece, let them do it. Like, I, I, I don't, I don't have a full ownership over like who does what as long as it's done in a way that actually helps product management. Yeah. Sometimes when those things get siloed like we were talking about with user research and becomes like a us versus them thing, they're not thinking about designing or doing in a way that can be leveraged by product management. And sometimes there's a product marketing team that's like, no, we do all the market research and you can't, you can't come to us and ask for it. Like we're just out there researching. You're like, well, that's pointless. Right. Like, we have to do this together and then we can form a hypothesis and then we could both go look at it and you can give me insights and that might spark me to actually start to think about other trends I've been seeing. And then we form a hypothesis together and look at it and I think we need to get away from those divides. So many companies, I feel like, just get so functionally aligned instead of remembering. If you, especially if you're a SaaS company, like you build a product and you sell it. So like we're all not just working towards that product or trying to make that product better or any of that, like trying to make our customers happy with that. Like, what are we doing? Why are we all, there's no, should be no competition.
- [46:40]
Kate Touzzi
Yeah. I mean, I might get shot for saying this, but, you know, I say things anyway. I think there's also need a need to accept that product managers are the top of the pile in the sense that product managers are making the decision, they're managing the product and it really is about giving the product. Man, this is my understanding at least, correct me if I'm wrong. It really is about giving the product manager the ability to make the decisions along with C suite level and founders and people like that. I'm not saying that they're the end of the road, but everything really should be pointing to in terms of research. Pointing to enable. Yes, sure. Designers, researchers are not researching to make decisions. They're researching to understand to enable others to make decisions. Designers need to make design decisions. Product managers need to make decisions about the direction of the product. That's really, for me, I'm like, why are we not all working towards that? And then marketing, of course marketing and product need to align and oftentimes you hear that they're not aligning very well on the direction of the product versus the marketing that's going on. Why company organizations are big and we all get stuck in our little space and it's easy like for someone, it's easier for someone like me who doesn't. I don't work in an organization anymore and so I get to kind of hover above the breadth of companies and have a look down and kind of go, why are we not all working together? It's because I'm hanging out in outer space. It's the same as people going to outer space. And then they say, wow, you just see that the Earth is one and we don't have all these boundaries. But then you come down to Earth and you travel back to your little home and then you're just back into your little world again. So it's maybe, you know, like Melissa, it's like we do have that guild or something, which is something of stepping away, coming to outer space just for like two days to basically see that really big picture again of how we can all be working together to achieve what we all want to achieve, which is ultimately success and more sales and like abundance for all. If you work in a for profit company and if you work in civic spaces or in charities, even then you want to be delivering more value for your sponsors, for your donors.
- [48:42]
Melissa Perry
I think that would be a beautiful world that I would like to live in and I want us all to get there. And I think, like for me, I keep pushing product ops and I don't know if you're getting this feedback too. But a lot of people will look at this and be like, oh, these are just people about processes and systems and stuff. Like they're not really thinking about, you know, the core of the product and delivering value. To me, I think it's naive to think that we can't talk about process like in an organization and get things done, especially in large organizations. Like they have to have some kind of system, some kind of process on how you work. Like otherwise it's a free for all. But I just keep hearing this pushback of like, do we really need this, do we really need that? And in my experience in organizations that don't have these things that we're talking about research, apps, product ops, being able to like see this data, understand your customers, they fail. Yeah, it's like, you know, they do not do well or they're hanging on by a thread like they may not failed yet, they're not doing well. Right. And then the ones that are implementing all of these things or creating these systems, they can tell you exactly what their customers want. Right. They're so in tune with them, they're able to deliver value faster.
- [49:50]
Kate Touzzi
I think some of that's because operations is not always like an instant. It's not always instant. When you're trying to deliver operations from scratch, you're looking for a low hanging fruit, quick fix, as I said earlier, to kind of show value early on. You can't say, you know, inviting people to a party and then going, well, you're just going to hang out for a couple of hours while I cook this amazing meal. You give them hors d' oeuvres or something. It's not the full meal, but it's something just to keep them happy. Glass of champagne, everyone's happy. And it's the same when you're setting up operation from the start. Look for something pretty easy, not perfect, but it's just a snack to give people satiated for a little while. But the big changes and the big value come sometimes a year or two down the line. And so when you start collecting data, for instance, within three months, it might not necessarily be the most robust data you've ever seen. And all the effort you've put into standing up the tools and the processes to collect that might seem like it might have been a waste of time. But a year down the line you've got some interesting things to look at. Two years down the line you've got something that might look like a trend. Three years down the line you're seeing maybe some really interesting patterns in there. And I think that's the really big piece around Ops is it needs that strategic long term vision. It needs an enormous amount of patience to get to the point where the processes and the systems are delivering things. And that's not just even in terms of data, but also culture. Like you've managed to shift the needle on how people see their relationships, how they see how they learn, how they understand how you engage with customers. These things don't change overnight. And so the trick for an operations person, I'm sure you've experienced this too, is deliver some quick things, keep people on board, show them the long term vision and constantly try and encourage patience in getting there. Because what you're building is not just something that's going to fly away the next day. It's like some real robust structuring that you hope is going to be valuable for a decade or two or three even.
- [51:45]
Melissa Perry
Kate, great advice for people out there who are trying to spin up research ops. If people want to learn more about you and buy your book Research at Scales, where can they go?
- [51:54]
Kate Touzzi
They can go to easy katetouzzy.com that's T O w S E y s for sugar you'll find on there. My book, you can buy it from rosenfeld.com as well or Amazon on there. If you buy it from Amazon, please leave a review at some point when you've read it. And I'm going to get to 50 reviews at some point soon. Yeah, that's the primary way. I'm also on LinkedIn.
- [52:16]
Melissa Perry
Great. And we will put all of those links in our show notes@productthinkingpodcast.com thank you so much for listening to the Product Thinking podcast. We'll be back next Wednesday with another amazing guest. Make sure you like and subscribe this and if you have any questions for me in the meantime, go to dear melissa.com and let me know what they are. We'll see you next time.