From Passion to Execution: A Story of Evolving Research Maturity at LinkedIn

Key Insights

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  Inefficient project tracking using Google Sheets was replaced by a custom Airtable base with automated unique project numbers, improving scalability and reducing duplicate entries.

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  Leadership resisted using standard service management tools like Jira for research project tracking, fearing it implied UX research was a service team taking orders.

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  Participant recruitment leverages LinkedIn’s data warehouse for opted-in users, enabling quarterly bulk recruits that account for 80% of recruiting needs.

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  Participant incentives were decentralized and error-prone until onboarding Ethnio enabled global culture-specific rewards, automated delivery, and compliance tracking.

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  Implementing a status reporting workflow integrated into tools researchers already used (Teams, Figma) drastically improved status accuracy and reduced manual effort.

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  Rapid Lab, a biweekly evaluative research program across three lines of business, tests six designs every two weeks, made possible by foundational operational improvements.

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  Connecting research assumptions, participant feedback, insights, and business impact in Airtable enables leadership to track research impact and identify process issues.

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  A research librarian role was critical to maintain a consistent taxonomy in the insights repository, preventing chaos from multiple inconsistent tagging styles.

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  Consolidating planning workflows across multiple design functions into a single Airtable interface addressed visibility, prioritization, and capacity planning challenges.

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  Scaling research ops requires strategic partnerships, custom tooling, centralization with flexibility, automation to reduce human error, and ongoing iteration as the organization grows.

Notable Quotes