Rosenverse

Log in or create a free Rosenverse account to watch this video.

Log in Create free account

100s of community videos are available to free members. Conference talks are generally available to Gold members.

ResearchOps AMA with Kate Towsey & Jake Burghardt

Thursday, October 16, 2025 • Advancing Research Community
Share the love for this talk
ResearchOps AMA with Kate Towsey & Jake Burghardt
Speakers: Kate Towsey and Jake Burghardt
Link:

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."

Ask the Rosenbot
Jack Moffett
SAFe or Sorry?
2019 • Enterprise Community
JP Allen
Navigating the UX Tools Landscape
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Sha Hwang
The Lost Year
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
George Aye
That Quiet Little Voice: When Design and Ethics Collide
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Erin Weigel
Testing and Experimentation Tools
2026 • Advancing Research 2026
Gold
Eniola Oluwole
Lessons From the DesignOps Journey of the World's Largest Travel Site
2019 • DesignOps Summit 2019
Gold
Isaac Heyveld
Expand DesignOps Leadership as a Chief of Staff
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Cheryl Platz
Demystifying Multimodal Design: The Design Practice You Didn't Know You're Doing
2024 • Rosenfeld Community
Luca Rager
Empowering Gaming at Scale: How Xbox Builds Powerful, Automated, and Distributed Design Systems with Sketch
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Dave Hora
A Research Skills Evolution
2021 • Advancing Research 2021
Gold
Chui Chui Tan
Global insights: Embracing international and intercultural research for innovation
2025 • Advancing Research 2025
Gold
Gabriela Barneva
Operationalizing Inclusive Design in Service Design
2025 • Advancing Service Design 2025
Gold
Peter Morville
The Architecture of Understanding
2015 • Enterprise UX 2015
Gold
Holly Cole
Panel Discussion: Growing People and Teams
2018 • DesignOps Summit 2018
Gold
Uday Gajendar
Theme Four Intro
2023 • Enterprise UX 2023
Gold
Ovetta Sampson
Research in the Automated Future
2022 • Advancing Research 2022
Gold

More Videos

Sheri Byrne-Haber

"You want to catch accessibility defects early through automated testing in your CI/CD pipeline, what we call shifting left."

Sheri Byrne-Haber

Accessibility at Scale

June 9, 2021

Prayag Narula

"Most users don't know what they want until you show it to them."

Prayag Narula Hannah Hudson

Empowering Designers to do Good Research

March 11, 2022

Janelle Estes

"Centralized teams can become 'no machines' when overwhelmed with requests, needing to prioritize carefully."

Janelle Estes

UX Research Trends

January 28, 2021

Craig Brookes

"Our customers actually live in Siberia and they don't want ice cream, they want hot cookies out of the oven."

Craig Brookes Andreas Huebner Morgan Quinn

"Just Make it Look Good" and Other Ways We're Misunderstood

June 11, 2021

Marc Fonteijn

"A regular heartbeat and familiar structure are really important principles to keep a community alive."

Marc Fonteijn Ru Butler

Increase your confidence, influence, and impact (through a Professional Community)

December 3, 2024

Kate Towsey

"Engagement and impact roles bring creativity and help maintain team morale in otherwise dry operations work."

Kate Towsey

The State of ResearchOps: More Than Just Theory

June 20, 2019

Alla Weinberg

"Creating safety requires specific, behavioral agreements you can observe and practice."

Alla Weinberg

Design Teams Need Psychological Safety: Here’s How to Create It

September 9, 2022

Shawna Hein

"A government designer aims to reduce UX variation while a contractor may optimize only their single product, creating potential conflicts."

Shawna Hein Kevin Hoffman

Create a Cohesive Civic Design Practice Across Agency, Vendors, and Contracts

November 17, 2022

Tricia Wang

"You have to find mentors and sponsors who leverage their privilege to help you get as far as possible."

Tricia Wang

SCALE: Discussion

June 15, 2018