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ResearchOps AMA with Kate Towsey & Jake Burghardt
Summary
Key Insights
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Research operations is fundamentally about systems thinking and operationalizing research as a verb, not just a noun or role.
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Successful knowledge management requires human curation and editorial oversight to maintain quality and taxonomy.
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Building research repositories should be prioritized by organizational goals, focusing on key business areas rather than dumping everything.
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Community and peer support among researchers reduce anxiety around sharing work and increase engagement.
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AI tools for research discovery require well-structured, high-quality input data and cannot replace human decisions about relevance or quality.
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Research repositories function best as two tiers: an engaged ‘bohemian’ campfire for active teams and a centralized ‘corporate’ library for lasting knowledge.
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Incremental, Lego-like building blocks approach to research ops infrastructure allows flexible scaling and replicability across projects.
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Engagement in contributing to repositories depends on delivering value back to researchers, such as visibility and impact.
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Collective research knowledge takes time to build trust and shared identity among disparate teams.
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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."
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