Kate Towsey

Episode 19
Brave UX

Scaling Research Ops: Lessons Learned

In this episode of Brave UX, Kate Towsey shares some of the experiences that have shaped her career and goes deep into the details of the UX research ops journey she’s been leading at Atlassian.

Highlights include:

What is the Candy Floss vs. Carrots theory of research?
Why is it important to define what UX research is and what it isn’t?
How are you working with User Research and Design to scale Research Ops?
How did an early mistake help you to find the key to scaling research ops?
How do you measure the effectiveness of Research Operations?

April 21, 202101:20:01

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Who is Kate Towsey?

Kate is the Research Ops Manager at Atlassian, and the founder of the 10,000+ strong ResearchOps Community.

Before moving from London to Sydney in 2018 to join Atlassian, Kate pioneered Research Operations at the UK’s Government Digital Service (GDS), where she designed and delivered their first user research lab, AV repository and participant panel.

Kate is currently writing a book called “Research At Scale: The Research Operations Handbook”, which will be published by Rosenfeld Media sometime in 2023.

Transcript

Brendan Jarvis:
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, Managing Founder of The Space InBetween, and it's my job to help you to put the pieces of the product puzzle together. I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings, and expert advice of world class UX design and product management professionals. My guest today is Kate Towsey. If you've heard of research ops, you've most likely heard of Kate. She's the research ops manager at Atlassian and the founder of the research ops community, which started with a tweet in 2018 and now has over 8,000 members before moving halfway across the world from London to Sydney in 2018 to join Atlassian. Kate spent the best part of a decade consulting to organizations as a content strategist, user researcher, and research operations pioneer. During that time, she worked for clients that included the University of Surrey, Pfizer, Boehringer, the BBC, and most notably the UK Government's Digital Service or GDS,
as its most commonly known. At GDS, Kate led the delivery of the tools, technologies, and environments that enabled the user research team to carry out great user research. While at gds, her accomplishments included the design and delivery of the first user research lab, AV repository and participant panel. Kate is currently working on a book called Research at Scale, the Research Operations Handbook, which will be published by Rosenfeld Media sometime in 2022. She's also the co-curator of Rosenfeld's Advancing research community. And today it's my pleasure to have Kate here to speak with me about all things research ops. Kate, welcome to the show.
Kate Towsey:
Hello,
Brendan Jarvis:
It's great to have you here.
Kate Towsey:
Great introduction,
Brendan Jarvis:
[laugh]. Well look, you did all the hard work there. I just summarized your professional history, which is pretty impeccable. And in my travels around the internet, I discovered something that caught me by surprise when researching for this conversation. Apparently you led a punk rock movement in Johannesburg. What is the story there?
Kate Towsey:
[laugh]? I did. I seem to have this habit of creating communities. So that was, gosh, I was 20 years old or 21 years old around about that time. And I went to London and someone took me to a punk rock gig with a band called Strung Out and Lag Wagon, I think it was in Brexton. And I had been spending, I'd spent a lot of time in my life with skateboarders that just tended to be the kind of group that I hung out with and always gravitated towards. And I just loved it. And the messaging behind it of independent free thinkers who really considered how they were in the world was so appealing to me. And I came back to Johannesburg after that month in London and I thought, why do we not have this here? And it was going to be my 21st birthday. And my parents said, well, you can either have a party or you can have a ticket overseas.
And typical of me, I thought, well, I want both. And so my way of living in the world is what would success look like and how do I achieve that? And I work on everything that way. And this was no different. And so I thought, well, I'll organize a party for myself for free and I will take my ticket overseas, which is what I did. So I knew some Irish guys who were friends with a pub owner and I said to him, look, I'll organize the bands and you have the door on drinks. And he said, that sounds like a great deal. So the bands were very happy because the punk bands hadn't had anywhere to play for other than garages for years. And so that was the beginning of a movement because around I guess two or 300 people arrived, something like that. I dunno the exact numbers, but it was absolutely packed.
And people looked at me and said, wow, that was an incredible evening, and when are we doing it again? And so I actually I then did this work with a friend of mine and we called it Beans on Toast [laugh] which was this whole kind of thing about just having the basics of life. And it was very much from my point of view I wouldn't say political statement, but it was certainly a statement around how you live your life and how you think about life. And very soon the bands love me because I was getting in 500 people into a venue. The venues love me because I was bringing them business. I just took the door at 10 bucks, [laugh] an entry and split it all kind of equally across the bands. And somewhere in between, then I got involved in a band myself and got very well known in the kind of punk rock skateboard scene in South Africa for that work.
So yeah, it's sort not a dissimilar story from the research ops community other than the topic is different. But the same thing with the punk rock thing that was repeated in 2019, I guess was it was maybe a year or two after I'd started the community and it really started to grow. This is in the punk rock space that I remember. I was at a gig DJing at one of the gigs after the bands played and some kids got up on stage and were just being real. Really, I dunno if you're allowed to swear on this podcast, go for it. Real assholes. They were being real assholes about, they were just being so judgemental of people who were not like them. And I thought this little shit with your Toyota Corolla parked out in the parking lot and your designer gear bought for you, your parents bought this for you, and are you standing on stage and judging the world?
And it really annoyed me because it was exactly the opposite of what I'd wanted to create. And so [affirmative], I didn't have the maturity at that point to look at it and see it as an opportunity to really make something of it and turn the conversation around. And instead, I was just so angry I walked away from the whole thing and never ran another gig again. Now the same didn't happen. We didn't have rude people in research ops at all. [laugh] gonna, yeah, no, no, this was not the same thing. But I started that community again with that same ethos of openness and equality. I really went out of my way to draw people in from across the world. So it didn't become an entirely Euro us conversation, which is what it always is and really wants to acknowledge that there are research practices that perhaps of a different style and different needs across the world.
But it grew so quickly that when I moved to Australia and started working for Atlassian, which was a 5,000 person organization at that point the research ops community was around 5,000 people. And I guess it was about a year and a half old, so not that old and a lot of work, a huge amount of work, [laugh], but a huge amount of work. And I realized I'm trying to move country, start up a team in a new organization and deal with that and run a community that's now basically the size of the company. I work for [laugh]. And I knew that I was never going to be able to do all of that well, and I just don't like to do things not well. And I don't like to be impersonal either. I'm not very good at that. I like to have one on one conversations. I like to really engage with the people that I'm brought together, [affirmative].
And so I stepped away from it similarly to the same thing I stepped away from in my early twenties but Bridget Metzler and the group of people that we'd brought together called which was affectionately, and it's still affectionately called the Cheese Board which was a play on, actually it was Andrew Maya who came up with that once in a conversation with him. And we were like, what's a cheese platter? [laugh]? And so it's still called the Cheese Board and they've taken it on run it since, I think it's 2019 or 2020, something like that, [affirmative] and done a superb job of it. So I can't take credit for the 8,000 people are there that are there now but you know, can call me the fire starter.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, you're the lone dancer on the hillside that eventually someone else comes and join you and you've started this wonderful movement.
Kate Towsey:
Yeah, exactly.
Brendan Jarvis:
So looking at your journey to where you are now at Atlassian, you do have a bit of a punk attitude that seems to flow through some of the milestones in your career. And you sort touched on it just earlier there where you seem to look at the status quo and regardless of whether you've got any experience in whatever that status quo is, you set out to change it. And you seem to be quite successful at doing that. How do you think about what you've achieved?
Kate Towsey:
I can only ever ask answer questions by the first. Usually I have an image that will come into my head, and this is gonna seem like a very, very weird response, but bear with me as I work through it. So [laugh] after the punk rock movement and several other journeys in life I ended up in India and spent time studying with a group of studyings, a strong word to just hang out with a group of very esoteric yogis in North India in Nepal called Aribas. And they're known for being real radicals in the sense that traditionally in India, white is, it's many connotations with it, but in the world of yogurts, the sort of purity and renunciation and they wear black they're, they're the anarchists of the yoga world. They wear skulls and crossbones and even they're dress with chains and things that you might associate with punk rock. So I found it very interesting that I've ended up spending time with these people and gone really well with them. If you Google them, you'll kind of see pictures of them. They're pretty radical. Did
Brendan Jarvis:
You bring a leg wagon CD with you?
Kate Towsey:
Listen to [laugh]? Yeah, I should have brought Ranard Rand was definitely my choice. I still love Ranard even to this day outcome, the wolves, if you wanna hear a really, really kind of timeless punk rock album outcome, the wolves is the one to listen to or
Brendan Jarvis:
Put that in the
Kate Towsey:
Show notes in my opinion. But actually we're going on a road trip today, so that one might come out. And so there's this, there's something that is intriguing to me about and I think just built into me, which is really attracted to that ability to step outside of the bounds of what we consider to be done and not done and leave all that structure that's kind of social structure behind to become truly creative. And so possibly it's something that's fascinated me throughout my life and possibly that's what comes into the work that I do as well. I don't tend to take no for an answer on an idea. And I remember even when I started the research ops community and I spoke to a few people who have now actually become great supporters at the time they said it won't work and you can't do it.
And it's just kind of like, it's just not gonna work. And the plan that I was kind of saying is of expressing, I wasn't asking for permission, but I was just saying, this is what I wanna do. I wanna really kind of get people around the world wear researchers, let's research what it means to do research and what we need to be able to do it well efficiently at scale, and who better to do that research than researchers on researchers around the world. And I'm gonna get all these people running these research sessions and get all this data together and just make it as this big global research project. And I was told it wouldn't work and I just thought, I feel like it is, and what have I got to lose a little bit of ego, maybe I'll look like an idiot [laugh]
Brendan Jarvis:
Punk attitude
Kate Towsey:
Right there. There's not much to lose here really. So those same people have, as I said, said, become kind of really great supporters and have really one day turned around and said, wow, yeah, it's quite amazing that this worked out [affirmative]. But it definitely takes a very particular energy and mindset for that kind of work. And I can't claim that I'm in that space all the time. [affirmative], it takes a real sense of playfulness to be able to throw yourself into something and realize that you might just burn [laugh] and that that's totally fine, that there really is nothing to lose and that you're not wanting to own every part of it which is, it's definitely a mindset. There are definitely times when I feel like I wanna be more in control of everything and own it more. And that's not when I do that kind of work [affirmative]. So a lot of my time is spent trying to either get to that mind space or keep myself there because I feel where the most magical work can happen. [affirmative] not, doesn't necessarily own you the most money or anything and at all, but it's the most interesting and fun work.
Brendan Jarvis:
If you're listening to this today, then if you remember one thing from this podcast, what Kate has just said is probably what you should remember. And I wondered how much of this sort of attitude that you've taken, this starting things, not needing to own things getting stuck in and building belief and change the status quo, how much of that as a result of your fine arts background?
Kate Towsey:
Well, you have done your research and I think previous to that I was educated in Ari Steiner background, [affirmative]. And it's actually funny, my partner he was also educated Rd Stein but in New Zealand and I was in South Africa and we'd been seeing each other for maybe three or four months and then we'd were just, wow. So similar in the way we think about things. And then one day I brought it up that I'd spent I'd been educated in a RD Steiner school mostly for most of my schooling life. And he said, me too. And we realized that that's where that sort of similar mindset of creativity and thinking outside the box comes from. If you don't know anything about Rudolph Steiner I don't necessarily advocate it as an education system for everybody, but it's very and you literally don't have pages of lines on it, so you can write and draw whatever you want.
You don't have to write and straight lines. You can write however you want and you can write in any color and you can write with a picture as opposed to words. You don't have to pass exams at the end of each year like you do in a regular school [affirmative]. And there's a lot of craft and creativity and a lot of space for you to do things in your own way. So I think it was probably more that foundation that perhaps shaped my brain and the way it works than fine art. But then certainly fine art was, particularly in the era that I went under a fine art degree, it wasn't about can you paint well and sculpt well, in fact I was very disappointed because I signed up to this course coming from an artistic family and I think I did maybe two weeks of painting and then the rest was all conceptual art and I used to have massive wars with the head of the department.
Literally one of my projects I made was a voodoo do of the department [laugh] which I did get called into the office for [laugh] and looking back, I think it was a juvenile attempt at any kind of conceptual art, but it did make a statement. And I said to him, I just feel like you're sending me out into the world with no real art experience. I'm not being taught how to draw or how to do anything practical. But I didn't realize with that what they were doing over those four years was sending me out into the world with a very kind of creative brain and teaching me how to process things from an initial idea to a more complex idea which I assume everybody can do, but perhaps that is something that comes from that training.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, I think it is a good assumption to make about the world that everyone can do that. But the more that I reflect on our education system in general and the West in particular, the less convinced I am of that and of the effectiveness of the model that we pursue. And so it's interesting to hear that you went to Rudolph Steiner and then pursued fine arts because it really does join a lot of dots for me. And now that you've told me that, you also joined a couple of dots for me there about your partner being from New Zealand because I noticed that at Uxr Comp 2019 in Toronto you were wearing a t-shirt with New Zealand's national build on the Kiwi and it was that the significance, was it sort of through your partner that you came to that?
Kate Towsey:
Yes, it's true. So very soon after I met him, gosh it have been, I think we'd been seeing each other for three or four weeks and sort of crazy as it sounds now even to us, we booked a trip three months later to travel around New Zealand and such a beautiful country as you would know. And so yeah, I bought that t-shirt in Maria Springs because I have an absolute love affair with hot springs and anything that's watery and warm like a bath [laugh]. But yeah, such a beautiful country. So I've ended up with an unexpected connection to it,
Brendan Jarvis:
[affirmative]. So something else that stood out about you Kate, was that you had to leave eight years of contracting behind you. And now that we've of got into your background, I can get an idea for why you might have preferred to be a contractor and more of a free agent. But what was it about Atlassian that you thought it was worth leaving life in London and moving back to the southern hemisphere halfway across the world?
Kate Towsey:
That's a great question. Sometimes I wonder myself, but [laugh], it has been a very, very good move. London, I'd been there for I guess around 11 years and really built up my career there from someone who'd really gotten, had been a journalist and then head off to India at some point and gotten completely stuck and involved in the yoga world for better and for worse. Some amazing experiences there and in between that had gotten involved in eCommerce and operationalizing eCommerce sites. I would not have called it operationalizing until eight years ago. And now I realize that's what it was.
And when I moved to London, that's when I really started to get back into building of my career again after getting lost in India and in meditation and so on and so forth. But it was time to leave. It was really time to have a new adventure to go seeking new experiences. And certainly from it's a country-wise, that was appealing and I was very happy to come back to the southern hemisphere and experience warmth again and just what it means to walk out the door and have that sense of overwhelming warmth around you. Cause I love the heat [affirmative] so that was an easy one. And I'd never been to Australia, I'd never thought about going to Australia and I'd never been further eastern India. So all of that I felt like, again, it's a theme of what do I have to lose? [laugh] not a lot.
I didn't have any kind of serious relationships or it was kind of a whole lot of furniture that I could put on a boat for free and get it shipped over here. And that was my massive commitment [affirmative]. So there was really, again, that sense of adventure and what have I got to lose? But the second thing which was I, I'd realize as consulting and certainly through my, at that point early work with the research ops community was that to really understand the work of research operations, you have to deliver an entire ecosystem for it. It's not just about one tool but that full understanding is spar an entire space that really starts to then impact on research culture and that's where the magic and the wizardry starts to happen. And so you can't do that as a consultant necessarily because you're in there delivering a thing, a lab, a panel, and then you walk away from it and however it is absorbed or spat out when they put a new heart into someone or a new organ and sometimes it's accepted and other times the immune system rejects.
It sort of feels a little like that when you're delivering this kind of thing and then walking away from it as the surgeon [affirmative]. But when you get in there and you're part of the body and you're part of the organization, you have that ability to have the long term impact. And I felt that in order to really understand this work and the way that it was building up I needed to find a playpen, like a sandpit [affirmative]. And it was around about that time that Lisa Rakel got in touch with me and said, Hey, what would you think about coming to work for Atlassian and Australia? And I thought Atlassian, okay, it sounds like an interesting company. I know a little bit about Jira and Confluence and then I thought Australia, southern hammi fear developed country. I've spent a lot of time in Africa and in India. So [laugh], I sort of know the importance of these things and Sunny let's go. So it's sort of weight up all those things but sounds
Brendan Jarvis:
Terrible.
Kate Towsey:
I know [laugh] so I guess I always joke with Australia that it's so far east, its west you don't quite know where you are in the time zone. But it's been an interesting experience. I would say that I'm still very much of a contract mindset and I would be lying and my colleagues at Atlassian know that I'd be lying if I said that I don't miss the world of contracting in that sense of freedom. But there are certainly big benefits that come with being with continuity and consistency and it's not for me about security. I've never had the same needs for that. But yeah, it's that consistency of knowing that you can actually build up a team and as a team you can deliver more than you would as a contractor with some dollars behind you.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, got it. I was reading an interview that you gave on the customer insights blog and I noticed that you said a time minimum of four years at Atlassian. What was significant about giving Atlassian at least four years of Kate thousands?
Kate Towsey:
That's interesting. Some of that is practical in the sense that my visa, my original visa was four years. It still is why I've, I think I've got a year and a bit left on it. But yeah, so I had the sort of mindset of four years was the visa and there's various other things like equity and things like that roll out over four years when you commit to Atlassian. But there's also I know from delivering on research ups and particularly now, I mean I've sort of proven it to myself that when I contracted it at gds, the government digital service it ended up being a three year contract that was of broken up into many six month contracts. And it took me that long to really deliver something that started to look like a more complete environment. And I knew from that how long it would take me to do something similar in the space of Atlassian.
And it's proven that we're now been there two, 2.8 years. I think I worked out the other day for another talk and I feel like I've delivered a lot of the environment and there's sort one element left that needs to be brought in that would take me probably another years to deliver, which does really come up to a four year huge investment and shift in how research is done within the organization and what kind of efficiencies that we've managed to put in place and how we've grown with and supported the growth of the research team at the same time because obviously nothing, everything's in flUX and so you've gotta keep moving with the changes
Brendan Jarvis:
[affirmative]. So when you arrived, what did research ops look like versus what it looks like now?
Kate Towsey:
Yeah I've actually got a talk that I'm sort of doing at the moment which goes through the story. And my analogy for it is that when I first arrived it was really a desert [laugh] and that the desert was there was one person here doing some recruitment and some admin. I will make this point probably until the day I die or at least the day my interest in research ops if that ever comes. But research operations is operations, not administration. A lot of people get that confused and what they do is they'll hire a junior person who is an administrator at the very most to come in and do some personal assistant and administration for researchers. And then they wonder why they're not seeing the kind of biggest strategic opportunities unfold with that research ops has to offer. And the simple story is that you get what you pay for and then when you've got it, you get how you implement it and [laugh].
So then you've got one person but they're like one person can look after maybe five researchers, they're never gonna scale beyond that [affirmative]. And so I came in, there was also at that point an internal panel that had just been started and a good job had been done of that but very hard to access it and actually use it without that one admin person actually being the only port of entry into that space. And that was pretty much yet a couple of main tools and nothing else. So somewhat of a desert, a few sand dunes, maybe a little spri popped up here and there and that's it. And so the short version of it is that was 2018 and 2019 I got a team member then learned a very important lesson in that I not knowing how many people were doing research at Atlassian I call those PWD RS people who do research, which can include anyone who does research researchers, designers, content designers, engineers, you name it, someone who does research and it's important there sort of something that we and other research teams have been bumping into is, okay, so people who do research, but what is research [laugh] because chatting to a customer once a week, is that research or is research that distinct?
Is it a distinct definition of having a cohort of people who are from a defined demographic who you then spend a planned amount of time with a discussion guide who you then do an analysis on those conversations and you synthesize and you come out with a set of insights. Is that research with the royal of, someone said to me the other day, that's royal research with a capital r [laugh]. And then on the other side you've got research which could be also defined as curiosity, which is a wonderful thing or empathy even, which is also wonderful. And all these things are so important in all spheres of research, but does it make research to chat to a customer once a week and feel close to their needs and does it make research to spend time being curious about someone's experience on an ad hoc basis? So
Brendan Jarvis:
What did you decide?
Kate Towsey:
We haven't fully decided yet. Okay. From a scoping point of view, there's a lot of stuff that then falls outside of our remit as research ops. If we're going with Royal R and we're looking, we are leaning very closely into that and going, this is the kind of stuff now that we look after. But the other side is the force is strong from the other side as well. [laugh], there are a huge amount of needs there that are pulling us into how do we support product managers, especially in doing the work that they do and think of as research and they are learning from customers. I think there's a debate that needs to happen there. How do we support them as well on what sits within our emit? Because what it can easily become is just contacting customers and everybody does that. My team would sync if we suddenly had to own contacting customers in a huge organization and no one's actually asking us to do that but it could easily become that. So you could see how the waters can become muddy.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, I mean it's a massive undertaking. And you talked about the definition of royal research versus speaking with customers. This might seem like a crazy thing to ask you this far into the conversation, so forgive me if it is, but how do you define research ops?
Kate Towsey:
Gosh, it's funny because would've given you a sort rote quoted response from our research in 2018, but I think of heading been several years later I don't have a short sentence, but it is twofold. I think the initial thing that people think of which is not wrong it's just limited, is providing all the tools and processes and this is the definition that I had in 2018 and that we as research community have put together. So it's all those processes and the tools and the infrastructure and technology, all that stuff that is needed to be able to get research done. And if you provide that to researchers so they don't have to think about procurement and finances and where's the money coming from for me to use this vendor? If they don't need to think about those things, they can continued focus on the work of doing research, which is what they're good at and what they're hired to do.
Researchers aren't always experts on information security where whereas although we're not privacy specialists or lawyers, we pick up a huge amount. And the same goes for procurement and finance. We now know we all the words and we can speak the lingo well enough to have intelligent conversation with these kinds of partners on a day to day basis. And so I think of us as the API that sits between the research organization and the rest of the world. So the researchers don't need to hear all the language, we just send them the relevant pieces in the relevant language. Got it. And so we perform that function, but where the power of research operations really comes in, and this is when you start to get to much higher level of maturity, which you can only achieve depending on your size. When you have someone who's experienced and knows what they're doing and is more senior you start to have palpable change on culture and how research has done and seen an organization through the tooling and the processes that you introduce and that can be for better or worse.
And so the wizardry and the magic then comes in understanding and learning through almost through AP testing in your own internal research and experimentation. If we put this tool in what impact that does that have on how people view research and the kind of insights and the quality and the value of insights that they're generating and that can be seen in so many different ways. So as an example something that I've been thinking about a lot recently which I call the candy floss versus carrots kind of theory, this is entirely made up, is that unmoderated research is wonderful, candy floss is wonderful when if you were dying of sugar deprivation or that then candy floss could save your life, right? Okay. If anyone's a medical professional, you might disagree with me, but take it as an analogy, it could save your life If you were stuck on the side of the mountain and some angel had to come down with candy floss and you haven't had food for five days, this could be your lifeline.
It's wonderful in if you're in fair one of those kind of circus places. Candy floss is super fun and it's just perfect for the context fun stuff. But as your day to day diet, it could give you diabetes and kill you and it would give you no nourishment. And so what unmoderated tooling can become is in the wrong context and with the addictiveness and the speed, that kind of high energy speed it can give you, it can become a candy floss and research is seen as it needs to be fast and instant. And I put something up today and a day or two I come and download a report, fantastic for quick validation of something, a quick test that then goes into more intensive research where on the other side you got carrots against the candy floss. And so although I've been told this is not correct carrots are apparently good for your eyes and help you see in the dark site is such an important thing for research gives you insight cheesy and pushing the analogy too far, [laugh] [laugh] with you, I'm still with you, you're with me.
It's a healthy food. There's times when this is exactly what you need and this is moderated research, which takes more time. You've gotta chew it a bit, you might have to peel the carrots and so on and so forth. It's not instant, it's longer term digestion, the whole thing [affirmative] but it brings you a lot of nourishment. And so neither is good or bad, it's all about context. But what we found was that by having a moderator tool in the space that is sugar addicted, that then becomes, it's just this addiction that everyone's just throwing everything into unmoderated testing all the time and not considering that there is something called carrots. And so aside from these tools becoming just extraordinarily expensive and various other things having an impact on our choices we've recently moved unmoderated research out and brought in tooling that has enabled atlass who do research we call 'em awd rs [affirmative] to be able to do moderated research in ways that are more easy.
So we've got a platform use interviews recruit that enables more easy recruitment for atlass. We've got a way of managing thank you gifts that are very easy. They submit a ticket to us and we handle it for them. And we send various types of thank you gifts, charity and swag boxes and e-gift cards and various things. [affirmative] we've got a lot of guidance and training on how to do good quality moderated research. And the point is that over time with what we are seeing is that there is now a love of carrots is emerging [laugh] [affirmative] where there's a real sense of wow, this is really nourishing and it tastes good. And although it takes a bit more time and it's a bit more energy to chew through, I feel like I've got some more energy out of this. And so this is where the kind of environment that you deliver can alter people's tastes in a sense.
And so the vision is that one day you reintroduce candy floss and so you've got lots of sweets and you've got carrots and you've got lots of different food types there and people have the ability to be able to choose the appropriate thing at the right time. So that was my obviously highly extended answer to you, very simple question of what is research arts. But I think what I'd love to see is that the sort of mindset of it just being tooling and infrastructure and all that sort of practical stuff and the sort of admin around research that leadership particularly see that there is a real opportunity as we have at Atlassian to partner with your operations team on how you master the culture that is happening within your organization around research.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah. You mentioned research culture earlier on in the conversation and this analogy with carrots and candy flosses is actually quite interesting. Maybe wonder when did you realize that there was an addiction to candy floss and what were the clues that people in other organizations might wanna look for that their diet needs a bit of a rebalance?
Kate Towsey:
A lot of it can be. It's the only type of research happening unless there's a researcher involved, involved anyone working in research knows that we have lots of different ways of methodologies or approaches to research because they're all needed and are valuable and unmoderated has its place, moderated has its placed, secondary research or desk research has its place and so on and so forth. Working remote has its place versus lab. And so diary studies have their place too. So there are the other, stick to the sort of food dining analogy, sit at a restaurant and you've got a spoon and a fork and a knife and they're all valuable and used for different things during your meal. So I think one of the first things you notice is that there is this real desire and need just to use that one thing and no one's picking up anything else that is on offer unavailable.
I think for a lot of people, certainly in the tech spaces these spaces work at such an incredible speed. It's boggling. It is so fast and there are so many demands on everybody to move fast and get things done. It's almost like a nature to the culture. And I know this is not unique to Atlassian. There's many, many places that are like this that you will tend to reach for the fastest thing [laugh], right? So yeah, I dunno if I'm answering your question, but you'll see the signs. I mean one of the first things is that no one's doing moderated research and when you speak to them they say it's too hard. And some of it is that it's time and it's getting team understanding and culture around the notion that actually sometimes, not always but sometimes taking that time gives you more energy and more insight at the end of the day. Then you might get through a whole lot of candy floss exercises.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah. Yeah. So we've spoken about what research ops is and it sounds like in the last couple of years your working definition of that is evolving and is still taking shape. Is there anything that you now believe is not research ops that you once did? Belief was,
Kate Towsey:
I'd love to go back to my analogy of the desert because out of that desert I just started and we got, I got sidetracked with the story of, I hired one person who was a participant, recruitment specialist [affirmative]. And I thought this is great. I'm going to say to all these atlass who do research, I didn't know how many there were. I set up a service desk on Jira service desk and I said, if you need a research participant, we will recruit and pay for it for you. It will, all you need to do is put in a ticket. Exactly.
Really at that point, for some reason, I dunno if it was because I'd just arrived in a brand new country and was doing too many things, hadn't really thought through the notion of what was the supply demand [laugh] in that. But I'm happy to admit to this a mistake cause this is how you learn very quickly. And so essentially what I set up was a full service desk for an unknown number of people, not even really understanding what it takes to deliver on a recruitment project cuz I'd set up tools but never as a consultant set up an ongoing kind of person to service like that. [affirmative] very, very soon I learned that there were far many far more people wanting the service than I had capacity for. And that it takes at least one recruit excellent recruiter with pretty dodgy operations behind her could deliver on, I think we sort of said it was 10 or something projects like that a month Anyway, we had dozens and dozens of these things queuing up [laugh].
So definitely a big lesson there to look at supply and demand and to be very aware of a full service service because scaling full service or what some people call a white glove approach, I don't love that terminology. [affirmative] is very, very, very tricky. And what I eventually calculate and learned also from other people in industry who have delivered this as full service is that if you're gonna look after 300 people who do research you need in order to deliver full service participant recruitment, you need a team of 40 to 45 to 50 people for sure. There's no getting around that which then suddenly means managers and sub managers and just, it's a massive deal. So I call that my miss world moment cuz I felt on reflection that what I really said was like Miss World when she takes her crown says, well this, I'm going to deliver world peace in my year of rain and [laugh].
It was as ridiculous as that. But I pulled that service back very, very quickly after realizing what a mess it was going to be and realized at that point that the only way I was going to deliver anything that was going to scale was to go fully. And so we in fact went underground as an ops team and started procuring and exploring and putting together fairly kind of at that point rough services and handbooks and guidance and stuff like that to enable just by then the 40 researchers in the research team to be able to self-serve participants and self-serve informed consent and video libraries and everything. And so we did a bunch of work on that and became really for at least six months to maybe nine months invisible to the research team and invisible to the rest of the organization. It was like we disappeared overnight and we needed to make that investment and I needed to get trust from the people around me and my team that who might have thought, oh my gosh, am I going to actually be seen to be performing under this person who's leading me into the dark?
But we did it and it meant that we've soon rolled out services to the research team which went from 40 to 50 and is now I think 60 or so [affirmative]. But about six months later we realized that it would be a good time to start rolling it out and seeing if we could roll the same services, which were now minimized and well set out to Atlass who do research. And so I returned back to the wider organization but this time with a self-service model that had been to some degree tested. And so I look at going from a desert where there were no operations to my miss world moment, to then doing a ton of procurement with the researchers and ending up with something of a jungle with very little signage. And so they couldn't find their way. There were too many process, it was hard to onboard, they had to have a machete to even see where they might be going to then realizing that well actually we overdid that.
And so we started to cut back and put in pathways and signage and create a national park, a beautiful Australian national park with the kind that you see in the states where there's just, and in New Zealand it lovely signs and warns you about a bear you might come in into contact with at some point or go this way to go to the waterfall. And so that's what our operations looked like as of last year. And then this year we've rolled out to now 400 atlass who do research as a team of six ops people and we're doing fine and people are self-serving and getting that carrot to go back to that analogy, they're getting that experience being able to recruit and store data in the right place and do analysis and synthesis in a tool and have thank you gifts sent for them and have training with an excellent educator and have a handbook and things like that.
But the thing that we added to our national park is we got in park rangers that can take people on tours or help them out at difficult corners and those are our research champions and they are designers who have volunteered their time to be our research champion in their team. And so they sit between my team and the 400 Atlassian who do research who are using our services and they are literally park wardens. They sign posts, they tell people to pick up their rubbish when they need to [affirmative] they help prioritize they plan journeys. And that has been a real game changer. And I think that the next thing we are going to be doing is having the national park when our of next port is really looking at much more complex systems integrated with Atlassian Data Lakes, for instance, about how do we manage customer data and manage customer relationships in terms of research. Cuz that's [affirmative] for any enterprise. It's a real really sticky area. And so it'll be our one and only focus next year.
Brendan Jarvis:
I just wanna come back to something that you mentioned there, which was that you've piloted the self-service program or what would enable that program with the user research team before you rolled it out. And then you also mentioned there you had your park wardens, which were essentially designers that are volunteering their time to help ensure that the park is well maintained and looked after [affirmative]. I just want to talk about that for a second because I don't wanna underestimate the achievement of that cuz you talked about culture and in order to generate a positive research culture, you have to work with people outside of research operations to achieve that [affirmative]. What were the conversations that you were having with people in user research and people in design to enable this to happen?
Kate Towsey:
So the first point on this is I was speaking to someone the other day and showing them this and I realized, oh my god, this is my first third community just internally again, it's kind of bringing people together on a voluntary basis. It was very interesting because we ran an early adopter program with eight teams outside of research and impact. And so our piloting was kind of twofold. First we built and piloted within the research team and when we'd learned from the researchers also what they agreed with in terms of quality we had three platforms that do sort of the user interviews respondent, askable, sort of the three main ones, [affirmative]. And we chose the one that we chose for reason, for reasons of quality and it suited us, but we couldn't have gotten there without that in engagement with the researchers and them using that tool.
And so they helped us really maybe in an unknowing way, but they helped us shape up what our park pathways would look like and where they would go and what trees would keep and what would get cut down. And then when we took it out into the wider organization, we picked eight teams and worked with them and those design leaders I spoke to and said, is there someone on your team who might like to be an enabler of research in their team? And so we were unsure of what a research champion would become, but they would pick someone who was a really great collaborator and multiplier and was genuinely keen on helping to make research more easily done within their team. And the teams were so desperate for remember we'd kind of stepped away and left them behind dry for a little while in order to come back with something that was much more sustainable and scalable.
And so they were really desperate to have tools that could help this. And so initially we had a very, very ill defined or well defined in the sense that it had very little definition which actually suited that context of what a champion would be. And we were thinking, well this would be to bring us feedback from the team and tell us when something wasn't working well and to come to meetings and really understand our processes so that they knew what tool was coming up when or to send people to the handbook or what channel that they should ask on in Slack. Things like that. So that we just get a lot less of those questions. We don't get any of those questions from the team members cuz the champion handles at all. But what the champions did was they took that, those sort of more administrative tasks and they elevated the role, something that we hadn't expected, which is beautiful.
And they started to, as the person who had access to the recruitment tool, which at that point had a budget on it, we allocated 25 participants per team per quarter [affirmative] that allocation of budget and that constrained meant that teams were starting to prioritize what research could happen and when mm-hmm [affirmative] and the other constraint is time. It's not like unmoderated, you can't throw it in and leave it and come back and have insights overnight. You have to spend time with people and you've gotta do, the recruiting had gone down from two weeks to a week depending on the complexity of your recruit, but it's a lot quicker using these tools and processes. But they then became these kind of people who were leading the discussion and working with their leadership on what research was important and which then rolls up into roadmaps and what needs to happen. And so the champions who really took on that role they love it. And some of them recently when we've now expanded to the entire organization beyond those first aid teams, actually just a couple of weeks ago they said, as long as I can keep my role as the champion, I'm happy. And so we've now got, I think it's 18 or 19 champions in total who are helping us to keep the wheels turning
Brendan Jarvis:
[affirmative]. And how did you manage to negotiate the time that they're investing in enabling research operations on a volunteer basis with the leader of design or whoever is responsible for those designers?
Kate Towsey:
It's so interesting, we just didn't even talk about it. [laugh] [laugh] we didn't have a huge definition around it. We allowed them to create their own space. There are no formal demands on it. [affirmative] there are a couple of things we like them to do. We like to meet with them. Someone in my team will meet with the champion each quarter to get their feedback on a one-on-one basis [affirmative]. And we will analyze that and produce a report with some actions against how we're gonna progress. And we have a town hall once a quarter, which now we ask the champion, a champion like a hall of fame champion. We now have to share back what they've achieved that quarter. But that's, that's all we really ask for. And then there's a little kind of slacking upwards and down of odd things, but they've kind of made it into their own space. And so we've never talked about time, not yet anyway. Might still come up.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well let's hope that it doesn't, cuz it's a great way to grow the research ops practice without actually having to grow your own head
Kate Towsey:
Count. Yeah, yeah. I always felt that my goal's always been to deliver as much as possible with a small team, like a small team that packs punch, but a small team of people who aren't burnt out [affirmative]. That's always been really important.
Brendan Jarvis:
I seem to recall that you one as K cops within the team. Yes. Is that still the case?
Kate Towsey:
Well, with K Cops it's affectionately called that now because pre covid when everybody was still in offices we actually did physically send cakes to the office. And so someone would be at the office and be greeted by a cake and for the odd remote person they'd get a cake at their door. But with Covid, that became a logistical nightmare. And so we'd now do eCards, [affirmative] and swag boxes on occasion for the team. So Kpop has now come to mean anything that is of Joy [laugh]. But yes maybe one of these days we get back to an actual Kpop. But it, it's quite a challenge with all the various dietary requirements and addresses and cakes. Cakes were arriving at homes but at the wrong home that people had moved and now cakes were sitting outside on someone else's door and all sorts of things. [laugh],
Brendan Jarvis:
It seems to me that the impact that you're trying to have with K Cops was to acknowledge the efforts of the team, but you've also spoken about in the past the demands that operations places on people. And I think you experienced that initially when you went out to the wider organization and you said, oh, if you need to recruit we can help you. And then we're overwhelmed. What do people that are managing research teams need to be mindful of in terms of the wellbeing, the mental wellbeing of their people, and what are the clue that those things might be out of balance?
Kate Towsey:
You make a great connection there because what Kpop offers is there can be some kind of data Dell rollover stuff in research. We don't have a huge amount of admin, but there certain is someone on my team send thank you gifts for instance, and does a lot of their financial accounting type stuff that the procurement and things like that, that can get quite heavy and dry. And so having something like K Ops that is an instant service and a hospitality piece that they can reach out to the research team. We don't deliver cake ops to anyone outside of the rni. Our research and insights team, [affirmative]. So we don't serve the entire organization with cake. But something that kind of is like instant joy is really, it's a lovely light lift for someone on your team and it helps 'em have a direct and known impact with the research team, which is not a lot of the stuff in research OP can be behind the scene.
And I was actually speaking to research the other day and saying what can become demoralizing in research operations in an organization is that like I dunno if you're in Formula One, I am, but [affirmative], you have various levels that help deliver the driver having a successful race. And so you'll have sort of offsite, say back in England for instance, you'll have the strategists and a whole team of people sitting there behind the scenes looking through data and working things out and sending messages back to the paddock at the race course. Got it. And then you've got, you've the people, the engineers and everybody actually building the mechanics, building the car and keeping that running, running. And then you've got the pit crew who are making all that happen. And then you've got executives and strategists on the pit lane and then you've got the driver who's really the person that's on camera and getting the credit.
And so we are sitting very often right back at the backside there and it can often feel like you're working very, very hard and if you're good at the job, no one knows you're there. It's all happening so seamlessly and and effortlessly that no one knows you there until it's broken or not working as well as desired. And that can be pretty difficult for a research ops team to manage and it can be demoralizing at times. And so something that Kpop does is it also brings in some of that direct connection with that sort of drive mentality of being, being on the paddock with the cars and the cameras and the lights and the action it brings in some of that kind of directness. What you're doing is kind of procuring tools and bringing infrastructure together. And although it's all wrapping up into culture change and bigger strategies, when you boil it, when you boil those big visions and strategies down, it demands running spreadsheets and being very, very tactical. So Kpop is fun and you need that. I think speaking to this researcher, she was saying it's funny because I had assumed that the researchers were the Formula One driver getting the spotlight and she said, actually we feel like we're the pit crew and the designer feels like there's somewhere stuck in between the pit crew and the racetrack and the product managers are the Formula one drivers [laugh].
And I thought that was such an interesting extension of the analogy and I'm sure the product manager will say, it's not me really. There's someone else that is the formula and driver getting the kudos.
Brendan Jarvis:
Sounds like that could be a good team exercise to do across departments.
Kate Towsey:
Yeah, [laugh], it could be. It's kind of fun.
Brendan Jarvis:
So thinking about the machine that you've created to enable this F1 car to run effectively and efficiently, what are the ways in which you are measuring the performance of the research operations team.
Kate Towsey:
This metrics are a constant question and one of the things I've learned is that you have to have operations in place to start generating data on a consistent basis in order to get to metrics. And the metrics only become a value when you've been in that space of consistency and measurement for six months a year. We really need a full financial year to be able to see how we are tracking and performing. And you need several years to really start to see efficiencies [affirmative]. And so none of the stuff is a quick turnaround. So I've been at Atlassian for two and a half years. We've gone through this journey of desert to jungle to national park, and then national park with wardens [laugh] or kind of tour guides in a sense, although, although they're much more than that now. But in the midst of that, only really as we've got an international park that we've got about just coming on 12 months now of data.
And I've got someone on my team now who is focused on finances and tracking finances. And what we are working with is that the finances obviously tell you what you're spending but they also tell interesting. There's an interesting narrative that is emerging from if you're sending thank you gifts out for the entire organization to participants who's sending the most thank you gifts when and does that mean that team? What sort of research are they doing? And is that a good opportunity? Then go in and try and get them to get a full-time research qp because they're obviously what Qhp? Good point. Actually no one I know knows the analogy for that, including me, but it's a head count, right?
Brendan Jarvis:
Okay.
Kate Towsey:
Yeah, this is Atlassian jargon that just rolled off the tongue. Got it. So when you see someone's doing, a team is standing out a lot of thank you gifts, what research are they doing and where those reports and what kind of research is it and do they need a headcount? Is that a better investment for them? And so the finances and tracking the finances can be a really interesting way of drawing out narrative around how research is starting is functioning within the organization. And all you're doing is uncovering sort of patterns that are already there, but just were untracked before so we're currently working towards that. But we were to speak again in a year's time. I would have a good answer probably to two things is how do you actually track impact, not just of research, but of research as well? I dunno anyone who's doing a great job of that yet.
And I think a lot of that is operations need to be mature to even start to look at that. And the second thing is the metrics that you can draw out is certainly how much money you're spending per participant across all your different methods for recruitment. Has that driven down, do you wanna drive that down or is it purely about getting quality up or is it about getting speed up? What do your metrics look like even quality of participants. We've looked at metrics around that and that's a really interesting debate around what is a quality participant? Is it that they pitched up on time, they were who they said they were how do you rate that quality? So many interesting things for us to work on yet.
Brendan Jarvis:
And presumably those metrics tie back to what the objectives of research operations look like in your organization.
Kate Towsey:
Yes, exactly. Yeah, but I think speaking to one of our executives the other day, and I actually drew something, a deck I made yesterday. I've got an image and it's an arrow going up to the right of the number of people we are looking after, which is now 400 and then an arrow of the growth of the research ops team, which is now six [laugh]. And I've been trying to work out what is that gap between the two? How many people more would I need to look after another a hundred people? And so what we've managed to do is deliver something that is scalable and I can start to get a sense of the measurement of how much could I scale to before I need more people. And my scaling is at a significantly lower rate than the number of people I can scale to. And I worked out, I think it was one of one person to 80 people with the operations I've got in place at the moment give or take.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, that's huge, Kate, because I was listening to one of your talks a couple of days ago and you were giving a ratio then of one research ops person to 15 researchers.
Kate Towsey:
Yeah, and it's interesting because at the time I remember us debating this, I remember the moment we were actually in one of my team members' cars driving over San Francisco Bridge and we were busy debating, is it actually one to 15? What is it? And I think in a full service model you would need to keep growing every 15, you would need to keep growing another person. And of course then with management structures, once you have five to eight, you'd need to have a manager in there. And so you've gotta add on one. But when you get into well reasonably well organized self-service structures, and I'm always gonna look at what we do and say, there's more work to do, I'm never gonna not say that but your scale changes completely because now you need highly skilled and mature people to design and people who understand service design and understand their space, whether it's privacy or recruitment or technology or whatever kind of operational finances, whatever operational space they're working on, they need to understand those things and be able to design systems that are scalable and that's their job. And then you need a brand of people in your team eventually. And some point I will need these people who are going to maintain those services and they are more administrators, but they're not, I kind of jumped on the word admin earlier which is one on one personal assistance for every need. These are people who are now administrating the services you've built and kept them running,
Brendan Jarvis:
Administrating at scale.
Kate Towsey:
They're exactly perfectly put. They're administrating at scale and then you start to get the sort of balanced team. So the scale picture changes entirely. So let's update that one. At the moment we are running at one to 80 [affirmative] but that's a very rough, rough cut because the more you scale, the more an admin comes in. And so you would need to actually build up your admin side and probably keep your service design kind of specialist side growing slower than the admin side. So it's a difficult one, but I think at the moment I'd probably be asking for one to eight at the very minimum.
Brendan Jarvis:
[affirmative]. And it sounds like it's evolving as you evolve the operations practice, things change naturally.
Kate Towsey:
Yeah, they
Brendan Jarvis:
Do. And the time that you've been there, so your 2.8 years that you touched on before, what are you most proud of?
Kate Towsey:
I have to say, the first thing that comes to mind and this goes back to your question around K cops, is I'm actually most proud of the fact that I've got a small team now, six in total. As I said we are distributed across the world. I've got two in the states and we are managing to deliver services to hundreds of people in the organization and have a marked impact on how they see things and be a happy team. We definitely have our stressful moments, but it's a very happy, fun team. And I've always seen that as a success market, that you're having a good time with what you're doing and you get together and as a team you can have fun. And so we do things like, we run on sprints we run agile. So every two weeks we have a sprint, retro and a planning, and we really kind of dig through where we can improve things and what's going on. And during those calls, we always have some kind of Motown music running in the background while we're working through things. And we punk, not punk rock. I haven't push that onto the team yet, [laugh]. But yeah, we have a good time. And I think if you can point to a team who's having a good time, who are growing, who are smiling in meetings and are doing really effective work at the scale that they are that that's really what I'm most proud of.
Brendan Jarvis:
Well, that's a great point to shift gears and do some scenario based questions. If you're up for
Kate Towsey:
Those, go for
Brendan Jarvis:
It. So these are really designed to help people that might be in a scenario in the question that they can relate to. And I've got three of them and we'll just jump into them and see how it goes. Are you ready? Yes. Okay. All right, here we go. Scenario number one, you wake up one day and you find that your dream of becoming a research ops manager has come true. Your business case has been accepted after the initial excitement passes, it's time to get down to business. What do you focus on first?
Kate Towsey:
I'm actually thinking back to my first day at Atlassian the first thing to focus on is really understanding your context. I run a one day course and a lot of research leaders and directors and things come to it. I haven't run it since Covid, but perhaps in the future [affirmative]. And one of the questions that I have is homework preparation is what is your context around research, which is broad. How many people are doing research in your organization, [affirmative] is it centralized or is it democratized? What is the research strategy? And if you're the research leader and where are you thinking of taking things? So surprising. I remember being stunned because I had that as a naive question as of the preparation. And it's the question, what is your research strategy that came back with the most blank stares? People didn't know what research strategy is and hadn't thought about it.
And I think that's a sign of the maturing of research at scale where sort of mature research leaders, and this is not to say that those who aren't mature, you can get excellent craft leaders [affirmative], but if you haven't yet thought about what is our research strategy, where are we going? And operations can really help shaping shape that up. So that partnership between the two should dovetail. And so it's really good to understand if you don't have a strategy, why not? What might the strategy be? Should you have a research strategy, would it be helpful to and so there's a ton of questions that you can do that are really kind of those curious discovery questions around who are we, where are we going, where do we want to go? And it's, it's good not to make a move until that because had I known and taken the time to think about the fact that there were, what I now know is 500 people who potentially do research at Atlassian, I sure would not have hired someone and stuck a service desk up and said, I'm gonna offer recruitment to all of you.
But I didn't take the time to do that basic, basic questioning and to do some basic questioning of my specialist that I had hired as to whether this was even a viable service to offer, which is kind of full guns, all guns blazing, [affirmative]. So it's good to pause, understand, do a discovery do discovery about all the things that you might not think to be obvious. Don't just speak to your researchers, speak to privacy, speak to finance speak to technology, speak to anyone who you think might be interested in the work that you're doing and how you might impact them. Account managers even they might be sensitive about who you're recruiting or not recruiting for research and so on and so forth. So you can get a big kind of picture of where you might wanna go and what your success story might look like in three or four years time.
And that also means that you can come to your research leader and if you're not the leader if you've been hired then which I think is your scenario you can show from the start that you aren't just there to do full service recruitment and show those very quick wins, which are, it's hot air, just it evaporates as soon as it's out, it's gone. And so you can get buy in for that longer term vision and for how long it might take to deliver it, but the overwhelming wins that you'll experience in the long run for which we are a case study.
Brendan Jarvis:
Excellent. And this scenario, this follow up is gonna be quite topical then from what you touched on there where you did put in place that specialist and then quickly had that overwhelm. Are you ready?
Kate Towsey:
Yeah.
Brendan Jarvis:
Your team is under-resourced and work-life balance is suffering. You want to demonstrate to management that research ops is adding value so you can grow the team and take some of the pressure off. How are you best to do that?
Kate Towsey:
Oh, it's a constant piece. One of the ways that I've done this is to be very, very specific about what you're going to deliver and what you're not going to deliver. And so people will be feeling the squeeze for something all over the place. And if you run around trying to fix up everything to make everybody happy you're going to burn yourself out doing it. It's not sustainable. And you also just become that kind of quick fix person. Now there's a difference between the architect or someone who builds skyscrapers and the handyman. You do not want to become the handyman who's just called for every little nail that needs to be hammered into the wall. So true. And so one of the ways of doing that, as you said, it hooks on nicely to that previous piece. You need to show the plan for the skyscraper and that you are capable of building it, but it's gonna take time.
But there is going to be such a view from the top that you're going to be stunned by it [affirmative] and that will buy you time and get your team motivated with a vision of where they're going to be able to start delivering on floor 1, 2, 3. But you need to make floor one, two, and three usable so that there are early winds to be seen. Two, you can't be like, well I'm just gonna spend three years building the skyscraper and then you'll be able to get the elevator to the top. Floors gonna be epic. You need to have floor one functioning within the first year and working. And that's really where we came in with rolling out to the researchers, something these disconnected tools that had little quirks in them that weren't quite right, but they were there. And so the plumbing wasn't quite fitted, but you could get a water bucket over there and throw it over yourself if you needed a bath [laugh].
And so it was the beginnings. And so you are offering things early on but you keep hold of that vision towards getting to the penthouse worked for us. There has been also a lot of calm defending of the space and just being never say no. You always say yes and I need X YZ to do it. Good. Very happy. Yeah, very happy to deliver to you. There's not a button there. There's not a no in there. Yes, of course I can do that for you and I would need this, this, and this, and I'd need six months
Brendan Jarvis:
[laugh].
Kate Towsey:
If you can give those things to me, then we're on our way. So there's never a no. And those things have worked quite well for me. Who
Brendan Jarvis:
Taught you those things, Kate? How did you learn that?
Kate Towsey:
I think I come from a content strategy background which is I've always been like, I used to be a journalist, I used to write screen radio documentaries and things. So communication has been kind of core to my life forever which is always a weird thing to say cause all of us speak, but kind of knowing your words and understanding what you're saying and the impact that they have has been on my mind for many long time. And one day I just realized that, you know, don't wanna say no because that just gets someone's backup. But I was at a conference that my friend runs called Thinking Digital in the uk her Kim he runs that and it's a great kind of annual conference. And he had someone who was speaking about speaking on stage and he said, avoid the word. But again, it puts that emphasis in a sentence of I'm about to disagree with you in a nice way, [affirmative]. And so I remember thinking about that and thinking, okay, so take out buts, put in, ands, and then thinking take out the no, but put in the yes. And so you get a yes. And
Brendan Jarvis:
I've got one to add to that as well, which is instead of using a why question use a what? It's less confronting as a why do you think that or why did you do that? You can ask what was it about that? Or something similar, which
Kate Towsey:
That's cool.
Brendan Jarvis:
Diffuse
Kate Towsey:
It. Okay. Oh I like that. And so you'd say what would you do about that? What are your first thoughts?
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah,
Kate Towsey:
Okay. I haven't have to think about that one. [laugh]. Yeah, it definitely takes some practice because in the flow of conversation you still catch yourself having a butt comes in there, but no one minds when you reverse and just go, you know what, actually you gonna change that to a yes. And I think it's nice for someone to see your thinking process.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah. And you're being mindful of how they're receiving what you're saying.
Kate Towsey:
Yeah, exactly.
Brendan Jarvis:
Rather than doing the final scenario, I'm just being mindful of time, let's play a quick game instead. Are you up for that?
Kate Towsey:
Yeah.
Brendan Jarvis:
Okay, cool. This one is pretty easy. It's called What's the first word or thing that comes to mind? And I've got three words or phrases and I'm just run through them and you just tell me what you see or what you think. Cool. Okay. The first one is recruitment
Kate Towsey:
People, crowds of people.
Brendan Jarvis:
[laugh], [laugh], hoards of people, overwhelming specials,
Kate Towsey:
People. Yeah, I see like 500,000 people,
Brendan Jarvis:
Lots of cakes being sent.
Kate Towsey:
[laugh]. Yeah, exactly.
Brendan Jarvis:
The next one is gdpr.
Kate Towsey:
Gdpr. I think of good relationships with privacy. I often have a little heart emoji that I use in documents because it's vital to have a good relationship with privacy and they are thrilled when you have it with them. So heart emoji.
Brendan Jarvis:
That's a really insightful point there. It's something that I've heard a couple of times in recent weeks is just people investing the time to go and speak with people that might be in privacy or legal or risk or in charge of ensuring that the organization's best interests are looked after. They often feel like they're the hand break on things and just having a conversation with them is a really cathartic experience for them and also can open doors for you.
Kate Towsey:
Absolutely. And they really are so thrilled when someone respects their work and wants to work with them. And I've only ever had excellent relationships with information, security, privacy, legal, so on and so forth. So yeah, it's definitely a heart emoji
Brendan Jarvis:
[laugh]. And the final word is cake.
Kate Towsey:
Cake. Well I just see cake now [laugh]
Brendan Jarvis:
What kinda
Kate Towsey:
Cake? Yeah, I'm seeing the little again maybe I think in emojis now. And I think it's the problem we all have [laugh]. There's a little emoji I learned earlier for a team member's birthday and it's a little one of those kind of animated emojis with a little cake slice. Slicer comes out [laugh]. But yeah, it's such a great connector. I'm gluten free very strictly and mine's always gluten free. But yeah, it's such a great thing to gather around a cake and celebrate something. It's a simple things that should not be lost in the midst of the rush of life and things going on. So that's important, bringing people together.
Brendan Jarvis:
That's a nice notion to draw us down to the final question of today's conversation, which is thinking about where research ops is now, what is your greatest hope for the field over the coming years?
Kate Towsey:
That's a great question. It kind of goes back to that simple thing of we're pretty nascent as a space and I think it's important to note that it's not, some people say, oh, well you invented research op. And it's like, no, I just it. I marketed it in ways that it hadn't been marketed before, but Microsoft had a research team of varying sizes up to 20 for and more I think even for 20 years now. And Facebook and Google have had research ops teams for a long time and they were called that. But as a a more broadly known space where now research operations jobs are popping up left and center, which is wonderful. I would love to see that the people hiring for this and well done. But when people are hiring for this that they're not hiring someone who isn't a senior strategist who really understands operations and depending on their scale that they intend on building a team around them to help them to do this work.
Well, [affirmative] it is work that is meant for scale and it's sort of a weird word that it gets used and I use it all the time in that notion where it's like, well, what scale small or big scale isn't a kind of great des on its own, but it's designed to, it's at its best when it's in a space where it is working into the dozens and hundreds. If you're a team of five researchers, you're hiring a personal assistant, you're not hiring, you don't need a research ops person at that point. If you're a team of 10, it's useful to start with an ops person, but only if you're really gonna start growing into the twenties, thirties, forties, fifties. And so I would love for the industry to really start to understand that strategic goodness at wizardry that sits within research and to move from the notion which I think is starting to happen, that it's just about procuring tools and recruiting people like white glove service. It has got so much more value in it and we are only just now getting into the really interesting stuff at Atlas and it's taken us two and a half years to build that foundation. And I'm excited to see what happens when leaders wake up to the real value that's locked up inside of their operations efforts.
Brendan Jarvis:
And I would love to talk with you again maybe in 12 months and just hear how that journey's gone being the API and bringing in more of, I think you called it tops and something else that I was reading, how you can actually move research ops from efficiency into something that's more meaningful and has more impact.
Kate Towsey:
Yeah, absolutely.
Brendan Jarvis:
Yeah, what a great thought to close on Kate. Yeah, great. Thank you. It's been such a wonderful and insightful conversation. It's been so much valuable insight in there that you've shared with us about the research ops field, Kate, so thank you so much for making the time.
Kate Towsey:
Yeah, thank you for doing such good research and answering, asking such excellent questions. It was very, very thought provoking even for me.
Brendan Jarvis:
My pleasure. And I'm sure the people that who are listening to today will get a lot of value from what you've shared. Kate, if people want to follow you, find out what you're up to and hear more of your insights, what is the best way for them to do that?
Kate Towsey:
LinkedIn under Kate Towsey you search me there and Twitter is at Kate Tassie as well. T o w s for sugar ey is how I say it. [laugh] and I've started to do well, I'd like to say they're weekly, but they're really not YouTube vlogs on as I write my book, the things I'm thinking about and uncovering and learning. So I put those up by LinkedIn and Twitter as well. So you'd find those there if you're interested in kind of little research ops, thought bubbles and those are the best places. LinkedIn I get back to kind of once a month, so you'd have to be patient [laugh], but I do get back to everybody eventually.
Brendan Jarvis:
Great. And it's great to hear about the vlogs as well. I'll be linking to all of that and the show notes for you, Kate, so people can find it easily.
Kate Towsey:
Great. And they're on YouTube, so
Brendan Jarvis:
Perfect. And to everyone that's tuned in, it's great to have you here as well. Everything we've covered will be in the show notes, including as we've just talked about, where you can find Kate, where you can also find the research ops community and any of the other resources that we've covered today. If you've enjoyed the show and you want to hear more of these great conversations with world class leaders and UX design and product, don't forget to leave us a review and subscribe to the podcast and keep being brave.

Kate Towsey

Scaling Research Ops: Lessons Learned

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