3 Question About Research Ops

Reading the Writing@TeamReOps article about 3 questions that they ask their members makes me want to write my answer to the same question.

and here’s my version.

How did you get started in ResearchOps? What background do you bring to your current role?

It’s almost 5 years ago I decide to join Bukalapak as a Research Operations, what brings me here? It’s UX Research of course! In 2017, I look for what kind of career I really wanted to pursue after a year I started my first job as customer relations with a lot of exposure to users and products. At that time I was still not sure about what exact role I wanted, but I’m sure that I am interested in the customer experience and the product itself.

A Long short journey, after explores several roles from customer relations, business analysis and product. I meet the UX Researcher role and decide to focus on this field. Around this month, 5 years ago I applied to Bukalapak as UX Research and got rejected. Then In several months later I got an offer for UX Research Operations position with raw job descriptions “to help UX Research team and handling recruitment”.

I find myself suitable for the requirements and the role is close enough to the UX Research role that I want to learn and explore more. So I apply and get this role, after a year of working as a part of the Research Ops team in Bukalapak, building everything from scratch it’s really exciting and made me choose this path instead of switching to UX Researchers Role.

Which aspects of ResearchOps have you been focusing on, and what advice do you have for people getting started on the same?

In the beginning, I do research on the research team myself before deciding which scope I want to take on when building research operations. We agreed to focus on 3 big scopes which are recruitment, documentation, and administration. Of course, each quarter the level of priority on each scope will be adjusted not only because we have to be flexible with company needs but we also keep in mind that research ops itself is a holistic system that will affect each other and we agree that we cannot address everything at once.

So if you want to start, think of yourself as a researcher too but with a different scope product and target users. Your target user is the researcher and find “what hinders the UX Researcher to just focusing on research?” After you have insight and understanding you can start with WHY, “Why this is important” and “How might we can help them?”. Remember to take a whole process of work as an endless experiment and choose your battlefields based on your capabilities and the severity of the problem itself.

What would you like to see as the next big thing for ResearchOps in your organization?

After almost 5 years of crafting in this field, I realized that some of the solutions, projects, or maybe problems will get not be relevant anymore. So what I want to see is the way of company involved research in their process to take business decisions is not only as complementary but as a process that we needed to keep be humanized our users. If that happens I trust that the ResearchOps team itself will be growing along with the research team.

In many companies in Indonesia, not many are familiar with this research ops position itself. But as the role of research within the product itself grows, I hope that more and more companies recognize this position and realize how important Research Ops is. Even with a different name, the work that includes administration, recruitment, and documentation will always be there, only with a different title and different recognition. So if you work with a similar scope with me, let’s keep growing and introduce this role more.

Thanks for reading and don’t hesitate to reach me out!