Operations
Scaling UXR Ops for a Growing Team
Note: company name and proprietary product/info have been redacted to comply with employment contract.
How do you handle operations change management for a distributed team?
As our UX collective grew, our research practice needed more than great researchers. It needed shared systems that made research easier to conduct, quicker for learn, and easier to reuse.
Alongside my UX research project work, I owned many of the operational foundations that supported a team of approx. 40 researchers and designers.
My work in this role changed how I think about UX research. Great research isn't only the product of good methodology. It's also the result of good operational design. When researchers spend less time navigating tools, reinventing templates, or searching for past insights, they spend more time understanding users. Building that infrastructure became one of the most rewarding parts of my role.
I also owned more general research system and process improvements handling things like:
Template creation/maintenance
Introducing participant recruitment best practices
Knowledge management (helping people find what they needed when they needed it through tagging, SEO, and synthesis across projects)
Data governance (PII compliance, creation of policies for data deletion timelines)
Development of a learning initiative roadmap for the team
Advising on accessibility best practices for UXR and UXD work
My Role:
Senior UX Researcher (Research Operations Lead)
My ops responsibilities included:
Handling administration and management for our Dovetail instance:
Creating and maintaining our workspace
Assigning seats and managing permissions
Managing our vendor relationship with Dovetail, including sitting on their Customer Advisory Board (CAB)
Partnering with a cross-functional team to implement single sign-on (SSO) for the tool (a complex project that our team had never gone through before for a product we used).
I also owned more general research system and process improvements handling things like:
Template creation/maintenance
Introducing participant recruitment best practices
Knowledge management (helping people find what they needed when they needed it through tagging, SEO, and synthesis across projects)
Data governance (PII compliance, creation of policies for data deletion timelines)
Development of a learning initiative roadmap for the team
Advising on accessibility best practices for UXR and UXD work
The Challenge
Rather than beginning with a formal discovery project, my understanding of the team's needs developed through supporting researchers and designers every day. Upon joining the team, I immediately began scheduling short 15-30 minute coffee chats with every single person on the team. This allowed me to identify trends and points of difference across team member role and the 7 locations we worked from as a distributed team.
An added benefit was that these chats allowed me to establish relationships early on and make myself clear as an approachable colleague who genuinely wanted their feedback and valued their time. I knew from previous work experience how valuable relationship building is before enacting any major changes to a team’s existing workflows.
Recurring patterns started to emerge. The same friction points surfaced repeatedly, giving me a clear picture of where operational improvements would have the greatest impact.
Researchers were solving the same problems independently because documentation was scattered or didn't exist. In some cases they didn’t even know that we had specific templates because they couldn’t find them or didn’t know where to look.
New team members needed a more consistent onboarding experience.
Research findings were difficult to rediscover without shared repository practices.
Teams needed practical guidance on using tools and AI effectively in their workflows.
Leadership needed better visibility into tool adoption and vendor value, and an easier way to access high-level insights and KPIs.
My Approach
The guiding principles I used for this work were:
Build once, reuse often
Rather than solving the same operational problems repeatedly, create templates, documentation, and shared resources that scale across the team.
When possible, reduce friction; don't default to adding process
Every new workflow or tool should make research easier, not introduce unnecessary overhead.
Treat researchers as as the specialist/expert users that they are
My job was not to reinvent the wheel just for the sake of making something new and shiny. As a UX professional, I have a primary responsibility to always advocate for the user. In this case, the users were my colleagues and deserved the same respect as an external audience would garner.
Outcomes
Outcomes Included:
A 71% CSAT score for team researchers satisfaction using Dovetail for analysis work.
A 63% increase in team confidence executing participant recruitment processes
Standardized onboarding for new researchers and designers baked into the overarching team onboarding process
Reduced repetitive support requests through documentation and templates and bimonthly office hours
Some highlights were two Qualtrics survey templates and a time-on-task worksheet
Improved discoverability of research findings
Strengthened vendor relationships and reduced contract renewal costs by 8%
Built sustainable operational processes that continued beyond individual projects