#55 - So You Want to Be In Research Ops? How Roy Olende of Zapier Made The Switch

There is a growing need for research operations.

As more companies embrace the importance of user research and scale their UXR efforts, a dedicated ops function is quickly becoming a necessity.

Research ops—which involves things like participant recruitment, research processes, and programs to help non-researchers do better research—can be a career path for many different kinds of people. Roy has worked with ops pros who come from traditional business operations, marketing, UX, and of course, research. He says the key to succeeding in a research ops role isis to being comfortable with blazing a new trail and taking joy in creating processes that work.

Roy talked about…

• How to decide if research ops is a good career for you
• What he does on a day to day basis
• How research ops works at Zapier

📖 Read more: Research Ops: What It Is, Why It's So Important, and How to Get Started

Highlights

• [4:50] Roy was the first research ops hire at Zapier. He's happy to be brought on early in the process so research can scale with the company.
• [6:45] The first thing Roy did was research the way UXR is done at Zapier. He wanted to understand where the problems were and what he could do to fix them.
• [10:52] You'll enjoy research ops if you're comfortable being an explorer. Research ops is a really new space and you'll be in uncharted territory most of the time.
• [16:06] Does Roy use Zaps to get his work done?
• [27:02] Roy has been most surprised to learn who he is serving in his role. He thought he would mainly be working to create services for the UXR team, but has spent a majority of his time working on things for people who sometimes do research, like PMs and marketing folks.
• [34:10] A typical day for someone in research ops

About our guest

Roy Olende has been involved in user research and service design for nearly a decade. He is currently the Head of UX Research at Zapier, where he launched the company’s Research Operations practice to support user research across the entire company and accelerate product development.