Research Operations
Research Operations
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Looking back at my experiences at kununu, an HR platform providing employee reviews, this is where my attempts for consolidated research operations started. Joining the organization as the second and first senior-level researcher, I soon realized that the basics of research management still needed to be set up. The company's hunger for insights was huge, so it also needed to happen fast.
Luckily, kununu is a very open-minded company, welcoming changes and new procedures, so coming up with new ways of working was more flexible than in bigger companies.
The goals, although very simple, were ambitious:
a) To enable stakeholders from all possible departments to make informed decisions.
b) To Support people to run research studies and do it the right way.
Process and Deliveries
Step 1: Investigation
Research Operations is not science, but it needs a lot of investigation to understand the organization's needs. The real magic lies in understanding the ambition of where the organization wants to go in the next years and what research has to be done to support that.
kununu has great plans and works hard to achieve them. Its people are curious to find any detail to shape their products, so they need a swift procedure to find the insights applicable to their work to make fast and well-informed decisions. We also quickly figured out, that as a small team, we could only support with some studies, so the need for proper guidance for more research independence was identified.
Step 2: Making insights accessible
Research outcomes have been spread across different platforms. We started to dig into all these reports, presentations, etc. and collected them. Through 40+ internal conversations, we identified what stakeholders are mostly curious about and what topics they repeatedly asked for. That helped us to create a well-structured listing within Confluence - a fairly used internal tool.
We showed that we respect the work and tools kununu worked with previously but think long-term, making space for future insights reporting. We implemented a new research repository that showed how professional and easily accessible research knowledge can be.
Step 3: Guiding for independence
The fact is, kununu - like many companies - had a small research team, which could only serve some of the demands. The vision was to provide holistic research to anybody in the organization, so many intersectional insights were gathered for marketing, business development, and other departments.
"Office hours" came to play to consult research projects. Here the research goals were framed, methods chosen, recruitment planned, and scenarios created. The "business people" then conducted the research by themselves, with training on a job where recommendations were given for leading research conversations.
Final step: Bringing it all together
Together with workshop formats, prepared as Miro templates to use anytime, and Research Directory, the basics for independent yet supervised research practice, were born.
In kununu the Jobs To Be Done methodology was strongly in use, so the guidelines and materials to support the conduct of studies - templates for scenarios, analysis of findings. etc. - were strongly adjusted to it.
Learnings
Thinking about my other experiences from the Research Ops space, kununu's example points out how even simple tweaks can help an organization strengthen research practice. Any strategy and tactics need to be adjusted to the size and type of the company and the methodological approach. These are the crucial learnings - principles I would repeat or do more when having similar assignment in the future:
Listening to stakeholders of various backgrounds, not just focusing on UX and design, is a good practice to follow. It might help to detect inconsistencies from a much broader perspective and understand companies research needs.
Promoting research by showcasing the impact, explaining good practices, and being vocal about research and its purpose must be an integral part. Research teams can't do it all, so the role of ambassadors is immensely important.
Planning beyond reports on how the research outcomes will impact real business life and offering help with insights implementation through different approaches will support most managers to make fast and informed decisions.
While marking a clear line for a democratization of research is essential, there is a huge potential in training people in research conversations. Anybody in a company should be able to speak to customers. Starting with these trainings would be something I would recommend to anybody trying to make a difference in internal research operations.
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