Scaling Research Ops
In this episode, Melissa Perri sits down with Kate Towsey, an authority on research operations and author of "Research That Scales." They dive into the significance of research ops in aligning product strategy and operations within a company, emphasizing how research can provide strategic insights essential for product development and organizational growth.
Show Notes
Kate discusses the evolution and necessity of research ops, sharing her journey from content strategy to pioneering the field. She highlights how effective research ops facilitate knowledge management, ensuring that valuable insights are not just gathered but are used to inform business decisions across an organization.
Tune in to discover how Kate's insights can transform your approach to integrating research into product strategy and the benefits of a well-structured research ops framework.
You’ll hear us talk about:
- Solving Recruitment Pain Points
Kate elaborates on the common starting point in research ops: participant recruitment. She discusses how managing this aspect effectively can impact product managers, researchers, and designers by enabling more seamless customer interactions.
- Democratizing Research through Collaboration
Melissa and Kate explore the importance of collaboration between product managers, UX designers, and researchers. They argue that while each role has its specialties, working together can democratize research and lead to better product decisions.
- Breaking Down Silos Between Teams
The discussion turns to the silos that exist within organizations, especially between product marketing and product management. Kate and Melissa share strategies for overcoming these divides to improve customer insights and product outcomes.
Episode Resources:
- Find Kate on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katetowsey/
- Purchase Kate's book, "Research That Scales," on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Research-That-Scales-Operations-Handbook/dp/1959029223/
- Subscribe to the Product Thinking Podcast newsletter for more insights here: https://productinstitute.kit.com/2c8b2a0136
Listen to the full episode to learn more about incorporating research ops into your strategy.
Timestamps:
Highlights
Intro
Dear Melissa
Kate Towsey's Journey into Research Ops
Understanding Research Operations
Challenges in Conducting Customer Research
The Shift of Research Ops to a Strategic Role
Collaboration in User Research
Right Tools to Scale Research
Research Ops and Product Ops Synergy
Episode Transcript
Kate Towsey: It's like saying that water is your most valuable asset, which most organizations they'll say knowledge is our most valuable asset, but they're not building a dam for it and thinking of tributaries and understanding where it's going. It's just leaking and you don't even know where it's going. And then you're all sitting there thirsty all the time. When you're making the big decisions, you really need robust, reliable knowledge, being well, tested. And there are definite, like highly skilled people who know how to get that. But what we need to do as researchers look down the line and go there, lots of different forms of learning and forms of gaining knowledge, we cannot monopolize the relationship with the customer. What we need to do is operationalize it. The trick for an operations person, I'm sure you've experienced this too, is deliver some quick things, keep people on board, show them the long term vision and constantly try and encourage patience in getting there, because what you're building is not just something that's going to fly away the next day. It's like some real robust structuring that you hope is going to be valuable for a decade or two or three, even.
Intro
PreRoll: Creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day to day interactions with developers. It's about how an organization supports products as a whole. The systems, the processes, and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers. With the help of some boundary pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions, we'll dive into this system from every angle and help you find your way. Think like a great product leader. This is the product thinking podcast. Here's your host, Melissa Perri.
Melissa Perri: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the product thinking podcast. Joining us today is Kate Towsey, an independent research ops advisor and educator. Kate formerly was a research operations manager at Atlassian, and she started research ops at the BBC. She founded the research ops community and the Cha Cha Club of global operations professionals. She recently published a book all about the great work she has been doing called Research That Scales: The Research Operations Handbook, which we're going to dive into today, as well as talk about how research ops helps product managers and how it works well with product ops. But before we start to talk to Kate, it's time for dear Melissa. So this is a segment of the show where you can ask me any of your burning product management questions. Go to dearmelissa.com and let me know what they are. Here's this week's question.
Dear Melissa
Dear Melissa, in the early days of our product, our CEO and sales team pushed us to have a broad, complex system. The problem was that we were always being lean and not raising a series A or B. This put a lot of pressure on the team at the time, but we've managed to make it a relative success with some high profile customers, good retention and good ratings. Now we have customers who expect us to keep deepening in all areas. We still get pushed to build more features in more directions. What advice would you have for narrowing the focus without alienating customers and prospects?
So one thing that's interesting to me here is that you say that all the customers want you to deepen in all the areas I would try to dig in here and try to figure out why, right? Like, what are they trying to achieve with the deepening? What are they, what can't they do right now that they would like to do?
Figure out what that value is. See what you can actually deliver on for the company too, you need to have a strategy. If you were basically just building what the customers asked for forever, you're kind of setting the tone that you were like a consultancy, right? An agency that we're building them customer software.
You have to change that relationship. Now it's still about understanding their problems and helping them get what they need from it. But you have to have some expectation about how you're not going to do everything. So your company needs to have a strong vision. And a strong statement about what you are going to handle and what you're not going to handle.
So that comes from a strategy and from communication on that. And it sounds like that might be missing in the organization. I see a really common theme with a lot of startups where they'll build something and they might build something super complex, like you're talking about, and they'll go out and they'll try to sell it to everybody.
You get a couple really big clients on there. And now those clients, so may have some similarities, but they might actually be different needs as well. So now you've got like client a saying, Hey, I need you to deepen in X, Y, and Z over here. And then you've got client B saying, you know, feature is one, two, three over here.
This part of the thing is my problem. You want to go back and study what kind of people are actually using your product and what they're using it for and make sure that there's a firm direction there. Are you solving the same jobs to be done for everybody in a way where it's going to scale to a lot more users, or are you just kind of building piecemeal for the biggest users who are yelling right now?
That's what you really want to figure out. Now, I've been in this situation too. I've worked with a company where I was setting the product strategy. And when we looked at all their customers and how much money we were spending on custom software, let's say for them, or responding to their needs, which weren't super strategic, we ended up putting together this document, which we called the sales debt of the organization.
And we said, what did we contractually commit to that was off our roadmap or straying away from our vision? And when we looked at it, the. Largest company that we had was a huge amount of sales debt. Like we were building custom features for them because they were yelling the loudest. Now we still wanted to protect that revenue because we didn't want them to churn.
It was a significant portion of it, but we had to go back and start to have hard conversations with them about what they really needed or start charging them more. So we said, okay, you could still have that, but the price is now increasing, right? This has to go up. So use the tools that are at your advantage here.
If they want custom software, or they're asking for things that are off roadmap, can they pay to play if it's something that's in line with your vision? And if it's not in line with your vision, you have to be firm and say, we're not really going into that. That's not where we want to look at. So I would look at all of your customers and again , make sure that you have a good ICP, make sure you know who that ICP is and make sure that you're not just building for anybody who wants your product, but people that it's going to scale to, right?
You want to make sure that there are other people who are going to want the same problems to be solved.
So you can keep scaling in that direction. Having these hard conversations to a customers, they're, they're used to it. People who buy software, they're told no, no by other people all the time. Right. So you have to expect that they've had these conversations before. If you're solving their biggest problems, they're going to stay with you.
If you're not solving their biggest problems, they will start to look elsewhere. So I'd look at your competition. I'd look at what else their alternatives are, but I'd also try to figure out if they're asking for all of these things, what's the value they're going to get from them and are they willing to pay for it?
Right. That's really, what's going to come down to, that's going to help you prioritize a little bit more. But again, go back and make sure all those customers are not just a bunch of very distinct, very different types of profiles. Make sure that they're, they're a target customer that you can scale this stuff to others, and that's going to help you prioritize what to actually build.
So I hope that helps good luck with this challenge and anybody else listening out there, please go to dearmelissa.com and let me know what your questions are. Now it's time to talk to Kate.
Kate Towsey's Journey into Research Ops
Melissa Perri: Hi, Kate, welcome to the podcast.
Kate Towsey: Hi, Melissa. It's so great to be here.
Melissa Perri: I'm so excited to have you. I love talking about operations. I love talking about research ops. I love talking about product ops. And I think that these are two things that are very closely related. And I'm really excited to dive into your book, Research That Scales, and talk about how research ops can help product managers. But before we do that, I'd love to hear a little bit about your journey. How did you get into research ops?
Kate Towsey: Well, I'm a librarian by trade. So I've always been interested in knowledge and how people use knowledge and how they access it. And I was working at the BBC, which is a very large organization, and I was working in the digital part of the BBC, which is a very large organization. And I was a content strategist, which is a very small part of a very large organization. And I was working on a project that was looking at how people use the BBC's content. And I was working with a researcher and I was watching her work and I was watching her do all the things that I was doing in my previous life as a librarian, but she was doing it in a digital context. And I was like, this is amazing. I want to do this. And so I started to work with her and I started to help her with her research. And then I started to help other researchers with their research. And then I started to realize that there was a need for someone to be doing this full time. And so I pitched the idea of a research operations role to the BBC and they said yes. And so I became the first research operations manager at the BBC. And that's how I got into it. And then I moved to Atlassian and did the same thing there. And then I started the research ops community and the Cha Cha Club. And now I'm an independent advisor and educator.
Melissa Perri: That's incredible. And I think it's so interesting that you came from a librarian background because I think that's what research ops is all about, right? It's about organizing the knowledge and making it accessible to everybody.
Kate Towsey: Absolutely. And I think that's the key thing that people miss about research ops is that it's not just about the logistics of research, it's about the knowledge management of research. It's about making sure that the insights that are gathered are actually used to inform business decisions.
Melissa Perri: So let's dive into your book, Research That Scales. What is the core message you want product managers to take away from this book?
Kate Towsey: The core message is that research ops is not just a nice to have, it's a necessity for any organization that wants to scale its product and its research. And for product managers, it means that you get better, faster, and more reliable insights to inform your product decisions.
Melissa Perri: Can you give us an example of how research ops directly benefits a product manager?
Kate Towsey: Sure. Let's take the example of participant recruitment, which is often the first thing that research ops tackles. A product manager needs to talk to a specific type of customer, say, small business owners in the US who use a certain feature. Without research ops, the product manager or the researcher has to manually go through databases, send emails, manage consent forms, and track incentives. This is time-consuming and often leads to delays. With research ops, we build a system—a panel, a CRM for research participants—that automates this process. The product manager can put in a request, and the system quickly identifies and recruits the right participants. This means the product manager gets the answers they need faster, and they can make decisions quicker, which is crucial for product velocity.
Melissa Perri: That makes perfect sense. It's about removing the friction from the research process.
Kate Towsey: Exactly. And it's not just about speed. It's about quality. Research ops ensures that the research is ethical, compliant, and that the data is stored in a way that is easily searchable and reusable. So, a product manager doesn't have to commission a new study every time they have a question. They can search the repository and find existing insights.
Melissa Perri: That leads perfectly into the idea of knowledge management. How does research ops help with democratizing research?
Kate Towsey: Democratizing research is about enabling everyone in the organization—product managers, designers, marketers, engineers—to engage with the customer and use research insights responsibly. Research ops provides the tools, training, and processes to make this happen. For example, we create a centralized repository of all research findings. Instead of insights being locked away in a researcher's head or a private document, they are tagged, summarized, and made accessible. A product manager can quickly search for all studies related to a specific feature or customer segment. This prevents "research debt," where you keep asking the same questions over and over.
Melissa Perri: That's a huge problem I see in many organizations. They have all this great research, but nobody knows where to find it.
Kate Towsey: Precisely. And when people can't find the research, they either ignore it or they do their own quick, often flawed, research, which leads to poor product decisions. Research ops bridges that gap. It makes the knowledge flow.
Melissa Perri: You also talk about the importance of aligning research ops with product ops. Can you elaborate on that relationship?
Kate Towsey: Product ops and research ops are two sides of the same coin: operational excellence for product development. Product ops focuses on the tools, processes, and data that support the product management function—things like roadmapping, metrics, and go-to-market processes. Research ops focuses on the tools, processes, and data that support the research function—recruitment, knowledge management, and tooling. They should work hand-in-hand. For instance, the customer data that product ops manages—who our customers are, what they use, their health scores—is gold for research ops to use for recruitment and segmentation. Conversely, the deep qualitative insights from research ops inform the strategic decisions and metrics that product ops tracks. When they are aligned, you have a powerful feedback loop from customer insight to product strategy and execution.
Melissa Perri: So, product ops is about the "what" and "how" of product delivery, and research ops is about the "why" and "who" of customer understanding, and they both rely on strong systems and processes.
Kate Towsey: That's a great way to put it. They both ensure that the product organization is running smoothly, efficiently, and, most importantly, is customer-centric.
Melissa Perri: What advice would you give to a product manager who wants to advocate for research ops in their organization?
Kate Towsey: Start small and focus on the pain points. Don't go in asking for a massive research ops team. Go in with a clear business case. For example, "We are spending 10 hours a week per researcher on recruitment. If we implement a basic research ops system, we can cut that down to 2 hours, freeing up 8 hours for actual research that informs our roadmap." Show the value in terms of time saved, money saved, and, most importantly, better product outcomes. Use the language of the business. Talk about risk mitigation, speed to market, and strategic alignment. And, of course, buy my book and give it to your leadership!
Melissa Perri: I love that. It's all about making the invisible work visible and showing its impact on the bottom line.
Kate Towsey: Exactly. Research ops is the scaffolding that allows the product house to be built quickly and safely.
Melissa Perri: Kate, this has been incredibly insightful. Thank you so much for sharing your expertise.
Kate Towsey: Thank you for having me, Melissa. It's been a pleasure.
Melissa Perri: And that was Kate Towsey, author of Research That Scales. We'll be back next week with another episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. And that's it for this week's episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. If you enjoyed it, please like and subscribe. And if you have any questions for me, go to dearmelissa.com and let me know what they are. We'll see you next time.
Kate Towsey: It's like saying that water is your most valuable asset, which most organizations they'll say knowledge is our most valuable asset, but they're not building a dam for it and thinking of tributaries and understanding where it's going. It's just leaking and you don't even know where it's going. And then you're all sitting there thirsty all the time. When you're making the big decisions, you really need robust, reliable knowledge, being well, tested. And there are definite, like highly skilled people who know how to get that. But what we need to do as researchers look down the line and go there, lots of different forms of learning and forms of gaining knowledge, we cannot monopolize the relationship with the customer. What we need to do is operationalize it. The trick for an operations person, I'm sure you've experienced this too, is deliver some quick things, keep people on board, show them the long term vision and constantly try and encourage patience in getting there, because what you're building is not just something that's going to fly away the next day. It's like some real robust structuring that you hope is going to be valuable for a decade or two or three, even.
Melissa Perri: Creating great products isn't just about product managers and their day to day interactions with developers. It's about how an organization supports products as a whole. The systems, the processes, and cultures in place that help companies deliver value to their customers. With the help of some boundary pushing guests and inspiration from your most pressing product questions, we'll dive into this system from every angle and help you find your way. Think like a great product leader. This is the product thinking podcast. Here's your host, Melissa Perri. Hello, and welcome to another episode of the product thinking podcast. Joining us today is Kate Towsey, an independent research ops advisor and educator. Kate formerly was a research operations manager at Atlassian, and she started research ops at the BBC. She founded the research ops community and the Cha Cha Club of global operations professionals. She recently published a book all about the great work she has been doing called Research That Scales: The Research Operations Handbook, which we're going to dive into today, as well as talk about how research ops helps product managers and how it works well with product ops. But before we start to talk to Kate, it's time for dear Melissa.
So this is a segment of the show where you can ask me any of your burning product management questions. Go to dearmelissa.com and let me know what they are. Here's this week's question. Dear Melissa, in the early days of our product, our CEO and sales team pushed us to have a broad, complex system. The problem was that we were always being lean and not raising a series A or B.
This put a lot of pressure on the team at the time, but we've managed to make it a relative success with some high profile customers, good retention and good ratings. Now we have customers who expect us to keep deepening in all areas. We still get pushed to build more features in more directions. What advice would you have for narrowing the focus without alienating customers and prospects?
So one thing that's interesting to me here is that you say that all the customers want you to deepen in all the areas I would try to dig in here and try to figure out why, right? Like, what are they trying to achieve with the deepening? What are they, what can't they do right now that they would like to do?
Figure out what that value is. See what you can actually deliver on for the company too, you need to have a strategy. If you were basically just building what the customers asked for forever, you're kind of setting the tone that you were like a consultancy, right? An agency that we're building them customer software.
You have to change that relationship. Now it's still about understanding their problems and helping them get what they need from it. But you have to have some expectation about how you're not going to do everything. So your company needs to have a strong vision. And a strong statement about what you are going to handle and what you're not going to handle.
So that comes from a strategy and from communication on that. And it sounds like that might be missing in the organization. I see a really common theme with a lot of startups where they'll build something and they might build something super complex, like you're talking about, and they'll go out and they'll try to sell it to everybody.
You get a couple really big clients on there. And now those clients, so may have some similarities, but they might actually be different needs as well. So now you've got like client a saying, Hey, I need you to deepen in X, Y, and Z over here. And then you've got client B saying, you know, feature is one, two, three over here.
This part of the thing is my problem. You want to go back and study what kind of people are actually using your product and what they're using it for and make sure that there's a firm direction there. Are you solving the same jobs to be done for everybody in a way where it's going to scale to a lot more users, or are you just kind of building piecemeal for the biggest users who are yelling right now?
That's what you really want to figure out. Now, I've been in this situation too. I've worked with a company where I was setting the product strategy. And when we looked at all their customers and how much money we were spending on custom software, let's say for them, or responding to their needs, which weren't super strategic, we ended up putting together this document, which we called the sales debt of the organization.
And we said, what did we contractually commit to that was off our roadmap or straying away from our vision? And when we looked at it, the. Largest company that we had was a huge amount of sales debt. Like we were building custom features for them because they were yelling the loudest. Now we still wanted to protect that revenue because we didn't want them to churn.
It was a significant portion of it, but we had to go back and start to have hard conversations with them about what they really needed or start charging them more. So we said, okay, you could still have that, but the price is now increasing, right? This has to go up. So use the tools that are at your advantage here.
If they want custom software, or they're asking for things that are off roadmap, can they pay to play if it's something that's in line with your vision? And if it's not in line with your vision, you have to be firm and say, we're not really going into that. That's not where we want to look at. So I would look at all of your customers and again , make sure that you have a good ICP, make sure you know who that ICP is and make sure that you're not just building for anybody who wants your product, but people that it's going to scale to, right?
You want to make sure that there are other people who are going to want the same problems to be solved.
So you can keep scaling in that direction. Having these hard conversations to a customers, they're, they're used to it. People who buy software, they're told no, no by other people all the time. Right. So you have to expect that they've had these conversations before. If you're solving their biggest problems, they're going to stay with you.
If you're not solving their biggest problems, they will start to look elsewhere. So I'd look at your competition. I'd look at what else their alternatives are, but I'd also try to figure out if they're asking for all of these things, what's the value they're going to get from them and are they willing to pay for it?
Right. That's really, what's going to come down to, that's going to help you prioritize a little bit more. But again, go back and make sure all those customers are not just a bunch of very distinct, very different types of profiles. Make sure that they're, they're a target customer that you can scale this stuff to others, and that's going to help you prioritize what to actually build.
So I hope that helps good luck with this challenge and anybody else listening out there, please go to dearmelissa.com and let me know what your questions are. Now it's time to talk to Kate.
Melissa Perri: Hi, Kate, welcome to the podcast.
Kate Towsey: Hi, Melissa. It's so great to be here.
Melissa Perri: I'm so excited to have you. I love talking about operations. I love talking about research ops. I love talking about product ops. And I think that these are two things that are very closely related. And I'm really excited to dive into your book, Research That Scales, and talk about how research ops can help product managers. But before we do that, I'd love to hear a little bit about your journey. How did you get into research ops?
Kate Towsey: Well, I'm a librarian by trade. So I've always been interested in knowledge and how people use knowledge and how they access it. And I was working at the BBC, which is a very large organization, and I was working in the digital part of the BBC, which is a very large organization. And I was a content strategist, which is a very small part of a very large organization. And I was working on a project that was looking at how people use the BBC's content. And I was working with a researcher and I was watching her work and I was watching her do all the things that I was doing in my previous life as a librarian, but she was doing it in a digital context. And I was like, this is amazing. I want to do this. And so I started to work with her and I started to help her with her research. And then I started to help other researchers with their research. And then I started to realize that there was a need for someone to be doing this full time. And so I pitched the idea of a research operations role to the BBC and they said yes. And so I became the first research operations manager at the BBC. And that's how I got into it. And then I moved to Atlassian and did the same thing there. And then I started the research ops community and the Cha Cha Club. And now I'm an independent advisor and educator.
Melissa Perri: That's incredible. And I think it's so interesting that you came from a librarian background because I think that's what research ops is all about, right? It's about organizing the knowledge and making it accessible to everybody.
Kate Towsey: Absolutely. And I think that's the key thing that people miss about research ops is that it's not just about the logistics of research, it's about the knowledge management of research. It's about making sure that the insights that are gathered are actually used to inform business decisions.
Melissa Perri: So let's dive into your book, Research That Scales. What is the core message you want product managers to take away from this book?
Kate Towsey: The core message is that research ops is not just a nice to have, it's a necessity for any organization that wants to scale its product and its research. And for product managers, it means that you get better, faster, and more reliable insights to inform your product decisions.
Melissa Perri: Can you give us an example of how research ops directly benefits a product manager?
Kate Towsey: Sure. Let's take the example of participant recruitment, which is often the first thing that research ops tackles. A product manager needs to talk to a specific type of customer, say, small business owners in the US who use a certain feature. Without research ops, the product manager or the researcher has to manually go through databases, send emails, manage consent forms, and track incentives. This is time-consuming and often leads to delays. With research ops, we build a system—a panel, a CRM for research participants—that automates this process. The product manager can put in a request, and the system quickly identifies and recruits the right participants. This means the product manager gets the answers they need faster, and they can make decisions quicker, which is crucial for product velocity.
Melissa Perri: That makes perfect sense. It's about removing the friction from the research process.
Kate Towsey: Exactly. And it's not just about speed. It's about quality. Research ops ensures that the research is ethical, compliant, and that the data is stored in a way that is easily searchable and reusable. So, a product manager doesn't have to commission a new study every time they have a question. They can search the repository and find existing insights.
Melissa Perri: That leads perfectly into the idea of knowledge management. How does research ops help with democratizing research?
Kate Towsey: Democratizing research is about enabling everyone in the organization—product managers, designers, marketers, engineers—to engage with the customer and use research insights responsibly. Research ops provides the tools, training, and processes to make this happen. For example, we create a centralized repository of all research findings. Instead of insights being locked away in a researcher's head or a private document, they are tagged, summarized, and made accessible. A product manager can quickly search for all studies related to a specific feature or customer segment. This prevents "research debt," where you keep asking the same questions over and over.
Melissa Perri: That's a huge problem I see in many organizations. They have all this great research, but nobody knows where to find it.
Kate Towsey: Precisely. And when people can't find the research, they either ignore it or they do their own quick, often flawed, research, which leads to poor product decisions. Research ops bridges that gap. It makes the knowledge flow.
Melissa Perri: You also talk about the importance of aligning research ops with product ops. Can you elaborate on that relationship?
Kate Towsey: Product ops and research ops are two sides of the same coin: operational excellence for product development. Product ops focuses on the tools, processes, and data that support the product management function—things like roadmapping, metrics, and go-to-market processes. Research ops focuses on the tools, processes, and data that support the research function—recruitment, knowledge management, and tooling. They should work hand-in-hand. For instance, the customer data that product ops manages—who our customers are, what they use, their health scores—is gold for research ops to use for recruitment and segmentation. Conversely, the deep qualitative insights from research ops inform the strategic decisions and metrics that product ops tracks. When they are aligned, you have a powerful feedback loop from customer insight to product strategy and execution.
Melissa Perri: So, product ops is about the "what" and "how" of product delivery, and research ops is about the "why" and "who" of customer understanding, and they both rely on strong systems and processes.
Kate Towsey: That's a great way to put it. They both ensure that the product organization is running smoothly, efficiently, and, most importantly, is customer-centric.
Melissa Perri: What advice would you give to a product manager who wants to advocate for research ops in their organization?
Kate Towsey: Start small and focus on the pain points. Don't go in asking for a massive research ops team. Go in with a clear business case. For example, "We are spending 10 hours a week per researcher on recruitment. If we implement a basic research ops system, we can cut that down to 2 hours, freeing up 8 hours for actual research that informs our roadmap." Show the value in terms of time saved, money saved, and, most importantly, better product outcomes. Use the language of the business. Talk about risk mitigation, speed to market, and strategic alignment. And, of course, buy my book and give it to your leadership!
Melissa Perri: I love that. It's all about making the invisible work visible and showing its impact on the bottom line.
Kate Towsey: Exactly. Research ops is the scaffolding that allows the product house to be built quickly and safely.
Melissa Perri: Kate, this has been incredibly insightful. Thank you so much for sharing your expertise.
Kate Towsey: Thank you for having me, Melissa. It's been a pleasure.
Melissa Perri: And that was Kate Towsey, author of Research That Scales. We'll be back next week with another episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. And that's it for this week's episode of the Product Thinking Podcast. If you enjoyed it, please like and subscribe. And if you have any questions for me, go to dearmelissa.com and let me know what they are. We'll see you next time.
Kate Towsey: Yeah. I mean, I might get shot for saying this but you know, I say things anyway. I think there's also need a need to accept that product managers are the top of the pile in the sense that product managers are making the decision. They're managing the product. and it really is about giving the product man. This is my understanding. At least correct me if I'm wrong. It really is about giving the product manager the ability to make the decisions along with C suite level and founders and people Like that. I'm not saying that they're the end of the road. Everything really should be pointing to in terms of research, pointing to enable. Yes, sure. Designers, researchers are not researching to make decisions. They're researching to understand, to enable others, to make decisions. Designers need to make design decisions. Product managers need to make decisions about, the direction of the product That's really, for me, I'm like, why are we not all working towards that? and then marketing, of course, marketing and product need To align. And oftentimes you hear that they're not aligning very well on the direction of the product versus the marketing that's going on, why company organizations are big. And we all get stuck in our little space and it's easy, like for someone, it's easier for someone like me who doesn't, I don't work in an organization anymore.
And so I get to kind of hover above the breadth of companies and have a look down and kind of go, why are we not all working together? It's because I'm hanging out in outer space. It's the same as people going to outer space. And then they say, Wow, you just see that the earth is one and we don't have all these boundaries, but then you come down to earth and you travel back to your little home and then you're just back into your little world again.
So, it's maybe, you know, like Melissa, it's like, we do have that guild or something, which is something of stepping away, coming to outer space just for like 2 days to basically see that really big picture again. Of how we can all be working together to achieve what we all want to achieve, which is ultimately success and more sales and, and, and like abundance for all, if you work, in a a for profit company. And, if you work in civic spaces or in, in charities, even then you want to be delivering more value for your sponsors, for your donors.
Melissa Perri: I think that would be a beautiful world that I would like to live in. And I want, I want us all to get there. And I think like for me, I keep pushing product ops and I don't know if you're getting this feedback too, but a lot of people will look at this and be like, Oh, these are just people about processes and systems and stuff. Like, they're not really thinking about, you know, the core of the product and delivering value. To me, I think it's naive to think that we can't talk about process like an organization to get things done, especially in large organizations. Like they have to have some kind of system, some kind of process on how you work, like, otherwise it's a free for all. And, but I just keep hearing this pushback of like, do we really need this? Do we really need that? And in my experience, In organizations that don't have these things that we're talking about, research apps, product ops, being able to like, see this data, understand your customers, they fail because it's like, you know, they do not do well, or they're hanging on by a thread. Like, they may not failed yet, but they're not doing well. Right.
And then the ones that are implementing all of these things are creating these systems. They can tell you exactly what their customers want, right? They're so in tuned with them. They're able to deliver value faster.
Kate Towsey: I think some of that's because operations is not always like an instant. It's not always instant. When you're trying to deliver operations from scratch, you're looking for A low hanging fruit, quick fixes. I said earlier to kind of show value early on. You can't say, you know, inviting people to a party and then going, well, you're just going to hang out for a couple of hours while I cook this amazing meal. You give them hors d'oeuvres or something. It's not the full meal, but it's something just to keep them happy. Glass of champagne. Everyone's happy. And it's the same when you're setting up operations from the start, look for something pretty easy, not perfect, but it's just a snack to give Keep, keep people satiated for a little while, but the big changes and the big value comes sometimes a year or two down the line. And so when you start collecting data, for instance, within 3 months, it might not necessarily be the most robust data you've ever seen and all the effort you've put into standing up the tools and the processes to collect that might seem like it might have been a waste of time. But a year down the line, you've got some interesting things to look at. Two years down the line, you've got something that might look like a trend. Three years down the line, you're seeing maybe some really interesting patterns in there. and I think that's the really big piece around ops is it needs that strategic long term vision. It needs an enormous amount of patience to get to the point where you're at the processes and the systems are delivering things.
And that's not just even in terms of data, but also culture. Like you've managed to shift the needle on how people see their relationships, how they see, how they learn, how they understand how you engage with customers. These things don't change overnight. And so the trick for an operations person, I'm sure you've experienced this too, is Deliver some quick things, keep people on board, show them the long term vision and constantly try And encourage patience in getting there because what you're building is not just something that's going to fly away the next day.
It's like some real robust structuring that you hope is going to be valuable for a decade or two or three, even.
Melissa Perri: Cute. Great advice for people out there who are trying to spin up research ops. If people want to learn more about you and buy your book, research that scales, where can they go?
Kate Towsey: They can go to easy: katetowsey.com. That's T O W S E Y, S for sugar. You'll find on there my book you can buy it from Rosenfeld. com as well, or Amazon on there. If you buy it from Amazon, please leave a review at some point when you've read it. And I'm going to get to 50 reviews at some point soon. Yeah, that's the primary way. I'm also on LinkedIn.
Melissa Perri: Great. And we will put all of those links in our show notes at productthinkingpodcast.Com. Thank you so much for listening to the product thinking podcast. We'll be back next Wednesday with another amazing guest. Make sure you like, and subscribe this. And if you have any questions for me in the meantime, go to dear Melissa. com and let me know what they are. We'll see you next time.
