Erin May sits down with Kate Towsey, founder of Cha Cha Club and author of Research That Scales, for Research Ops Appreciation Week. Kate shares insights from producing an audio documentary series on the future of research ops, including her fascinating experience co-creating content with AI. She reveals how research ops teams are increasingly surviving layoffs while research teams are cut, explaining that ops professionals focus on unblocking systems and delivering measurable business value rather than gatekeeping processes.

Kate emphasizes the critical shift happening in research ops from administrative firefighting to strategic systems design. She discusses the importance of discovery over knee-jerk solutions when building research ops from scratch, advocating for focused problem-solving rather than generic panel and library building. The conversation covers the newly released research ops career ladder, the growing need for strategy skills in the field, and how to effectively communicate value to executives by aligning with existing business priorities and measuring concrete outcomes.

Highlights

• 03:54 Bringing past skills to research ops
• 17:45 AI context and memory limitations
• 26:37 Future vision for strategic research positioning
• 36:28 Quality governance in AI era
• 44:21 Strategy skills gap in research teams
• 50:27 Translating research value to executives

Resources

• Strategy References
• Kate's Masterclass
• Research That Scales (Book)
• Kate's Substack
• The ResearchOps Review