Onboarding on an ops-first research team
A first-hand account from two of Auth0’s newest Research team members
Back in January, Auth0 welcomed Josh Kennedy and Rodrigo Dalcin to the Research team. With 5 years in the industry, Josh is Auth0’s newest UX Researcher, having previously worked at IBM, Synopsys, and Reddit. Rodrigo joined as a Research Operations Lead after over 10 years working with digital products in a diverse range of industries, including e-commerce, cloud software, and supply chain.
In this article, they share their experiences joining an ops-first research practice, how it shapes their day-to-day work, and what potential it brings to the evolution of research at Auth0.
A bit of context
Rodrigo: Like most researchers who have once found themselves taking on an unicorn or lead role, I had already inadvertently been dabbling in ResearchOps before Louis Rosenfeld coined the term on Twitter. Doing research has always come with its share of heavy-lifting, and optimizing any repetitive or time-consuming processes in the name of efficiency is just a no-brainer, especially when you’re a team of one. It was only after I joined my first research team that I came formally into contact with research as a practice that can be operationalized to empower anyone in an organization to go out and find answers to questions about their customers.
Josh: I’ve helped many companies implement ResearchOps into their framework, but the problem has always been the same. How do you reduce the amount of time and effort it takes to recruit participants, how do you ensure researchers have enough participants to keep their studies moving forward, and the correct participants to ensure quality insights are gathered? Here at Auth0 is the first time I have been the beneficiary of Research Operations’ services.
Rodrigo and I have completely different experiences with ResearchOps, which I think is part of the magic of our team at Auth0. We all have different strengths and areas for growth which makes for a well-rounded team.
Onboarding the Practice
Rodrigo: One of my first impressions during my onboarding process was that Research at Auth0 had already covered some solid ground despite being a small (but mighty) team of three. They made the most out of their limited bandwidth by dedicating some serious time into building a scalable practice that revolves around an accessible research engagement process. Being a remote-first company, everything is thoroughly documented in Confluence to ensure everyone knows exactly what steps to take no matter your level of expertise and which phase of research you find yourself in.
As part of my onboarding tasks, I had conversations with PMs, designers, leadership, and anyone else who benefited directly or indirectly from Research at Auth0. I used these conversations to learn more about what an ops-first practice meant on a day-to-day basis, and they also gave me an opportunity to wear my researcher hat by using some guiding questions and finding patterns that would help me identify which improvements to prioritize in order to elevate research at the company.
Josh: During onboarding, Rodrigo and Carolyn took ownership of curating and importing a pool of participants, composed of Auth0 customers, into a remote testing tool. This simplifies the process considerably and enables teams to shorten the time it takes to recruit participants.
Walking into a project, ops-first
Rodrigo: A couple of months in, I had some solid work cut out for me. My listening tour pointed to some great opportunities around standardizing the way customer feedback is categorized and distributed across the organization. There was also room for improving research awareness by casting a wider net when educating new and existing Auziros about our engagement process, as well as increasing research velocity through streamlined participant recruitment.
On top of that, my teammate Carolyn and I started working together to check in and follow up with individual product teams about their research needs. We host bi-monthly syncs with those folks to keep track of any research projects in our self-service track and elicit customer-centric questions or assumptions that could potentially result in new research initiatives.
Josh: It was refreshing setting up my first study at Auth0, having support and assistance, whether recruiting participants, setting up a kanban to track my progress, or taking care of the participant incentives. This framework enables researchers to focus their energy on conducting interviews, synthesis, analysis, and reporting.
Partnering with Carolyn and Rodrigo has been the learning experience of my life, as they have both previously practiced research then transitioned to ResearchOps. Having experienced both roles, they know what is required to keep studies moving forward. Using Confluence for documentation and team collaboration, and Jira as our research repository makes creating, sharing, and saving research documentation very easy.
Outcomes and benefits (so far)
Rodrigo: An expedited onboarding and learning experience was probably the most positive outcome from joining an ops-first research practice. It gave me enough confidence to start contributing right away based on how welcoming the team has been to new ideas and different approaches.
I also appreciated people’s transparency when expressing the negatives of doing research on a self-service track, such as how time-consuming administrative tasks like participant recruitment can be or how overwhelmed they feel about our Confluence documentation. This was really useful to come up with a prioritization plan and strategize accordingly.
Josh: After completing my first study, the ResearchOps team took care of sending participants’ incentives and any follow up communications required. Our shiny, new remote-moderated platform empowered me to conduct remote-moderated interviews and synthesize data into actionable insights.
As a result of the ResearchOps team’s hard work and preparation, I was permitted to spend more time with participants. Additionally, I was able to use more time to thoughtfully synthesize data and report findings.
The Future
Rodrigo: The amount of research studies being conducted by our product teams has significantly increased, so the next thing to focus on are ways to make our engagement process scalable while ensuring that the PWDRs (“people who do research”) deliver quality insights and receive the support they need. We aim to achieve this by optimizing any tactical stuff using automation and simplified tooling that PWDRs can confidently use (shoutout to Great Question and Tremendous). Moving forward, we’d like to be more strategic in terms of how research ops can make the insight-to-decision cycle truly seamless and efficient.
Josh: The Research and ResearchOps teams have audacious goals to further reduce the time it takes to recruit participants. Having faster access to the right participants makes research and testing more accessible to designers and product managers working on a short deadline.
Our teams aim to hire more researchers and employ more tools to help us analyze, synthesize, and visualize the data we collect. This will all coalesce into a system that increases the velocity in which Auth0 design and product teams are able to make informed product decisions.
Benefits to our research team include affording the ability to focus on more formative research, creating comprehensive user profiles, and partnering with design and product teams to ensure the research and testing being conducted meets our shared standard.
