ResearchOps in 2024: the year in review

Jonathan Richardson
researchops-community
5 min readJan 7, 2025

Starting 2025 by looking back at the previous year’s amazing ReOps activity

Welcome to the ResearchOps roundup for 2024. As an editor of our Medium it’s been a privilege to see the publication of so many outstanding articles on research operations throughout the year.

A word cloud with “research” in large blue text in the center. Surrounding it are various words related to research like ‘user’, ‘data’, ‘team’, ‘insights’, and ‘understanding’ in different colors and sizes.
Word cloud formed from all of 2024 ResearchOps articles

Myself, my new co-editor Clara Kuo — who took over from Jake Burghardt in late 2024 — and Holly and the rest of the board, have been impressed with both the amount of articles submitted and the sheer quality of articles

But before we go further, I just wanted to say a huge thank you on behalf of myself and the Cheese Board to everyone who submitted or volunteered to write an article. We’re a volunteer led organisation and we could not have done this without your help.

ResearchOps in 2024

For those of you who found us via Medium or a search, we are a global community of research operations professionals. ResearchOps is the people, mechanisms, and strategies that set user research in motion and we’re a community for practitioners and those just interested in it. We have a friendly Slack group, one that’s both massive and intimate.

ResearchOps content in 2024

We published nearly 30 articles this year and as part of our mission to ensure that the whole global community of ResearchOps is represented we have had publications in English, Spanish, Portuguese and Turkish. November also saw the launch of our Nordic publication, with 3 articles (including original content) in Norwegian.

Jake Burghardt, my co-editor of many years with a real passion for this blog, stepped down in September. His input was invaluable, together we updated the submission process and his skill as an editor will be missed. Jake was keen to get a regular flow of content that represented the community and contributed to ReOps as a UX discipline.

The image has a blue background with “re+ops” in large white text on the left. On the right, there’s a white text explaining “ResearchOps” and a button that says “Read more about ResearchOps”.
ResearchOps statement of purpose

While I was sad at his departure it was for good reason — his forthcoming book was approaching its final stages and he needed to devote time to it. If you want to know how to “Stop wasting research” then I encourage you to visit his site or follow Jake on LinkedIn.

In September, Clara Kuo stepped in to take his place. Clara had been one of our regular contributors. She brings a wealth of experience in ResearchOps with her and plans to revamp our Medium publication and volunteer meetings, so watch out for those in 2025. While she was learning the ropes Holly Cole proved invaluable to keeping things running, as always.

As for myself, I even wrote an article, whereas as editor I tend to take a step back as it is a bit too close to self-certification, based on my own experience of the job market during my recent move to Australia.

For many researchers and research ops practitioners this was a tough year for the industry, with lay offs and reorganisations, so here’s to 2025 being a more positive one.

Community calls and the mini conference

We hosted five community calls organised by Jahnavi Mirashi. These are live sessions where experts talk about one of the big ResearchOps issues. If you missed them catch the recordings:

May saw Approaching B2B recruitment and an expert session on incentives from Tremendous, June accessibility panels, and September had Vendor Management: RFPs

You can find all our previous calls at our Vimeo page.

We also held a mini-conference with Great Question in November on Tool Talks.

ResearchOps Vimeo page

Articles published in 2024

We published or promoted nearly 30 high quality articles this year. You can view the full list on our main Medium page or in our Airtable which has links to our main Medium site and our sister publications. Here are some of the highlights.

Roundups

Faten Habachi’s Unlocking the Potential of Research Repos: Dive into a Collection of Articles gathers together the many articles ReOps contributors have made on research repositories. This should be your first stop if you’re looking at creating a repository.

Research repository lifecycle by Faten Habachi

Great ReOps advice

2024 saw several articles containing great advice on carrying out research operations, and my top three were:

Thinking about your users

We’ve had some excellent discussion on how to think about your users and how we present them to organisations:

Setting up research operations

We published several articles on establishing and growing ReOps in your organisation and the lessons learned:

Translations

This year we saw a swell in the number of translations, including the launch of ResearchOps Nordics and Turkish.

We also had more Portuguese and Spanish versions and original content as we aim to accommodate more than English.

Screenshot for ResearchOps Nordics
ReOps Nordics

Coming up in 2025

Upcoming we have a few articles in the pipeline. We’ve had proposals for experiences with the Slack Jobs board, Personas, AI (it almost seems mandatory) and taxonomies, and we may also be catching up with one of founding members.

If you’d like to submit to the web’s most popular publication dedicated to ResearchOps then send your proposal now — don’t forget we publish in more than just English and if your language isn’t represented we can create a dedicated publication.

If you’d like to join our community do so at https://researchops.community/

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researchops-community
researchops-community

Published in researchops-community

Publication of the global ResearchOps Community, sharing practical articles on research operations topics, updates from our work streams, and other community contributions. https://researchops.community/

Jonathan Richardson
Jonathan Richardson

Written by Jonathan Richardson

User researcher and writer with an focus on the journalistic and anthropological approach

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