Employee Spotlight — Victor Wu

Welcome back to our Employee Spotlight series! In this week’s addition we speak with Victor Wu, our UX Research Operations Manager based in Hong Kong. Victor talks to us about his role in the Design team at SEEK and in particular, his team’s focus for the next 12 months.

Tell us about your role?

Hi! I’m Victor, the Research Operations Manager here at SEEK.

How does Research Ops impact Design at SEEK?

Research Ops affects design through the research aspect of the design process. We try to look after and support our design and research teams through tooling, culture, guidance, and whatever else, to try and get projects off the ground and design questions answered.

What’s your team focused on for the next 12 months?

Our team is focused on tooling, relationship, and documentation for the next 12 months. We are looking to bring in a new usability platform to support our research democratization efforts. Regarding relationships, we’re currently looking to bring on new research partners throughout Southeast Asia in order to support our design team’s growing appetite for research. Lastly, documentation — we are a small Ops function and as demand has grown, we know we don’t exactly scale, yet we want to be able to provide a relatively strong base-level of self service support; this means playbooks, best practices, and guides for starting through to completion of research.

What do you love about your role?

What I love about my role… Well, I’ve spent half my career with companies looking to grow and/or transition their digital capabilities and often that’s much easier said than done. I often ask what a team can achieve if there is a strong foundation and support system. How much can be accomplished? What would retention efforts now look like? How do we get people to a place where they can do their best work without worrying about how to get the appropriate tool/s? I enjoy being able to ask these questions and make decisions that hopefully move the needle in the right direction.