#179 - The Future of Research Operations with Kate Towsey LIVE

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

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#179 - The Future of Research Operations with Kate Towsey LIVE is an episode from Awkward Silences by User Interviews.

This episode is 55:28 long.

This episode was published on Dec 22, 2025.

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