This is about how my team formed our research ops strategy, but it starts with a retro. In February 2018, I was UX researcher at Zaplabs on a product team that loved to do frequent retrospectives. After one such retro, my fellow researcher Sanjana and I found ourselves taking on the nebulous task of “improving UXR project management”. To be honest: I wasn’t actually sure what that meant.

I fell back on my natural instincts and proposed starting by talking to each member of the research team about their project management process and pain points. Typical researcher move.

That’s how we got started with Researching Researchers: A Meta Research project. Sanjana and I made a list of questions to ask all the other members of the research team and our leadership.

Here are the questions we asked them: