It seems like the whole of tech has imploded this past year. Managers in tech are leading through a LOT of ambiguity and a LOT of change. This takes its toll. It’s hard to lead when you don’t have all the answers or control over the situation. You might also be in ‘fight or flight’ mode yourself.

I’m leaving Meta thanks to the mass layoffs. When someone leaves, the tradition is to do a ‘badge post’. Here’s mine.

I gave the keynote talk at the ReOps community conference in New York in June 2022. In this talk, I shared how you can encourage your own Research community to run programmes of work to support the team. I’m sharing an updated version of the full transcript and slides for this talk in this post.

I recently left my role as Director or User Research at Babylon. I had a three month notice period so I was able to have a fairly calm and smooth transition out of the business. There will likely be a gap before the person who is replacing me starts, so I had to make sure my team were equipped to function well without me / a leader. I thought it might be helpful for me to share how I went about this for anyone else in this position.

Like most people I go through love / hate phases with social media. It's safe to say that my career has been changed by using the major platforms though - mostly for the better.

I'd go so far as to say that social media has been instrumental in my success.

We often hear that Ops is all about process, efficiency, speed and scale but does saving time and money have a real and lasting impact? What about quality? Are we doing the right work or are we scaling poor quality research? Is the work visible? Are we learning from our insights or are we repeating the same studies? Does anyone care about governance or are we skipping over the ‘boring’ work in favour of speed?

Month 3 at Babylon Health as the Interim Director of Research has passed by in a blink. If this was a permanent role, it would be time for my probation review. It feels like all I have done for the last three months is to sit in one to ones and team meetings. I’ve certainly been busy but what have I actually achieved so far? I’ve been reflecting on this during the last few weeks. To help make sense of things I looked again at Bruce Tuckman’s team model.

Early in 2019, Firefly Learning needed to recruit a new User Researcher to their team. Rather than charge straight into recruitment, they wanted to pause, reflect on their current research practices and reset their expectations for the role. I was hired to help them.

Last Summer I was asked to write a strategy for a second stage interview for a Head of Research role. I spent around a fortnight putting something together. I was unsuccessful (in fact, the company changed their hiring plan and didn't appoint anyone). This was at the end of a soul destroying 11 week process and I wrote the whole thing off as a lesson learnt! (Clearly not a good fit for me)!

This year has been quite different for me and I wanted to capture my learnings to look back on in time.

Three months ago, I hung up my ‘employed’ hat and put on a new shiny ‘self-employed’ one. Around the same time, I happened upon an emerging Slack community about Research Ops, set up by Kate Towsey. It was like a breath of fresh air! Researchers from across the globe and all walks of life but mostly the UX kind, came together to talk shop. I couldn’t help but get involved despite the fact I was ‘taking some time off’.