When I first began managing both UX Research and Research Operations (ResearchOps or ReOps), it felt like juggling two forces that naturally pushed against each other. Researchers craved freedom to explore; Ops demanded structure to keep the machine running. At industry events, I’d hear lighthearted jokes — “Here come the Ops people…” — but behind the humor was an uncomfortable truth:
Curiosity and control don’t coexist easily.
In my early days as a User Researcher, I treated leadership like a project management effort: setting goals, assigning tasks, and expecting clear outcomes. It was efficient, but superficial. Research doesn’t respond to rigid management. Insights don’t flourish in spreadsheets. If we want our work to spark real change, we need more than process; we need movement, alignment, and purpose. I didn’t fully grasp that in 2018, but experience has a way of providing clarity.
When I later led a Research team, I approached things differently. By then, I’d spent years observing how leaders interacted with stakeholders — watching decisions made without user input or seeing valuable insights set aside in favor of speed. Instead of questioning the outcomes, I began questioning the motivations: Why did the CPO insist on that direction? Why hire a consultancy to create personas we already have? That shift, from outcomes to intent, changed how I understood leadership.
Researchers, after all, are experts in understanding people. Why not apply that same skill internally? When researchers resist operational structure, it’s rarely the framework they oppose; it’s the feeling that structure might stifle curiosity. Recognizing that distinction was pivotal for me.
Later, when I had the chance to lead a ReOps team, everything clicked. Operations wasn’t the enemy of exploration, but the enabler. It provided the systems that let research thrive at scale. That experience cemented a belief I still hold today: every great research leader should understand operations. Because in the end, operations don’t limit innovation — they make it sustainable.
Leading a Research Operations team is quite different than leading a UX Research team. Here are some situations and examples I've faced or seen in companies:
Research leadership involves nurturing craft: coaching on methods, storytelling, and stakeholder management. ReOps leadership involves growing systems thinkers: coaching on process design, change management, and organizational influence. You help one group grow through depth of research excellence; the other through breadth of operational thinking.
Related read:Â Change management for UXÂ research teams by Johanna Jagow
Researchers thrive on nuance, meaning, and narrative. They want to know more about the “why”. Ops professionals thrive on structure, process, and outcomes. They want to know more about the “how”.
ReOps leaders often influence without direct power — they depend on persuasion, not hierarchy, to drive change across teams. Research leaders also influence laterally, but often have a clearer “product voice” in strategic discussions. ReOps leadership demands exceptional diplomacy, patience, and political navigation skills.
Researchers often identify as craft experts — they take pride in being the voice of the user. Ops professionals often identify as enablers — they take pride in empowering others to do their best work. A leader must honor both: one through celebration of insight, the other through recognition of service.
Research leadership involves holding space for emotional labor — researchers often deal with heavy stories from users and organizational resistance to insights. ReOps leadership involves buffering burnout — Ops people are often the ones fixing broken processes and handling everyone else’s chaos.
I started asking better questions instead of giving faster answers. Instead of “How can we do this quicker?”, I asked, “What are we trying to make easier for others?” I invited the team to co-create processes, not just follow them. One small example: instead of creating the plan for the year ahead only with my team, I asked at least three researchers to join what we call a “ReOps diagnosis” with us. It changed everything. Engagement went up, adoption felt natural, and the system became something we all owned.
That’s what leadership in these spaces requires: balancing vision and friction removal.
Research leadership gives direction and inspiration; ReOps leadership clears the path. Without both, the teams either get lost in ideas or stuck in logistics. Together, they create flow.
When facing a complex leadership challenge, there are two simple principles I always return to. Time and time again, they’ve helped me solve the problem at hand.Â
Operations work happens behind the curtain. When it’s working, nobody notices. When it’s not, everyone does. I’ve learned that visibility isn’t about ego; it’s about connection.
Once, after a particularly intense semester, a very nice result showed up: our Ops team had helped increase the ease of conducting research by 30%, by using our Researcher Effort Score model. After that we started a small ritual: every month, we’d collect all the other metrics that were connected with that result, so at the end of the semester we could present all of them to everyone else. This process exists because visibility builds trust. And trust builds influence.
Related read:Â Beyond the "black box": Measuring research impact by Pedro Vargas
In fast-moving companies, curiosity often becomes a luxury (something you do “if there’s time"). But without curiosity, research turns into validation, and Ops turns into bureaucracy. I learned to defend that space intentionally.
Once, a design team asked me (a solo Researcher) to run about 20 usability tests in 2 weeks. Technically possible, but pointless if nobody had time to reflect on the findings. So I said no — not to slow things down, but to protect our thinking. I reframed it: “We can run fewer tests and get better insights, faster. Here’s how we can do this and why I recommend it…”
Protecting curiosity also means protecting people. Research and Ops teams are vulnerable to burnout because they serve everyone else. I’ve seen Ops professionals quietly take on emotional labor, solving unglamorous problems, holding the glue together. So we started small wellness rituals: retros where we’d talk about frustrations, wins, and yes, sometimes vent.
Those spaces turned into collective intelligence sessions, where emotional honesty became operational clarity.
These two lessons — increasing visibility and protecting curiosity — help manage the cultural and emotional dynamics that ReOps and Research leaders face: the need for recognition, the risk of overload, and the challenge of earning sponsorship without shouting for it.
Related read: How to increase research visibility with an internal newsletter by Mia Mishek
Having the opportunity to lead both Research and ResearchOps teams has changed how I see organizations. We’re not here to collect data or manage systems. We’re here to help companies listen, learn, and make better decisions.
In many ways, we start as a radar: detecting signals, identifying risks, capturing patterns. But real leadership means helping the organization move from radar to direction: turning insights into strategy, and systems into rhythm.
A company once told me they wanted to “make research more scalable.” What they really needed was to make learning more natural. That’s the shift we can lead: from reporting insights to shaping decisions, from fixing workflows to influencing culture.
When we lead with empathy and clarity, we don’t need authority to influence. We earn it through alignment. Through showing (not just telling) how curiosity and systems together can build a culture that learns faster than it reacts.
And that’s what gives me hope. The future of Research and ReOps leadership isn’t just operational, it’s strategic. And we should be empowered enough to embrace it. It’s about how we choose to listen, what we make visible, and how we translate the invisible work of understanding people into visible change.
Pedro Vargas is a Brazilian researcher, mentor and teacher. A content creator for thousands of professionals, he has a postgraduate degree in Business Management and Marketing and is UX Certified by the Nielsen Norman Group, with an emphasis on UX Management. He teaches and learns about ResearchOps and UX Research in his classes and has worked in youth entrepreneurship initiatives all over the world.
