A Year in Review: What Shaped ResearchOps in 2025, and a Look Ahead to 2026
Reflecting on another year of progress in ResearchOps: The ResearchOps Review’s annual recap highlights wins, challenges, and what’s next for the profession.
For most people, 2025 has disappeared in a blur of AI feature releases and news of layoffs, at least in the professional sphere. It’s been a funny-not-funny old year! Were you to do a sentiment analysis of the future of research and ResearchOps on LinkedIn, the mood would be sombre. I know because I’ve done that poll; in fact, I’ve done two:1 only 11% of the 250-odd people who responded to those polls were optimistic about the future of research, which implies ResearchOps, too—at least to a degree. On the face of it, that’s pretty bleak. But it’s not all bad news.
A recent The Economist article (paywalled) perfectly explained something I’ve been pondering: “Some suggest that an economy needs the occasional downturn to stay healthy. Joseph Schumpeter, an Austrian economist, argued they provoke ‘creative destruction.’ Failing firms exit the market, capital moves to more promising technologies and workers move to more productive jobs. The result is short-term pain and long-term gain.” The article goes on to share a further Schumpeter quote: “‘Depressions are not simply evils, which we might attempt to suppress,’ he wrote. They represent ‘something which has to be done’.”2
This year, ResearchOps professionals across the globe have embraced Schumpeter’s “creative destruction,” know it or not, and they have learned to adapt. As a result, ResearchOps has greater potential and scope than ever before—and, ideally, more jobs when the economy picks up.
To create this “Year in Review” from The ResearchOps Review—the first of its kind—I asked Cha Cha Club3 members to send me videos and quotes sharing the biggest trends they experienced in ResearchOps in 2025, and what they expect in 2026. Five core themes emerged, the first of which should come as no surprise.
The Biggest Theme? No Surprises, It’s AI.
As Eric Levy, Director of Insights Operations for US Pharmacopeia, so wonderfully wrote, “2025 is clearly the year that AI ate common sense. Everyone is anxious to deploy some type of AI use case to show they’re keeping up and to see if the fuss is all that.”
There are endless news articles about the AI bubble bursting, at least from an economic point of view. Still, as far as ResearchOps folks are concerned, AI is here to stay, and they’re proactively figuring out how to implement it not just as a siloed technology but as a capability that’s integral to how research operates. Noël Lamb, the Senior ResearchOps Manager for ServiceNow, put it perfectly:
This year, I’ve learned firsthand how important it is to think about enabling AI not just as a technology, but as a program. One that requires intentional structure, clear ownership and strong change management to truly bring teams along and meet them where they are in their own adoption journeys.
Jared Forney, the Research Operations Principal at Okta, Inc., calls this intentional structuring and change management “meta work.” He said, “I’ve spent more time in the last three months collaborating with our privacy and product legal partners on implementing this new tooling than I have in the last year, prior to the rise of all of this AI functionality. And I think that presents a ResearchOps practitioner with unique opportunities to interface with teams that they don’t spend as much time with, generally speaking.”
A common complaint across disciplines in 2025 has been the notion that AI will solve everything—typically a hopeful, cost-cutting call “from above”; from the executive. Generally speaking, it seems people are waking up to the fact that this isn’t true—at least not yet, and perhaps it never will be. But these notions have been thematic, so as ResearchOps professionals have started to wrap their arms around AI, including understanding what it can and cannot do, they’ve also found themselves helping stakeholders to understand its strengths and limitations.
Stephanie Marsh, the ResearchOps Lead at the UK’s Ministry of Justice, shared a research-specific example. They said, “If we don’t have the data, like when you’re talking about underrepresented groups, we can’t use AI to generate that data. We need AI to use the data to generate insights, which I think is a pretty common misconception: that it’s just going to create new stuff rather than synthesise what’s already there.”
Who would have known? We may still need researchers after all! (In case you didn’t pick it up, that was sarcasm.)
Finally, Stephanie Kingston, a UX Research Program Manager at Cisco, pointed out something promising, and, again, a sign of Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” at play. Stephanie shared the potential of AI “to accelerate and free ourselves [that is, ResearchOps] up for more of that creative, strategic work that we are so good at” and “we can automate the parts that...you know, probably aren’t giving us a lot of ‘work joy,’ and I think it’d be really exciting to see what sort of amazing, creative things that people can come up with when we’re not always like in the ticky-tacky weeds. So, really looking forward to the future on that.”
As Schumpeter wrote: “Depressions [or perhaps disruptions] are not simply evils, which we might attempt to suppress, but—perhaps undesirable—forms of something which has to be done.”
How Companies Operate Is Changing—So ResearchOps Must Change, Too
Post-pandemic economic shifts and AI have impacted all layers of society, including how organisations are designed—in other words, how they operate—and ResearchOps is not immune. Jenna Lombardo, a Senior ResearchOps Manager who’s worked most recently at Workday and LinkedIn, shared the following:
"One of the most prominent and disruptive themes impacting ResearchOps this year has been the radical restructuring of organization design for both research and operations functions. I’ve observed a stark polarization: on one hand, once-mature, centralized operations teams are facing significant consolidation or dissolution, with core functions often being offshored or absorbed.
On the other hand, we see a recognition of ResearchOps’ strategic value among emerging teams. These organizations are aggressively vying for budget allocation to establish their first dedicated ResearchOps role, signaling a clear understanding of its necessity for scalability and quality control.
I’ve also witnessed an accelerating shift away from traditional, decentralized UX research models toward hybridized research structures. For example, several major organizations are merging their user experience and product research capabilities with market research teams. It will be interesting to see how these shifts play out in 2026."
Jenna has done such an excellent job of expressing this theme that it’s hardly worth adding anything, except to say it will indeed be intriguing to see how these shifts play out in 2026. Watch this space.
Democratisation Is Still a Big Theme, but It’s Shifting
As budgets have shrunk and researchers have been laid off, an intriguing theme for ResearchOps has emerged: often the ResearchOps team, which could be a “team of one,” is retained with the mission to either continue or start setting up operations that support research democratisation—a term that barely needs explaining these days. Rodrigo Dalcin, Staff User Experience Research Operations at Wealthsimple, offers a pointed example: he is Wealthsimple’s only research hire, and research is entirely democratised. Far from a one-off, this is an emerging theme that research and ResearchOps leaders should be aware of.
Rodrigo shared: “I’m in a very unique position where I work in a company where research is 100% democratised, and helping the people who are doing research figure out things that are usually linked to the expertise of dedicated researchers has been a big theme. And that includes, for example, using creative, clever ways of getting them to make a decision around a research approach based on the time that they have to do research, based on how much knowledge they have over a problem space, or how much risk they’re dealing with has definitely been a big thing for me.”
What’s striking about Rodrigo’s story is that there are now opportunities for research operations professionals to own research entirely, which begs a big question: Should we own research entirely? I think research expertise is crucial, so either research leaders need to become better operators or ResearchOps folks need to become better research methodologists—and ideally both.
Finally, on the topic of democratisation, Luana Cruz, a ResearchOps specialist at Itaú Unibanco, makes a compelling case to think about how you deliver self-service programmes as you turn the page to 2026. She says:
" I think the trend is that people are just finding out that self-service isn’t just a program or a document you’ve done once and will be forever useful. No. I think people are just finding out that self-service is about making people closer to research, either by doing it by themselves or by supporting their local researcher.
So for 2026, I hope we crawl back to the beginning when we were trying to understand how to scale research and ask ourselves: Are these self-service programs that we all grew fond of the answer for scaling research? Or is it just a palliative solution, and it was meant to end in the near future?
My gosh, it’s another excellent question! Write it at the top of your 2026 must-consider list and let me know when you’ve got the answer."
The Relentless Search for a Job
This article would not be complete without addressing the major theme of layoffs and joblessness. I’m sure I wasn’t alone in assuming that layoffs would peak in 2022 and that things would then get back to “normal.” Instead, it’s 2025 and layoffs are still happening. At this point, it’s almost trite to say that times are tough. That said, there have been success stories, such as Eric Levy, Director of Insights Operations for US Pharmacopeia:
For me, 2025 was a year of new beginnings. I’d been looking for full-time work since getting RIFed [RIF being “reduction in force”]. More than two years of active job searching—that was a lot of heartbreak.
If you’ve experienced that heartbreak, you’ll be heartened to know that others who’ve run the unemployment gauntlet have found work, too. Kasey Canlas, a UX ResearchOps contractor currently working at Amazon, is one such story. Kasey shared her story:
"I spent the first seven and a half months [of 2025] unemployed after being let go, and it really crushed my spirit. What I learned about the ResearchOps job market is that it’s confusing. Organisations think they know what they want, they throw everything under the sun in the job description, and then you get to interviews and they don’t know how to interview for an ops role, and then you get to final rounds, and you ask for feedback, and you’re met with silence. Or we just found someone who was a better fit."
A misunderstanding of the ResearchOps role is certainly a problem for job seekers (and for hirers hiring the wrong people for poorly defined roles). Still, job descriptions are gradually improving as ResearchOps becomes better defined, and thanks in part to The ResearchOps Review and various Cha Cha Club productions, we’ll no doubt see continued improvements in 2026 and beyond.
Learning on the Job
If you thought AI had been covered, it rears its em-dash-loving head in the jobs market, too. Not only has AI revolutionised how talent acquisition teams operate, for better or worse—most stories point to worse, at least for job seekers—it’s also revolutionised the types of skills companies are including in job descriptions. I’m sure that statement is hardly a revelation, but this article would be incomplete without it.
UX ResearchOps Leader and job seeker Lydia Iana shared how her job-seeking experience has shifted over the past year. She said:
I feel like every job description now includes AI. They want you to have experience with AI and to automate tasks using it. ...And it’s a little bit difficult because all of these job requirements want you to have AI experience, but yet AI is still pretty new, so it’s kind of learning on the job, right?
It is a conundrum. Perhaps a short course on AI for ResearchOps professionals is needed to help bridge that gap? It’s not on my to-do list, but it should be on someone’s.
A Light at the End of the Tunnel
If you’re job hunting, Eric and Kasey’s stories have shown that there is light at the end of the tunnel, even if it’s in the form of a not-to-be-sneezed-at contract. And if you’re in the depths of job-seeking heartbreak or have a job but you’re worried how long it will last, here are some practical words from Stephanie Kingston.
I think the biggest thing I learned about ResearchOps this year is that we are very good at what we do, and there’s a lot of joy and a lot of pain in that, because you’ve seen a lot of elimination of ResearchOps roles this year. And I do hope, and I believe, and I think that the pendulum is going to swing back because ResearchOps people are creative and strategic—we are force multipliers.
We do so many things that aren’t apparent until we’re gone. And I think we are going to see a reversal of this negative swing that we’ve seen over the past year. And so, I’m very hopeful for that because there’s a lot of really incredible people out here doing this work, and we deserve all the love and support because we’re really good at what we do.
More than Ever, Community and Connection Are Essential
Finally, the theme that’s come up time and again during the tumult of 2025 is the importance of community and connection. As Kasey Canlas shared:
What really turned everything around for me was that I went to a conference and I got to speak with others who are in our field, and it really reminded me why I love what I do, and I love helping people. And it made me remember I’m not alone.
The Cha Cha Club, the members’ club of which this article’s contributors are part, is predominantly a virtual environment, but it gives members a space to connect. It helps them feel less alone, whatever their context or need. I often say to new members: “If you’re a team of one, you’re now a team of 200!”
Looking Ahead
From AI to layoffs and radical organisational changes, to an evolution in the scope of ResearchOps, 2025 has, without doubt, been a year of ‘creative destruction.’ But ResearchOps professionals are a motley crew of highly adaptive and inventive people. Over the past fifteen years, we’ve collectively, if not consciously, used the rapid scaling of research, the rise of the research technology sector, and the growing focus on data privacy to expand our remit in organisations. And with advancements in AI and the organisational changes we’re seeing in how products and services are built and delivered, we’re doing it again. So, here’s to an even more productive (or perhaps creatively destructive) 2026!
1 Seven months after running the first LinkedIn poll, I reran it with precisely the same question and framing. The results were nearly the same.
2 “Recessions Have Become Ultra-rare. That Is Storing up Trouble: Continuous Growth Can Make Economies Fat and Slow.” The Economist, November 10, 2025. https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2025/11/10/recessions-have-become-ultra-rare-that-is-storing-up-trouble.
3 Founded by Kate Towsey, the Cha Cha Club is a members’ club for full-time ResearchOps professionals. The ResearchOps Review is the publishing arm of the Cha Cha Club.
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