The need for ResearchOps at Kroger developed from a series of quantitative and qualitative research I and others performed to understand how research is performed across more than 15 internal teams.

An important insight we found was teams ran, on average, 1 study per 2 week discovery sprint and there was not a consistent process for conducting research. This led I and others to create the research ops team to support and empower user research across the organization and enable 3 key goals:

• Increase the number of studies done per 2 week discovery sprint
• Improve the quality and consistency of each study
• Reduce the risk of unmet desirability and usability

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Mission & Principles

One of the founding objectives we had as a team was to define our mission and working principles. The mission and principles below provide a view into our purpose and goals and allowed us to internally evangelize our initiative to the rest of the organization.

Our Mission

Drive deep understanding, empathy and focus on our customers by partnering with teams to enable actionable user research, and inspire thoughtful experiences.

Principles

•       Resourceful: We seek to understand existing research and data from current outlets before adding new. We provide a central hub that makes research accessible, connected and trusted.

•       Curious and Driven: We are open-minded to uncover the root of the problem and opportunities to let the customer guide us.

•       Holistic: We seek a holistic understanding of our users. While we learn more about their interactions with Kroger Digital, we recognize how they fit in with their broader grocery shopping, food and meal planning, and general digital life across journeys.

•       Lean: We tailor research methods to be agile and focused on what we need to learn, while our collective knowledge builds up to a comprehensive view of the user over time.

•       Empathetic: We relentlessly focus on our customers. This entails listening and observing them to uncover deep insights. We collaborate with cross-disciplinary team members to bring them closer to our customers and empower them with a user-first mindset.

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A next step for our team was to determine quarterly goals in the form of objectives and key results (OKRs). We determined 7 core areas:

• Governance
• Recruitment
• Budget Management
• Tools
• Internal Communication
• Knowledge Management
• Capability & Opportunity

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During my time on the team, we completed 10 research projects,  organized an internal research repository, created a research playbook (see below) and adopted a new research tool to decrease user recruitment time by 72% for moderated interviews.

Research Methods Playbook

One of our initiatives I led to support the consistency and quality of our research process was the development of a research methods playbook. This was important to our work because it would enable teams to:

• Perform research outside their comfort zone with greater confidence
• Decrease the overall time to perform research
• Decrease the time to onboard new team members

With these strategic goals in mind, the playbook had the following tactical goals:

• Quantify the what, why, and how of each user research method at Kroger
• Provide a collection of helpful assets, tools and links to get started
• Create a guided experience for less experienced researchers to find a suitable method for their needs

Below is a condensed version of V2 I created before leaving the company

View Prototype

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