Rally Around ReOps 2026

Michelle Bejian Lotia

Staff UX Researcher

Craft Coaching Doesn’t Scale—That Was True, Until AI Came Along.
Research craft coaching has long been a crucial part of democratizing research, but it's also time-intensive and difficult to scale beyond a small population or team. That changed when Michelle Bejian Lotia, Staff Experience Researcher at Ramp, tinkered with AI and accidentally built UXR Interview Coach: an internal tool that delivers near-real-time, transcript-grounded coaching to dozens of Ramp's non-researcher colleagues. In this talk, Michelle will share the process behind the Coach, what it has helped the team achieve, and the practical patterns you can use to turn exploratory AI tinkering into real operational value that wasn't previously possible.

Romana Rajput

Head of Research Operations

Rigorous Research at AI Speed: Integrating Synthetic Panels, AI Moderation, and Agentic Workflows.
The pressure on research teams to adopt AI tools and move faster is real, but so are the risks of doing so without careful evaluation. At Chime, Romana Rajput's team is working through exactly this tension, assessing synthetic research panels, AI moderation, and agentic workflows with as much attention to quality and ethics as to the efficiency gains these tools promise. In this talk, she'll share how her team approaches AI tool evaluation, the criteria they apply, and what it actually looks like to balance the genuine appeal of faster insights with harder questions about rigor, bias, and stakeholder trust.

Joe Marcantano

Staff UX Researcher

Raising the Floor: Evaluating Research Quality in Democratized Teams
The biggest risk to democratizing research isn't tooling or even training, it's the absence of a clear standard for rigor and quality. As research scales beyond dedicated teams, the challenge isn't achieving a perfectly executed research plan; it's knowing when you've hit "good enough."In this talk, Joe Marcantano, who leads Twilio’s research democratization program, will share the evaluation framework he uses to assess research conducted by non-researchers, and the judgment calls that come with it. He'll break down the criteria he applies, where projects commonly fall short, and how he decides when to move forward versus when to intervene. He'll give you a clear, defensible approach to evaluating research quality, one that enables teams to move quickly without sacrificing rigor or trust in the outcomes.

Graham Gardner

VP, UX Design Research Operations

ResearchOps Is a Puzzle. But Which Kind?
‍ResearchOps can feel like a jigsaw puzzle: find the right pieces, fit them together, and you're finished. But anyone who's tried knows it doesn't work that way. Tools change, teams evolve, and the edges never quite line up as expected. So if it's not a jigsaw, what kind of puzzle is it? This talk takes that question somewhere unexpected: through the history and psychology of puzzles, what makes people love them (and why so few of us cheat), and what mystery novels reveal about why practitioners are drawn to this work in the first place. It's a prompt to think differently about the ResearchOps landscape—and maybe about yourself.

Riya Relan

Program Manager

The Quiet Work of ResearchOps
‍Behind every smooth research study is a web of invisible coordination: recruiting the right participants, aligning stakeholders, managing timelines, and quietly solving problems before they derail the work. Yet ResearchOps is still too often framed around tools and processes rather than the human effort that sustains it.Drawing on seven years across Product Operations and ResearchOps at Sprinklr and Salesforce, Riya Relan will share real examples of navigating stakeholder expectations, scaling participant recruitment, and advocating for research practices in product-driven environments, making the case that effective ResearchOps isn't just about systems. It's about people: the relationship-building, negotiation, and judgment required to make research thrive.