1 min lesson
Lightweight rituals and self-serve
Put this idea into your own words: "Pair the self-serve template with a short 'how not to lead a participant' guide so democratized research stays trustworthy."
Step 1 of 2
Lightweight rituals and self-servedemocratize the easy methods
You cannot personally run every study a fast team wants. Build rituals and self-serve paths so PMs can do the lightweight reads themselves and reserve your time for the work that needs a researcher's judgment. Pair the self-serve template with a short "how not to lead a participant" guide so democratized research stays trustworthy - the goal is research that scales past you, not research that gets sloppier the moment you're not in the room.
Proposing a heavyweight ResearchOps function at a company this size is a red flag. The interviewer wants the smallest set of rails that creates the most impact. Lead with "templates, a panel and a searchable repo," and only add ceremony when the team's scale actually demands it.
If asked how you'd set up research at Cursor, don't just list studies you'd run. Say you'd ship a participant panel of daily Cursor users and a reusable screener in week one, because recruiting developers is the slowest part of every study and that one asset speeds up everything that follows. Naming the first brick - and why it's the bottleneck - shows you've built a function before, not just run studies inside one.
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