Speaking

A collection of my recent speaking engagements. Please feel free to reach out to me at hello [at] jaredforney.com if you'd like to discuss booking for an event; I'm always looking for new opportunities to connect with the ResearchOps community.

Jun 18, 2026 Speaking

Awkward Silences #192, "Slowing Things Down to Speed Up Research"

A conversation with Erin May of User Interviews about what happens to research and ResearchOps when AI compresses product timelines. I argue that scale and rigor aren't opposed, and that most teams reach for new tooling before revisiting what they were trying to accomplish in the first place. We get into trust as the capital you spend with legal, product, and design partners when you want to change something big, why automating work concentrates human attention instead of removing it, and where knowledge management goes next.

Jan 12, 2026 Speaking

The Universal ResearchOps Career Ladder · The ResearchOps Review

A mini-pod with Kate Towsey on her creation of the Universal ResearchOps Career Ladder, which I contributed to. My take: the Ladder finally puts language around the strategic half of this job. Connecting systems and designing them is the work that usually goes unnamed when people describe ResearchOps as administrative support.

Oct 14, 2025 Speaking

ResearchOps 2.0, Episode 5: The People of ResearchOps

The closing episode of Kate Towsey's five-part audio documentary, with practitioners from Microsoft, Adobe, Intuit, Target, Cisco, Capital One, and Itaú Unibanco. My segment covers how I came into the field. Later in the episode there's a case study from our team at Okta on making invisible work visible.

May 15, 2025 Speaking

Rally AMA: How Governance Fuels Enablement, Adoption, and Impact

An AMA segment on the guardrails, permissions, and workflows that decide who can do what, where research data lives, and how any of it ladders up to company goals. I walk through the audit I'd run first at a new company, the data flow map that got me further with legal and security than any deck ever did, and a driver's license analogy for thinking about tiered access. The short version: governance is how research scales, not how you slow it down.

Apr 23, 2025 Speaking

Mediated Meaning, AI's Role in the Research Craft · Insight Out 2025

A panel with Kaleb Loosbrock of Instacart and research consultant Sam Ladner, moderated by Dovetail's Alissa Lydon. My contribution came from the security-conscious end of the spectrum: at Okta we moved slowly and deliberately on AI, weighing what it would mean for the business and for the insights we distribute before we committed to anything. The point I keep coming back to is that uncertainty is what you get when nobody has put a stake in the ground, so write the AI charter and get your principles down on paper.

Apr 11, 2024 Speaking

Insight Out 2024: Prix Fixe to À La Carte

My closing talk at Dovetail's first conference, in front of about 500 people, with thousands more online. The argument is that most teams deliver every insight the same way to everyone, which is a large part of why so much research goes unread. I use restaurant service models to lay out how we match delivery format to what a stakeholder actually needs, and why a full report isn't always the right answer.

Jun 15, 2020 Speaking

How to Build a Successful UX Repository · EnjoyHQ AMA

An AMA with Sofia Quintero about standing up a research repository at Okta. Taxonomy decisions, the change management underneath them, and what I'd do differently. This one is early in my ops career and it shows, but the questions people ask about repositories have persisted.