Research Ops Skills

Research Operations — Domain Orchestrator

The Research Operations surface is how the enterprise plans, funds, scopes, and synthesizes research across four workstreams: clinical R&D, R&D finance, market research, and product research. This orchestrator forks its context, routes your inquiry to one of four sub-skills, then returns a digest. Heavy intake (protocol drafts, program ledgers, survey exports, interview transcripts) stays in the forked context.

This is the enterprise counterpart to the academic research/ domain. If your question is about finding literature, grants, or patents, use research/. If it is about planning, funding, scoping, or synthesizing research as an operational discipline, you are in the right place.

When to invoke

Routing logic (deterministic)

Same two-signal threshold pattern as commercial-skills. Single-signal → clarifying question. Mixed signals → highest-confidence first, chain second in a follow-up turn. Never silently chain.

Signal table

Workflow (Matt Pocock grill discipline)

Derived from Matt Pocock's grill-with-docs pattern: explore-then-ask, one question per turn with a recommended answer, walk the decision tree depth-first, track dependencies, anchor every challenge in the research canon (references/ of each sub-skill).

Step 1 — Explore before asking

Check the user's working directory first:

• Is there a protocol draft, program ledger, TAM model, or interview guide already in the workspace?
• Does the inquiry already disambiguate the lane (e.g., "what sample size for a two-arm trial" — that's clinical-research, no question needed)?
• Is there an artifact filename that resolves the lane (protocol.json → clinical; program-budget.json → finance; tam-model.json → market; interview-guide.md → product)?

If the workspace resolves the lane, route silently.

Step 2 — If still ambiguous, ONE forcing question with a recommended answer

Matt's rule: never bundle. Always recommend.

Pattern:

Q1/1: [precise question naming the two candidate lanes]
Recommended: [Lane X, because <signal-table rationale>]

(Confirm, or override?)

Step 3 — Decision-tree walk for multi-lane inquiries

If the inquiry legitimately crosses two lanes (e.g., "design this trial AND budget it" = CLINICAL + RD_FINANCE), walk depth-first:

1. Highest-confidence lane first → run sub-skill in forked context → digest
2. Ask: "Now run [second lane]? Recommended: yes, because [dependency]."
3. Confirm before chaining.

Never silently chain.

Step 4 — Invoke sub-skill in forked context

Forward original prompt + structured inputs (protocol JSON, program ledger CSV, market model, observation export).

Step 5 — Return digest with cited canon challenge

≤ 200 words: analyzed, top 3 findings (anchored to a canon citation), top 3 next actions (named human owner where applicable), artifact path, and one grill challenge for the user. Examples:

• "Your power calc assumes a 0.5 effect size with no published anchor. ICH E9 requires a justified, clinically meaningful difference. Where did 0.5 come from?"
• "Your TAM is a single top-down number (1% of a $40B market). Bessemer market-sizing discipline requires a bottoms-up cross-check. What's units × price × adoption?"

Forcing-question library (grill-with-docs pattern)

Grill the user on lane-defining decisions before invoking the sub-skill. One per turn, recommended answer, canon citation:

• CLINICAL lane: "Is your primary endpoint a clinical outcome or a surrogate — and if surrogate, is it validated for this indication? Recommended: clinical outcome unless the surrogate is on FDA's validated table. Canon: FDA Surrogate Endpoint Table; BEST glossary."
• RD_FINANCE lane: "Is this spend in the research phase or the development phase, and can you evidence technical feasibility? Recommended: research = expense; development = capitalize-candidate only with feasibility evidence, routed to a named finance owner. Canon: IAS 38; ASC 730."
• MARKET lane: "Is your TAM top-down or bottoms-up — and have you computed it both ways to triangulate? Recommended: both; reconcile the delta. Canon: Bessemer / a16z market-sizing; Fermi estimation."
• PRODUCT lane: "Is this study generative (discover problems) or evaluative (test a solution)? Recommended: name it first; the method follows. Canon: Rohrer's landscape of UX research methods (NN/g)."

Never run a sub-skill until the lane-defining decision is locked.