As user research has scaled in organizations, the need for research operations —abbreviated as ResearchOps — became apparent. ResearchOps, as a discipline, emerged fairly recently to support researchers by establishing consistent research practices and processes needed to streamline work. At the start of 2021, I switched from being a full-time user researcher to working on IBM’s ResearchOps team. I still conduct research now and then, but my role shifted to building up our participant panels and participant recruitment. As I’ve been doing this work, our ResearchOps team sees another need arise: relationship operations or, as we call it, RelationshipOps. In this article, I’m going to share the challenges I faced on my research operations team in the area of participant recruitment that led me and my team to see the need for relationship operations.