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Wild Hearts
Making user researchers feel like superheroes with Dovetail
Season 1, Ep. 10
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Dovetail was founded three years ago by CEO Benjamin Humphrey, and CTO Brad Ayers, who met working at Atlassian. They founded Dovetail on the belief that deeply understanding your customers is the key to creating a great product.
Seeing first hand how manual and siloed user research and product development processes are, they set out to build a collaborative platform for research professionals.
"When a product manager, researcher or designer leaves a company, all of their customer understanding, context on the market and the invaluable data and insights in their head goes away too," says Benjamin. "So every time a product manager starts at a new organisation, they spend the first six months onboarding."
Dovetail's platform solves this problem with easy to use collaborative tools, data and research analysis and video transcription tools, meaning UX and product teams can build a centralised research repository.
With just three employees and no sales team, Dovetail has grown to support hundreds of customers including Square, VMware, Shopify, BCG, Esri, Harvard, Maersk, Teradata, and the Royal Bank of Scotland, with thousands of people within these organisations using Dovetail every month.
"Not hiring sales over the past three years has kept us product-led," says Benjamin. "We invest heavily in the product so we can build a lot of features that should be self-explanatory, intuitive and self-service."
Title: Making user researchers feel like superheroes with Dovetail
Episode interviews: Dovetail co-founder and CEO Benjamin Humphrey, and Blackbird Partner Nick Crocker.
Key topics covered:
• To bootstrap or not to bootstrap?
• The rise of user researchers
• Dovetail's product-led strategy
• Dovetail's winning recipe for customer growth
The best of Benjamin:
"Research is extremely fragmented in terms of methodologies and tools. It's very immature as a discipline. In 10-15 years it will be somewhere closer to where design is heading, where you have players like Figma that are signed posted to become the standard."
"We want to be known as being the standard way that all product teams organise and scale their customer understanding."
"If you can have a product that makes sense and conceptually matches what customers have in their head and the marketing website reinforces this through the funnel, you don't need onboarding. You can focus on other things like showing the value."
"I try to be quite open with the team, and am genuine, authentic and transparent about my frustrations and challenges."
"At Dovetail, we don't have any support people. Each week a new person is on support, and when you start at Dovetail, you get thrown in on your first week, which is trial by fire."
"It's so good because you can tell at the end of the week that a new person has built up so much context and empathy."
"Rather than do lots of things to 80 percent kind of done, just do less things to 100 percent."
"Velocity is probably the single most important thing for a startup or any company. You need to be as fast as you can be to respond, to change in the market, to ship new features, to execute on those ideas that you're getting through your customer research."
"The more customer-focused you are, the faster you'll be able to build valuable products and services, and that's a huge differentiator."
"More and more, the user experience is becoming the key differentiator for businesses."
Nick Crocker on Dovetail:
"If you can build a company that grows in proportion to new users, their usage or passion for your product, that changes the unit economics of your business entirely."
"Instead of pumping dollars into sales and marketing, you pump more dollars into product improvements, and that scales way further and way longer and...
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