Dovetail retro: our biggest releases from the past year

Over the past 12 months, artificial intelligence went mainstream, causing waves of disruption throughout the tech industry.

While this period has been different for everyone, one thing that remains constant is change! When faced with navigating emerging tech and shifting conditions, we did what we do best: relied on customers like you, alongside teams like Atlassian, Okta, Gitlab, Porsche, and Dyson.

You told us you want to make sense of customer feedback faster, present insights in more engaging ways, and connect your insights hub across more teams and tools. With this, we set out to make Dovetail faster, more connected, and more secure than ever before. We want every team—from one-person startups to the world’s largest organizations—to have the insights they need to make better decisions to build what’s next.

Read on for a recap of what we released over the past 12 months, and get excited for some of the biggest ever changes to Dovetail landing this year.

Making magic ✨

We can’t write a product update in 2024 without mentioning the elephant in the room! We can confirm we have spent a lot of time working with customers to define how we integrate AI into Dovetail. We didn’t want to bolt it on, rather, we wanted AI to weave seamlessly into how you work, reducing the time it takes to go from messy, unstructured data to a summarized, sharable insight.

Our customers told us they need more insights, but finding connections in data still takes too long. We introduced magic cluster in canvas to help you uncover themes automatically. Try it when you want to get a head start on your analysis or uncover big ideas you might have missed.

We heard you want to share quick takeaways with your team moments after you finish a call. Introducing magic summarize that transforms customer conversations and insights into instantly digestible outputs. Keep your team connected to the customer without them having to dig through long transcripts and endless highlights.

Flexible, fast analysis

You told us you want to get more use out of the documents and presentation decks you store in your insights hub. Now it’s possible to highlight and tag documents in Dovetail to bolster your customer insights.

We know you like canvas—it’s by far the most popular view in Dovetail. But you want it to be better. You want highlights organized in a way that matches your mental model. Groups in canvas helps you organize your highlights, making your work more accessible to you and your team.

Customers from around the world asked us to improve transcription. Now, there are an additional ten transcription languages with automatic language detection, including Vietnamese and Turkish.

Create engaging insights

When you’re ready to share insights, Dovetail makes it easy to create engaging, delightful, and consumable outputs. Focus your team on what matters to build a customer-first culture and drive the roadmap.

Help your team get straight to the point by simplifying references in insights. Now you can ensure your team has just the right amount of context by hiding bits you don’t need, like text and tags.

We heard you ask for improvements to how your team navigates to insights. Now you can surface published insights in folders. That means your team no longer needs to dig into a project to find that golden nugget to steer their next product decision.

Connect the tools you love

We don’t want anything to get in the way of your team connecting with your customers. That’s why we've been working hard to make Dovetail more connected to the tools your team use and love every day.

With eight new integrations like Notion, Jira, Confluence, and Productboard, your insights hub is plugged into the way you work. Instantly import interviews and files from Teams or OneDrive. Then, share the insights directly in Confluence, Notion, Slack.

Your team doesn’t have time to jump around to find the latest insights. Now they won’t have to—because sharing the important bits got a whole lot better with playable highlights embeds in Slack, Confluence, Jira, Trello, Notion, and Microsoft Teams. Your team can connect with their customers easily while still being able to trace back to the source.

Scale insights across your organization

Dovetail is the insights hub for the world’s largest organizations. To support our growing enterprise customer base, we’ve made our product even more secure, safe, and scalable to support our largest customers.

Magic redact lets you redact video to hide faces and names, silence audio, and remove sensitive information from transcripts. Analyze participant expressions before sharing securely with your team. For our larger customers, this is our most requested feature of the past 12 months!

We heard that as your organization scales, you need a way to keep insights organized. Clean up your projects and organize them in a way that reflects your team structure by creating folders within folders. Combined with new user groups, you’ll be able to maintain control over sensitive data at a project or folder level across your whole organization.

We know you need to keep some projects private. Now you can add or revoke access to many users at once. Organize your user groups in a way that works for you—this could be by team, project, or level.

Also, if your team uses Okta, you can now automate user provisioning with our latest SCIM integration. This means you can centralize user permission updates and streamline onboarding and off-boarding. Microsft Azure is coming next—so stay tuned.

GDPR is important for our European customers. It’s easier than ever to adhere to GDPR with our new EU data region. When you create a new workspace, you can choose where you want to store your data, in the US or EU. Our European data region is part of an ongoing commitment to security and compliance that includes a SOC 2 Type II report, and our HIPAA-compliant solution for storing sensitive healthcare data.

Supporting our community

There’s no one way to organize customer insights. That’s why we’re connecting customer-obsessed product people around the world.

With so many approaches to organizing customer insights across teams, we’re always being asked for best practices and a peek into how other teams use Dovetail. We launched the new Dovetail community—a first-of-its-kind marketplace for you to exchange and learn different approaches to uncover customer insights. Find and try hundreds of project templates, insight templates, and tag boards from Dovetail and leading teams like Kickstarter, Maze, and Sprig.

We launched the Dovetail Academy for you to learn best practices, tips, and tricks whether you’re just getting started or a power user. Plus, a brand new champion program to nurture leaders.

The year ahead

Product people want to find answers to customer questions fast. They shouldn’t have to wade through tonnes of meaningless data to get there. They shouldn’t have to speak to everyone in a customer-facing role across the organization. And anyone on the team should be able to do it—not just specialist researchers and experienced designers.

This year, our mission is to make it possible for all teams to immerse themselves in customer insights. From faster, lightweight analysis to improved discovery, it will be easier than ever to uncover customer insights and find answers across teams and tools.

We’re making magic. And you’re invited to see it at Insight Out—our first global conference for customer-obsessed product people. We’ve got some big product announcements, plus you’ll hear from industry leaders from Meta, Netflix, Uber, and more. Reserve your spot today.