Okta securely scales customer insights across 30+ teams

From seamlessly accessing applications in day-to-day work, to buying a ticket for a baseball game or booking a flight, Okta exists to enable anyone to use any technology securely.

With over two hundred Dovetail users, Okta champions a mixed-method approach leaning heavily on qualitative research. The nature of their product is built on trust, so customer insights are their lifeblood.

Right access, right time, security first

Okta’s research team works in partnership with legal and data privacy ops on handling the sensitive information that forms the foundation of their product. With strict policies in place to meet requirements like GDPR and CCPA, best practices have become increasingly important and are continuously iterated on.

For Okta, Dovetail’s custom data retention was a game-changer and fit their compliance model. So much data was coming in from different sources, which had to be manually removed on a regular basis as soon as the raw data was no longer needed for functional purposes. Now, this process is automated. It’s clear when something is uploaded when the expiration date is, and the full value of the data can be extracted before deletion.

Previous repository tools required a heavily manual process to turn access on and off for individual users. Now, the team saves time on tedious backend admin by creating user groups in Dovetail to implement and manage permissions at scale. At Okta, they believe provisioning access to folders or projects based on role or group is one of the fundamental tenets of how people get the most value out of a product.

A powerful home for an insightful roadmap

In Dovetail, Okta can finally consolidate all their research material in an accessible centralized repository where stakeholders can self-serve. Generating insights and making them durable and shareable throughout the organization has never been easier.

Okta’s custom home acts as a living document that is constantly updated. It sets the context of what Dovetail is and how the team uses it, shows how to get started and where to search, and directs stakeholders to finished insights reports and relevant projects.

Search and feed blocks help the team get a sense of what’s new. Okta’s goal is to build a culture with Dovetail where people don’t wait for quarterly summaries but actively jump in and keep up to date—particularly for insights in their feature area.

Each quarter, the product teams identify areas to explore and work collaboratively to build roadmaps fuelled by insights. These insights are shared directly with the team, in Slack, or even turned into slides, which are then uploaded as PDFs back into Dovetail as valuable, searchable artifacts.

Opening Dovetail up at scale

With more than 30 teams in Dovetail, and growing, democratization is a hot topic at Okta. They were searching for tools that supported a mix of methodologies for full-time researchers to anyone who came into contact with customers and had valuable insights to share.

Now researchers, product managers, designers, and more are brought into analysis and even lead projects in Dovetail. Having the relevant help docs, supporting tutorials, and Dovetail templates help make running projects an approachable and repeatable process. The ability to become multi-player has been invaluable at Okta.

Dovetail was like a welcoming front door when they opened it up to the whole product org—a custom home, easy navigation of projects, and a simple UI. The future at Okta looks like getting more stakeholders driving collaborative approaches to learning and research from all sources in Dovetail.