A global SaaS leader builds the software millions of people use to write, plan, and organize their work, from solo creators to enterprise teams. At that scale, every product decision carries weight, and the only reliable guide is a deep, continuous understanding of how customers actually work.

That understanding comes from the company’s research team and its continuous program of moderated customer sessions. The harder problem is reach. Customer intelligence locked inside one team can’t keep up with a product organization that ships fast and grows faster.

Today, more than 35 researchers and product team members work from the same intelligence in Dovetail, and the recordings, highlights, and answers from years of customer sessions are one search away for the people making decisions. This is the story of how they got there.

The research practice started small: three researchers supporting a product with millions of users. Every “what do we know about this topic?” question from colleagues landed on one of them, and answering meant digging through past studies by hand.

The mechanics made it slower. Session videos and transcripts were exported from one tool and re-uploaded into another to share findings, and finished clips were downloaded again to embed in readouts, one manual step after another. As the team hired, conventions multiplied: each researcher clipped and tagged in their own style, so finding past work across projects grew less reliable just as more people needed it.

None of this was a failure of rigor. The studies were sound. The intelligence simply couldn’t travel farther than the people who produced it.

Dovetail came in fast. The team switched it on the morning of a design sprint and put the first round of interviews straight in, and the workflow stuck. Today every research session lands in Dovetail: nearly 2,000 customer sessions and 500+ hours of recorded conversations across 215 projects. Synthesis happens where the recordings live. Researchers clip sessions, tag highlights, and shape them into shareable intelligence: 16,000+ highlights and 600+ insights to date.

Centralizing changed who participates. Product managers and designers join as viewers and watch sessions directly, and the appetite reaches the executive team: the company’s Chief Revenue Officer maintains viewer access because they want to watch customer interviews firsthand.

The findings travel through the company’s own product. On weekly research sprints, researchers share Dovetail clips directly with stakeholders, and bigger studies become readouts with clips embedded in the pages where the company already works, so the software its customers use every day is itself shaped by the customer intelligence gathered in Dovetail.

The team is now standardizing how everyone works: workspace-level tags, shared fields, and common conventions that give new researchers one language from day one. The sharing format is changing with it. Long readouts weren’t capturing attention across the company, so research leadership is pushing toward the right clip instead of the full report, short and watchable. A consistent taxonomy also lays the groundwork for AI-powered analysis across the entire archive, surfacing patterns from years of sessions instead of one study at a time.

The ambition reaches past research. The company’s sales team already mines its own call recordings for recurring customer themes, and the research team sees the opportunity to connect research sessions, sales calls, and support feedback into one view of the customer. That is what a Customer Intelligence Platform delivers.

Colleagues who never opened a research report now watch customer sessions and ask sharper questions. New researchers start in a structured workspace, not an undocumented archive. These are small habits, but they compound. Session by session, the team is aligning product reality with what users say.