Over the past decade, Harvard Business Publishing (HBP) encountered significant challenges due to siloed product development and fragmented customer intelligence across its divisions, including Higher Education, Corporate Learning, and the Harvard Business Review Group. These silos hindered teams from accessing valuable insights and collaborating effectively, leading to inefficiencies and difficulties in knowledge retention, especially when individuals moved teams or left the company.

To address these issues, HBP introduced Dovetail, a platform designed to centralize customer intelligence and foster cross-functional collaboration. This initiative aimed to eliminate redundant work, enhance decision-making processes, and ultimately improve the quality and effectiveness of product development across the organization.

At HBP, the lack of standardized customer intelligence approaches across multiple projects made it difficult to compare studies and understand their nuances, such as how questions were posed or who participated. This hindered the team and stakeholders from easily discovering the full context of their customer data. However, with the introduction of Dovetail, HBP standardized their customer intelligence process, allowing team members to quickly browse key takeaways or delve into detailed data. Dovetail facilitates understanding, supports new team members' learning, and accelerates their integration into HBP’s customer intelligence environment.