From unlocking enterprise software to buying a baseball ticket, Okta exists to let anyone use any technology securely. Trust isn't a feature—it's the product. So when a product decision gets made without solid customer evidence, it doesn't just risk a bad experience. It risks the thing Okta is built on.

That tension sits at the center of research operations. As Research Operations Principal, Jared Forney supports a team of five researchers and roughly 300 product, design, and engineering stakeholders—a ratio that makes intuition-driven decisions dangerously easy. "We have a lot more product verticals at Okta than we have researchers to support them," he says. "I'll probably always be saying that."

The question Jared set out to answer: how do you build a customer intelligence platform that scales insight across an enterprise—without compromising security or adding friction to an already overstretched team?

Okta's research team doesn't just deal in insights—they deal in sensitive data. Research sessions are recorded. Participants share candid feedback. And every piece of information flows through an organization where data security is existential.

Before Dovetail could become a true customer intelligence platform at Okta, it had to earn the trust of legal, security, and privacy teams. Dovetail's custom data retention rules were the first unlock: Jared set recordings to expire after one year, automating deletion and eliminating the risk of stakeholders stumbling across participant data long after a study closed. User groups and permission settings made sure researchers, product managers, and designers each got exactly the access their role required—nothing more. Dovetail's compliance integrations also give Okta's privacy team a reliable audit trail for GDPR and CCPA data subject requests—a critical requirement for a security company.

Research calls are uploaded directly into Dovetail projects, where transcripts get highlighted, tagged, and synthesized before they expire. The result: a compliance-ready research workflow that security is happy with—and one researchers can actually use.

Even with the infrastructure in place, getting product teams to actually consult customer intelligence was an uphill battle. Most stakeholders live in chat and docs—not research repositories. Asking them to click a link into a tool they've never opened isn't a strategy.

The turning point came when Okta joined the early beta for Ask Dovetail. A design manager posted a question in Slack: did the team have any research on a particular topic? A researcher started typing a reply about digging through a couple of studies. Jared pasted the question directly into Ask Dovetail, generated a cited insight in seconds, and dropped it in the thread. "Immediately they wrote back: this is great, this is exactly what I'm looking for," Jared recalls. "Not two minutes later, our VP of Design slapped me and says, 'What was that?'" The magic trick had worked. Jared's reply: "This is where we're going. This is why I've been pushing so hard on this initiative."

Okta also uses Dovetail's Channels to bring continuous voice-of-customer data into the platform. Project trackers, field team question logs, and NPS surveys all feed into themed, searchable streams—letting product teams track sentiment trends by plan type, ARR, and industry vertical without waiting for a quarterly report.

With the platform in place, Okta's research team runs quarterly insight rollouts across the organization. Jared aggregates highlights from every team's Dovetail projects, distills them into focused five-slide summaries, and shares them as a week of daily posts where product, engineering, and design leadership gather. Every post links back to the source material in Dovetail. "It's about finding more ways to amplify our content everywhere," Jared says. "We're seeing success with it."

The custom Home in Dovetail acts as the platform's front door—orienting new users, surfacing active insight reports, and directing stakeholders to what's relevant for their team. Researchers export polished slide decks as PDFs and upload them as insights, making finished work searchable without changing a workflow anyone already uses. Full-time researchers, product managers, designers, and others across 30+ teams now contribute to and consume customer intelligence without needing a research background.

Kevonte Mitchell, a researcher on Okta's team, measures the platform's impact simply: "When I think about the value of Dovetail, I see it every time a stakeholder does a search and finds something interesting from our repository—that kind of smile or that look of surprise or that wow moment, that realization that customer insights are actually important and should be taken seriously. That's how I measure the ROI of Dovetail."