Why Dovetail

Great products are never created from thin air. The secret to creating great products is understanding people. Methodically learning about their behaviors, emotions, and pain points is called user research or customer research.

Our intuitive and affordable cloud software helps people inside businesses store and make sense of unstructured user research data, capture and summarize their findings, and share that with relevant people inside their organization. Dovetail helps our customers understand their customers, and therefore they build better products as a result.

Our culture values responsibility and accountability, trust and openness, efficiency and speed. We’re all about sweating the details on delightful experiences, tackling ambitious technical challenges, and learning twice as fast as anywhere else. We’re extremely customer-focused, regularly talking with customers in-person, via email, or over video. Our company Slack workspace is even shared with over 600 end-users.

No founder dictators here. As an early employee, you will help us shape this culture. We’re building for a healthy, happy team where everyone believes in what they’re working on. We only hire excellent people that you’ll trust and learn from. We’re transparent in everything we do; regularly sharing product decisions, financials, and fundraising plans with everyone on the team, and even customers at times.

What you will do

We want Dovetail to be the best user research platform for teams worldwide, and you’ll play a critical role in us achieving that mission.

As our first User Researcher at Dovetail, you’ll be expected to:

• Conduct end-to-end user research using a variety of methodologies to help us understand our users, their needs, and the opportunities this uncovers for our product.

• Regularly talk to customers across a variety of channels including email, video calls, Slack, social media, conferences, and in-person meetups.

• Establish the user research discipline at Dovetail, including improving our processes for data analysis and management, participant recruitment, repository structure, etc.

• Be the subject matter expert for user research in the rest of the team to consult when faced with product design, implementation, and prioritization decisions.

• Dog-food new unreleased features and offer constructive feedback and creative ideas, and identify potential pain points before customers experience them.

• Work closely with marketing and customer success on content marketing and conference opportunities to establish Dovetail as a respected and leading expert in user research.

• Be an advocate for Dovetail in the research community by writing high quality blog posts about user research best practices, processes, and trends, and speaking about user research at conferences and meetups in Australia and abroad.

• Develop a deep understanding of how user researchers, designers, product managers, and more work together in all kinds of industries, all around the world.

Your background

You’re a creative and highly collaborative person who enjoys stepping up and leading all kinds of user research. You enjoy working in a fast moving startup environment and taking risks. You’re comfortable with ambiguity, can craft your own research questions, and are capable of identifying the right methodology for the research at hand. You’re passionate about your craft and enthusiastic about contributing and participating in the wider research community.

As our first User Researcher, ideally you should have:

• Recent, hands-on experience executing across a variety of methodologies like interviews, usability testing, surveys, affinity mapping, co-design, A/B testing, and more. We’d love to hear stories of how your research has influenced roadmaps and informed design decisions.

• The ability to identify the right methodology for the research at hand, across qualitative and quantitative, analog and digital, in-person and remote. You should be creative when thinking about the problems you’re trying to solve.

• Experience analyzing qualitative data, synthesizing it into a coherent and truthful story, and creating effective ways of sharing your insights so they resonate and are impactful. We’d love you to bring the entire product team along on your discovery journey.

• An understanding of all roles involved in product development—from product management to marketing—and the ability to explain how each one adds value to the business.

• Excellent, concise communication so you can easily convey your thoughts, opinions, and feelings with other teammates, founders, and customers.

• The right attitude towards a sense of urgency, risk, and uncertainty about the future that comes with working at an early-stage startup.

• Experience articulating constructive criticism on architectural or design decisions beyond phrases like “I don’t like it” or “it doesn’t look good”.

• The ability to offer thoughtful opinions on important business decisions like fundraising, hiring, and establishing management structure if / when it’s required.

Benefits

• Competitive salary plus equity.

• Flexible working hours – we value work-life balance.

• Personal learning and development budget.

• Office snacks, cereal, sparkling water on tap.

• Sit-stand desks, 4k 27” monitor, Aeron chairs.

• Pet friendly office including a terrace, BBQ, concrete floor.

• Regular events like yoga on Tuesday and monthly social events.

• Annual company retreats

• Regular lunch and learn events with other companies.