👩‍🎨 Dovetail's Head Of Design Lucy Denton, on design thinking, lessons from Atlassian, the “sacred rituals” of Dovetail’s design team, and so much more

❤️‍🔥Episode 6, Season 4

“Ship less, but better”, with Lucy Denton, Head of Design at Dovetail

✅Lessons from working at Atlassian

✅Detention & Sparring: “sacred rituals” of Dovetail’s design team

✅Balancing product simplicity with new features

✅Design thinking & the “double diamond” framework

Dovetail is on a mission to help the world improve the quality of everything. Dovetail’s customer insights hub allows teams to quickly analyse research data and share insights collaboratively, helping thousands of teams build better products by helping them understand their customers. 

Episode Highlights from Lucy:

“Everything is a design problem! It’s just a way to solve problems.”

“We have a few rituals that are sacred to the design team. One we call Design Detention, and the other is Design Sparring… They’re two pretty standard rituals that a lot of design teams have, usually they’re called collaboration & critique.”

“We have a ratio of about 1 designer to 6 engineers, and that feels like a good ratio for us. At Atlassian I think it was 1 designer to 8 engineers… so it just depends on the company culture and how fast the engineers move.”

“Once you have a product and you have users, you get so many feature requests, and it’s really easy to just build everything that everyone asks you to build. But you have to be quite thoughtful about what problem that is solving, how does that fit into your existing feature set?”