This guide is written for the person leading the rollout — usually a researcher, ops lead, or insights champion. You’ll need Manager or Admin access to follow every step. See User roles for the differences.
Why follow a structured rollout?
Dovetail rewards a bit of upfront thinking. The teams who get the most value treat the first month as a setup phase, not a free-for-all. You’re answering four questions, in order:- What problem are we solving with Dovetail? Decide on the use cases before the data lands.
- How will the workspace be organized? Folder structure, access controls, and naming all flow from this.
- How will we analyze data consistently? Global Tags, Fields, and templates keep your data comparable across projects.
- How will the rest of the org consume it? Chat, Agents, and Docs turn your work into decisions other people can make.
Week 1: Kick-off
The kick-off is about alignment, not setup. Don’t open Dovetail yet — open a doc or whiteboard and answer these questions with your team.Identify your research flows
Most Dovetail workspaces support three flows running in parallel. Yours probably fits one or more:- Ongoing intake. Continuous feedback like post-event surveys, NPS responses, support tickets, or sales calls. The signal is steady but the individual data points are low density.
- Targeted studies. Specific projects with a clear question — new-segment research, usability tests, concept validation. High density, time-boxed.
- Self-service discovery. Anyone in the org can come in and ask a question. “What are customers saying about MFA?” “What did the last round of small-practice research find?”
Decide who’s in the workspace
Be realistic about your launch team. Two to three people doing the analysis is enough to start — you don’t need to give everyone a seat on day one.Map your tech stack
List every place customer feedback currently lives:- Call recording (Zoom, Teams, Gong, Chorus)
- Surveys (SurveyMonkey, Qualtrics, Google Forms, Typeform)
- Support (Zendesk, Intercom, Jira)
- App reviews (App Store, Google Play)
- Sales conversations and CRM notes
- Internal sources (SharePoint, OneDrive, Slack channels)
Week 2: Assemble your workspace
This week is about structure. The goal: someone who has never used Dovetail can sign in, find what they’re looking for, and trust that what they find is the source of truth.Choose a folder structure
Browse is the real homepage of Dovetail — it’s where everyone’s eyes land when they sign in. Your top-level (parent) folders are the navigation everyone else inherits, so pick a model and stick with it. Here are some common structures:- By audience or product area
- By team
- By product line
Best when feedback often spans multiple internal teams, or when stakeholders come in looking for a topic rather than a department. Example top-level folders:
- Voice of the customer
- Targeted research
- Past research
- Insight library
Set access controls early
By default, anything you create is open to everyone in the workspace at the level their seat allows. For most parent folders, that’s more permissive than you want. The four levels of access are:| Access level | What it means |
|---|---|
| Full access | Anyone in the workspace can do whatever their seat allows — edit, manage, or view. |
| Can use | Recommended for global Tags and Fields. Everyone can apply them but only invited users can edit them. |
| Can view | Recommended for most parent folders. Everyone can read and chat with the content, but only invited users can edit. |
| No access | The folder doesn’t exist for anyone outside the group — it won’t appear in search, Chat, or AI results. Use this for sensitive or in-progress work. |
Build a Pins shelf
Pins live at the top of every user’s homepage. As an Admin, what you pin shows up for everyone — use this for the two or three things you want every viewer to see first (your insight library, a current flagship project, your taxonomy guide). Personal Favorites are different. Each user sets their own — encourage stakeholders to favorite the projects they care about so they can jump straight back in.Set up global Tags and Fields
This is the single highest-leverage decision in the first month. Global (workspace-level) Tags and Fields can apply to any and every Project in your workspace, which means:- You only build them once.
- The same Tag means the same thing everywhere.
- Search, Chat, and Agents can trust the data they’re filtering on.
Decide what to track
Before opening Dovetail, brainstorm with your stakeholders. A useful prompt: “What keeps you up at night about our customers?” Those answers become your Tag themes. The factual labels — persona, practice size, region, product line — become your Fields.See the Taxonomy 101 and Taxonomy workshop guide articles for facilitation tips.
Create global Fields
In Settings → Structure → Fields, create the factual attributes you want logged on every piece of data — persona, segment, region, product line (ie the metadata). Set the share setting to Can use so everyone can apply Tags without being able to edit the board.
Create global Tags
Go to Settings → Structure → Tags. Create a group for each high-level theme — sentiment, types of feedback, competitors, feature mentions — and add the Tags you brainstormed.
Build a project template
In Settings → Structure → Templates, create a template and link your global Tags and Fields to it. From then on, anyone starting a new project from that template will have your taxonomy ready to go.
You can still create project-only Tags and Fields when something one-off comes up. The rule of thumb: if you expect to see it frequently, promote it to global. If it’s truly unique to this project (or a couple of projects), leave it local.
Week 3: Analyze
Now you can bring data in. The goal this week is to upload one real piece of data end-to-end and walk through every analysis tool, so you understand the full workflow before you scale up.Connect your data sources
Open a new Project and click the + button at the top to import. Connect the integrations you mapped in Week 1:- Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Drive, OneDrive — bulk-select recordings without downloading and re-uploading.
- Calendar sync — pair Google Calendar or Outlook with your recording tool to auto-import calls based on the meeting title. New calls land in your Project the moment they finish processing.
- CSV import — for survey exports from SurveyMonkey, Qualtrics, Google Forms, or anywhere else. You’ll be prompted to map columns to Fields on import.
- Zapier — for anything without a native integration. Search the Dovetail Zapier library for prebuilt zaps.
- Dovetail API — for fully custom pipelines built by your engineering team.
- Blank note — paste anything that doesn’t fit the above. Blank notes are scanned by AI just like a transcript.
Working with Data in a Project
Once your first call or transcript is uploaded, here is the most common workflow teams utilize to start analyzing their data.Fill in Fields
The person uploading the data has the most context — capture it while it’s fresh. Set persona, segment, and any other Fields you’ve defined.
Name your Participants
Rename Participant 1, 2, 3 to real people. Mark yourself or your interviewer as a Dovetail user so the AI knows to focus on the customer’s words, not yours. Turn on the contact automation beta to have names picked up automatically when they’re spoken clearly.
Redact PII
Use Blur & redact on the transcript or video for sensitive moments. Turn on the automated PII redaction in Settings → Data redaction and leave it on Suggest so you can accept or reject each one. See Blur and redact.
Review the AI summary
Every uploaded recording gets a summary on upload. Try the different frameworks (chronological, usability test, executive) to find the one your team prefers, then set it as the default in your project-wide automation settings.
Cluster on the Canvas
Once a Project has Highlights from several pieces of data, switch to the Canvas view. This is a Miro-style whiteboard where Highlights become sticky notes you can group, draw on, and rearrange. The Canvas’s superpower is Auto-arrange. Select your Highlights and choose to cluster by:- Theme — Dovetail groups by the actual content of the quotes. Best for finding patterns you didn’t expect.
- Tags — groups by the Tags you (or AI) applied. Best for validating your taxonomy.
- Data — groups by the source recording or survey. Best for spot-checking individual sessions.
Use different views for different work
Inside a Project, switch the view based on what you’re doing:| View | Best for |
|---|---|
| Grid | Default. Visual scan of every data object. |
| Table | Bulk-editing Fields across many data objects at once. |
| Board | Mapping data by a single Field — great for personas or journey stages. Drag between columns to update the Field. |
| Canvas | Theme clustering and synthesis. |
| List | Compact view for very large projects. |
Week 4: Query and act
Data in Dovetail is only useful if the right people see it. This week is about turning your work into something the rest of the org can self-serve from.Build your insight library with Docs
A Docs folder pinned at the top of Browse is the single best way to give stakeholders a “front door” to your research. They don’t need to navigate projects or understand Tags — they just open the Doc and read. Inside a Doc, use Search blocks to keep the content live:- A search block that pulls “all Docs with the insights Tag” updates itself every time you publish a new insight.
- A search block that pulls “all Highlights with the feature request Tag” gives your product team a live feed of customer asks.
- A search block filtered by a persona Field gives marketing a continuously-updating view of their audience.
Enable Chat for self-service
Chat is the fastest way to get stakeholders learning from Dovetail without training them on the tool. Anything they can see, they can ask questions of.- Chat respects whatever scope you’re in — workspace-wide, a folder, a single project, or even a single piece of data.
- Multi-context filtering lets you pick a custom set of folders, projects, or data to chat with at once.
- Citations link straight back to the source quote, so answers are always verifiable.
Automate reports with Agents
Agents push insights out instead of waiting for stakeholders to come look. An Agent has three parts:- A prompt — what should it generate? (“Weekly summary of new customer pain points.”)
- A source — which folder, project, or channel should it pull from?
- A destination — email, Slack channel, or a Doc that lives in Dovetail.
- Weekly digest to leadership — pulls from your Insight library folder.
- Feature requests this week to product — pulls Highlights tagged feature request from a Channel.
- Voice of the customer to marketing — pulls Docs tagged customer story from the past 30 days.
Add Channels for high-volume feedback
If you have continuous, low-density data — App Store reviews, support tickets, NPS responses — set up a Channel. Channels turn thousands of data points into a handful of named themes you can act on, instead of asking a human to read every ticket. Pair Channels with Agents for the strongest workflow: an Agent that summarizes a Channel weekly gives your team a continuous read on what customers are saying without anyone manually reviewing the inbox. See Build a Channels strategy for the full setup.Week 5: Close out and look ahead
By now you should have:- A folder structure pinned to Browse with the right access controls.
- Global Tags and Fields applied through a project template.
- At least one Project fully analyzed end-to-end.
- An insight library Doc with live Search blocks.
- One or two Agents sending automated reports to real stakeholders.
Set a quarterly review cadence
Block 30 minutes each quarter to review:- Taxonomy hygiene. Open Settings → Structure → Tags and look for duplicates or unused Tags. Merge or archive them.
- Folder sprawl. If a parent folder has more than 10 subfolders, it’s probably time to reorganize.
- Stakeholder usage. Use Workspace analytics to see which folders, Docs, and Agents are actually getting traffic. Kill what nobody reads.
- New use cases. What did your team try to do that didn’t fit cleanly? That’s where the next round of structure work belongs.
Expand access deliberately
When you’re ready to bring more people in, add them as Viewers first. Viewers can read, chat, and comment but can’t change anything. After a few weeks, promote your power users to Editor or Manager seats as their workflows mature.Keep learning
- Dovetail Academy has guided walkthroughs of every feature.
- The Dovetail community is where other champions share workflows and templates.
- The Changelog ships near-weekly — new features often slot into the workflows you’ve already built.
- Email support@dovetail.com for technical issues. They’re fast, and you don’t need to go through your CSM first.
Where to next
How Dovetail is organized
A deeper tour of workspaces, folders, Projects, and Channels.
Taxonomy 101
How to design global Tags and Fields that scale with your data.
Build a Channels strategy
Set up Channels for continuous, high-volume customer feedback.
Agents use cases
100+ Agent prompts you can adapt for your team.