Challenge

A tech company with an unusual user base had no structures in place for user research, quality assurance, customer support, or product management.

OUTCOME

An organization with defined procedures and strategies for replicable and sustainable design and product development work.

OVERVIEW

Dharma Platform, like many tech companies, was started in response to a pressing need: humanitarian workers didn’t have a streamlined way to collect, track, and manage the data they needed to do their job. Founded by Jesse Berns, an epidemiologist who specialized in conflict zones, the company’s flagship product, also called Dharma Platform, aimed to make it easy for people without a lot of time, Internet access, or Excel expertise to gather and use quantitative and qualitative data on the go.

As the first official full-time employee of the company, I was in charge of a variety of areas, including human resources, finances, and marketing. Very soon, however, my primary focus became developing the foundations of our design research, product management, and customer support work. While Jesse, the founder, had conducted research in the process of developing initial versions of the application, there was no system in place to replicate her efforts; we had no ethical guidelines, no procedures for defining research goals and parameters, and no method of anonymizing and storing user insights for later application. In my role as Director of Operations and later as Implementation Advisor, I developed standard operating procedures for conducting research, identified promising tools and approaches and trained my colleagues and direct reports on how to use them, and created libraries where our engineers could access what we’d learned. These procedures were developed and refined through my own research work, which included remote interviews, in-country observation and co-creation with client NGOs and in refugee settlements, and regular review of what I learned during the course of everyday customer interactions.

In addition to my work establishing our design research practice, I also set up our quality assurance protocols and worked with our CTO and engineering team to set up our product management systems, including identifying an appropriate platform and creating workflows that ensured our research answered the tech team’s most critical questions. Finally, I oversaw the development of our customer support experience from initial contact to final sign-off, working with both my colleagues and the customers themselves to establish timeframes for responses, define what information needed to be provided when to customers, and developing interactive, user-friendly documentation. Thanks in part to this work, Dharma made it through a Series A funding round with support from major institutional investors, most notably SAP, before eventually being acquired by BAO Systems.