airfocus offers a modular product management platform. It provides a solution for product teams to manage and communicate their strategy, prioritize their work, build roadmaps, and connect feedback to solve the right problems. airfocus allows users to customize the platform to fit the various ways that teams work. airfocus offers a 14-day trial.
$15
user/month
Dovetail
Score 8.6 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Dovetail, headquartered in Sydney, aims to enable the world to create better products and services through deep customer understanding. Dovetail states they empower 45,000+ people, from agencies to universities to Fortune 100 companies, to make sense of their customer research in one collaborative research platform.
airfocus is a scalable platform, very useful for any organization, especially for our IT department since it facilitates decision making, helps to establish different priorities, and helps to execute your sprints easily in a simple and visual way.
Well suited for: A product team with one FT person dedicated to research and operations to ensure the DT stays up to date, since its automated connectors are not that robust for lower plans. Eg., Salesforce doesn't work great without an enterprise plan, and you have to use outside automated workflows to feed in data from other sources of user feedback (e.g., Google Docs, Sheets). An enterprise team with more engineering time to dedicate to customizing their user research workflows.
Product prioritization was made simple by compiling stakeholder input on projects to determine the proper order to execute differing projects. Priority poker-like features are a huge timesaver.
Creating roadmaps could not be easier in airfocus. Creating new projects is intuitive and you can customize settings that allow you to automatically add projects to the overall roadmap. There are a number of choices for the roadmap templates also which is nice depending on individual product managers' needs and expertise.
Perhaps the most useful feature(s) of airfocus are the collaboration tools. The ability to build out product roadmaps with the entire team's input saves countless hours of in-person prioritization meetings and has made refinement meetings with engineering team go much more smoothly.
I really like the User Interface, how easy it is to have all your research data in one project and how visual it is to understand where are things. It does have a good User Experience.
I like how nice and easy it is to create categories or use the ones auto generated as a starting point. It is very easy to create a color coded set of categories that help make sense of the data.
I like how easy it is to see the video snippet of a specific highlight.
Because we are really happy with the tool and it’s capabilities at the moment. The price increase is the main issue we can have but the features are getting better and better. It really saves a lot of time for our team and allow us to collaborate more efficiently with certain stakeholders that often did not réalise how much research we conduct. Now they can just have a look to it by themself!
it is relatively intuitive but it does take some practice to get used to the platform and understand the capabilities and limitations. There are also times that we have run into issues where the people we are sharing reports with either cannot view them or access is not provided. Additionally, the ability to export any of the video clips or snippets has created some frustration since we want to include the great findings that Dovetail helps put together, but need to bounce between screens or share after-the-fact rather than embedding it directly into a readout deck.
Regarding performance, I would say it’s satisfactory. Adding data and transcriptions is really fast and efficient, and can be done in the background, so I’m never hindered by these aspects. However, all the new AI-generated features are still somewhat slow to run. It’s nothing major, but it should improve in the future.
They answered every single question we had in a timely fashion and furthermore, they went out of their way to make sure we had all the time we needed to fully evaluate the product. I think the fact that they truly valued customer feedback to improve the product made them feel more like a partner then just an off-the-shelf solution
Support was good, especially when it comes to the capability of your support agents and engineers. But as i am located in Europe, the difference in the time zone made it hard to communicate with your offices and kept my work way back
The training went very well, and we co-built it to really address our needs. I also think it was beneficial to have feedback coming from someone other than myself (since I manage the tool), as it helped reinforce the points I wanted to highlight. The team’s feedback on the training was very positive.
It's easy to use, it's customizable. It is ideal for managing multiple product lists, it is transparent and helps keep any work team centralized. It has an intuitive interface, special to track the time to our established goals.
We looked at a few other options, Marvin and Reforge Insight. They were both pretty cool platforms that operate largely or entirely on AI, but neither quite fit our needs. Reforge Insight was cool, but it did not have all the features we needed from Dovetail, and switching to Marvin felt like a massive undertaking. We have so much data in Dovetail that the "cost" of leaving feels monumental. Besides, Dovetail fits our needs right now.
Management is quite straightforward; it’s easy to change access if certain stakeholders need to use it. The repository features are accessible to all teams, making it a good entry point into the tool. The more people use it, the more powerful the tool becomes, so it seems truly scalable to me. The limits are more financial, in terms of accessing additional features.
We know exactly what the impact/effort is of our projects, so we don't waste time on projects or features that won't drive meaningful revenue or increased brand affinity.
Having a centralized research space is a game changer. Makes it so much easier to hand over research if working with new people and have system in place (using the templates). Saves so much time. We don't have hard numbers on the hours saved but we are much more efficient using Dovetail than without.
The tagging system in general is amazing and allows for consistency in topic marking. This was non-existent for our team before Dovetail and now we can do much more granule reports with exact # of times something was said with accuracy.
