The BreakFast Sessions: the role of brand in product success
For our second Product-focused BreakFast session, we welcomed Abhishek Lahoti from Dropbox to the Printmakers Gallery in Edinburgh.
Dave Ward, our Creative Director engaged Abhishek (Shake to his friends) in a wide ranging conversation that covered company culture, collaboration and... cupcakes, all in pursuit of delivering great brand experiences through product.
We started with an easy question…
What’s more important? Brand or Product?
Both Dave & Shake agreed there was a tension between the desire to be noticed (brand) and the desire to deliver a frictionless, almost invisible experience.
This is especially pertinent to Dropbox, who want to do everything they can to stay out of the way at times: “We want to make you work a little more efficiently, to keep you in the flow, without distracting you.”
As a result, Dropbox found that as they matured, they moved from a product-led brand (such as Apple for example), known for being ‘the folder on your desktop that shares things’ to being more of a service-led brand (akin to Red Bull or Zappos), where the outcome and experience is foremost.
So, how do Dropbox build a brand through the experience of using their product?
We discussed two pillars of the Dropbox brand - trust and friendliness.
“Despite the importance of what we do, we don’t take ourselves too seriously. Take the sharing icon, for example. When we started, there wasn’t an accepted icon for sharing - so we explored a lot of possibilities before settling on a rainbow. It feels nice, friendly. If seeing this can bring even the smallest smile to your face, whatever you're working on, that makes us happy.”
But that friendliness needs to be underpinned by trust:
“User’s don’t buy Dropbox because they trust it, or because it’s secure, they buy us for the outcome, because it does what they need, when they need it, every time”. Dropbox have to work hard to maintain that trust behind the scenes - “If every time you logged on we were tanking it, and half your files were missing, it wouldn't matter what icon we used. Dropbox wouldn't still be around. We work really hard so that our users don't have to think about everything we are doing in encryption and security to keep users safe”.
How do you bring brand into company culture?
“It starts on day one: this is the easiest time to engage people. They’re open, they’re enthusiastic and engaged. We don’t need to convert everyone into brand fanatics, but everyone needs to understand why the brand exists and what we’re trying to do”
And how do you maintain that education and awareness?
“We still have weekly all-hands meetings, despite our size, to keep people connected. Obviously for some people this is streamed or pre-recorded, but wherever we are, we’ll come together as an office to watch it”.
Shake also explained that the trust value applies internally: “If something big is being released or an announcement is going to make the news, the company is told first, globally, and trusted to keep it secret until it's released.”
And how do you keep product engineers aligned with the customer’s perception of the brand?
“We spend a lot of time with our customers - and not just the biggest customers, we also have small-business panels that surface some really interesting requirements. As a result, we really understand how customers are using Dropbox and what they need it to do”.
These requirements, Shake explained, are translated into objective feature ‘scores’ that allow the engineering teams to prioritise and even rule out feature-requests if they aren’t directly traceable to a customer need and benefit.
Brand values and objective score cards and two useful ways to keep various teams aligned, but there’s still a need for continuous, effective communication:
“We work hard to keep an open, collaborative environment at Dropbox. When you join, everyone is flown to [the head office in] San Francisco and given a list of people and encouraged to meet as many of them as possible. You might never need to use that relationship but it could come in handy when you need it further down the line”
Additionally, Marketing have teams that sit within Product Engineering teams, so both fully understand what is being built and what is being promoted. Finally, great importance is placed on the ability of product owners to act as ‘translators’: “Everyone is well meaning, working towards the same ends, but brand & marketing, developers, designers, have their own language. We need people who can move between teams and bridge any gaps”.
Hackweeks
Dropbox have been running annual, company-wide hackweeks for nearly a decade, and, along with the feature scorecard, it heavily contributes to the product roadmap.
“Hackweek started when the development team were burnt out working on the thing they should have been doing, and had hit a wall. For a chance of pace they decided to mix the teams up and work on something, anything, new, and they found it really productive. Some significant developments in Dropbox’s history have come from hackweeks, such as the approach to store only metadata, and not the actual files on users devices, which is now the industry-standard approach”.
Shake explained a few reasons why it’s so successful:
“Ideas are submitted in advance (via Hackdash - a kind of suggestions box) - so that the most valuable ideas can be prioritised, and appropriate teams formed.
“Everyone is involved, and supported from the top down - it’s not unusual to find yourself on a team with one of the founders, who’s got their sleeves rolled up and coding away on a project. And it’s totally expected that you’ll clear your diary of everything but essential tasks to take part.
“Hackweeks are wide ranging - and not just for product development. Finance might use the week to map and optimise all their process integrations. HR created a podcast to engage potential recruits. The Paris team dressed as pandas and walked around the city getting user feedback and made a video to share with the company”
“Finally - they don’t just happen. There is a whole team dedicated to organising and supporting Hackweek and the teams involved”.
How often should companies check in on their values?
The short answer was that Dropbox are continually assessing how they perform against their brand values, and whether those brand values are still relevant. All staff are surveyed quarterly for their feedback to this end.
“Brand values will inevitably change over time, but they should ideally be consistent for as long as they are relevant and tight. It’s especially important with founder-led companies (like Dropbox) that these values are documented and understood, as the values are often based on the personalities and views of the founders - if the founder’s priorities change, it shouldn’t necessarily or immediately influence or distract the company”.
Before wrapping up, Dave had to ask….
Cupcake?
One of Dropbox’s values is cupcake, or rather it’s an emoji of a cupcake, and Shake explained that this could be traced back to a time when the support team were working closely with one customer to try and solve a particularly thorny issue, that eventually evolved into a new use case and feature for the product. As a thank you to the customer for their time and patience, they sent a box of cupcakes.
“The cupcake emoji reminds us to lean into problems, to work that little bit harder to solve customer’s problems and do what we can to put a smile on their face”.