How Dovetail Studios designs, builds and maintains billion-dollar fintech companies

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I recently had the chance to catch up with @Nick Frandsen, co-founder of Dovetail Studios. Dovetail helps design, build, grow, and invest in technology companies, primarily in Australia and increasingly in the US. Read on to discover how the Dovetail team uses Atlassian Products to manage incidents and get the job done. 

Hi Nick! Can you tell us a little bit about the companies that Dovetail works with?

We work both with new companies and help larger scaleups tackle new markets or create new products. As an example, we’ve worked with Afterpay since their early days and have helped them design and build the mobile and web products that are used by millions of people around the world and have catapulted them to a payments leader with a market cap of almost $20B.

What Atlassian solutions does your company use? Of those, which are you most familiar with?

Opsgenie is the most critical Atlassian product in our company. Some of our clients use Jira and Confluence and we're invited to these products too.

Why is incident management important for your business/industry?

We do a lot of work in the fintech space and it’s vital that our products are always available and working as designed. Large active userbases and downtime don’t mix well and can quickly result in lost revenue and unhappy customers.

Describe how you use Atlassian products. How do different teams use our products?

We expend a lot of effort trying to prevent any errors from ever being able to make it into production in the first place and in addition we combine it with extensive monitoring and 24/7 mission-critical support. Opsgenie is the core platform that we use to run this function of our company and we've found it a pleasure to work with. We have Opsgenie connected to a variety of the tools we use to ensure that everything is running as it should and make sure that we can catch and rectify issues before they affect users.

Are any non-technical teams using Atlassian? Which departments? How are they using those tools?

Yes, our mission-critical support involves non-technical key Dovetail people that can help guide the client through any issue while our mission-critical engineering team works to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.

What led you to consider Atlassian?

It was simple to use, had a strong feature set, including call routing, and was priced competitively. 

What was your organization using before Atlassian?

We tried Pagerduty but ultimately preferred Opsgenie. 

If you were to recommend Atlassian to a peer, what benefits would you highlight? 

It has everything you need to run a high-performance on-call team. It has good scheduling, call routing and integration with third-party tools. Lastly, it's simple to use and well priced.

Can you quantify some of the ways Atlassian helps you save time? Can you quantify the benefits in other ways?

Opsgenie has helped us build a full support system that our clients can trust to always be there in a time of need. As projects get larger and more complex, issues become more expensive and disruptive. By linking Opsgenie with other tools such as NewRelic we can often catch issues before users and try remedy the problem before it even becomes noticeable. Having a capable, high-touch and responsive support function can yield huge dividends in creating a strong, trusted relationship with the client.

Thanks, Nick! Community members - if you have questions for Nick, please add them in the comments below :). 

[Veronique DUFOUR]

Very informative.