How Design Pickle uses Dashworks to combat information overload

Design Pickle is a creative services company that works with industry leaders like Unilever, Poshmark, and Salesloft. We sat with Aaron Spence, Director of Culture and Talent Development at Design Pickle, to hear how Dashworks has helped unify its global workforce of 500+ creatives. We cover: 

1. How centralizing knowledge drives efficiency for marketing and product teams
2. Why Dashworks is crucial to cementing their remote-first ethos
3. The endless struggle to maintain institutional knowledge

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“Dashworks is becoming a corporate second brain for us. We don’t need to think about how or where we capture info. It’s just there — organized and recallable.” 

Phase One: Information Overload and Lack of Centralized Data

Since 2015, Design Pickle has followed what Aaron calls the typical tale of startups:

Individual teams develop unique systems for organizations. But, as a company, you’re moving so quickly in hypergrowth that you can’t stop to set up centralized, searchable info systems.

As such, the Design Pickle team felt stuck. They’d accumulated seven years and roughly 400 iterations of design teams in files and resource management.

They didn't know where to start, but Aaron was clear on the destination: organizing what already existed in a tactical, searchable way to create a one-stop shop for information.

In his words, they needed the equivalent of a corporate second brain. 

“We couldn’t begin to imagine an information hierarchy because we had seven years and hundreds of iterations of design teams and resources to work with.” 

Phase Two: Why Design Pickle Jumped Onboard with Dashworks

Before Dashworks, Design Pickle searched for tools offering centralization functionality. 

Unfortunately, as Aaron remembers it: “We just couldn’t find the right tools that would work for our company.” But then, they found Dashworks – and immediately jumped on board.

Plug-and-Play Functionality

Compared to other tools, Design Pickle was able to get set up on Dashworks within a day – with zero additional overhead or manual resources required to kickstart the process.

After onboarding, connecting their entire tech stack and internal tooling was seamless. Diving deeper, Design Pickle connected and centralized 11+ tools with Dashworks.

Once Dashworks finished indexing, the search functionality began working instantly.

Given the familiar user experience and that Dashworks integrates with existing workflows, end-users at Design Pickle began reaping the benefits with little to no training.

“We knew we had to be intentional in onboarding. Again, we’re looking at years of institutional knowledge. With Dashworks, that process of knowledge transfer and tooling centralization was completely painless.”

Benefit #1: Centralized Information Access for Every Team

Since kicking off with Dashworks, Design Pickle has experienced the core benefits of pared-down yet enhanced centralization, organization, sharing, and access.

Specifically, teams like marketing, people, and product — all departments with heavy file loads daily — have seen incredible benefits from our platform right out of the gate.

1. People Ops

As the Design Pickle's head of talent dev, Aaron has witnessed the streamlining of their resource systems up close in real-time. Notable changes include: 

• Searching — Rather than answering multiple daily inquiries about who's reporting to who, employees can easily search for that on Dashworks and pull up employee profiles.
• Unified storage & access — Regardless of file type, every team now understands that the best place to aggregate and distill cross-department information is in Dashworks.
• No more misplacement — After sending over some decks to an event coordinator, Aaron realized he didn't have to sift through Google Drive or manually maintain share settings. 

Aaron also notes that these positive developments have kickstarted — while Dashworks isn't even fully live at his company yet.

2. Marketing Efforts

Like any company in 2022, Design Pickle’s marketing team deals with a significant volume of files and info, whether that’s graphics, video case studies, paid analytics reports, etc. 

While they've successfully organized everything in Drive, they've never had a method for seamlessly directing others (especially non-marketing folks) to specific links or file locations. 

That is, until onboarding with Dashworks and our Google Workspace integration. 

3. Product Managers

PMs at Design Pickle have also hopped on the Dashworks train since realizing it's ideal for internally organizing and publicly posting loads of info daily.

For instance, rather than flooding Slack channels with numerous links to different platforms, they can create a single collection of files for the next demo day they’re pushing. 

“I always searched Google Drive and forgot file names and owners or share settings. Now, I can find, share, and pin resources quickly and in context.” 

Benefit #2: Fluid Integrations & Cross-Platform Opportunities

The Design Pickle team has already started reaping the benefits of Dashworks’ 45+ turnkey integrations — from Google Drive to Monday.com.

Aaron highlights our Slack integration and company-wide announcements functionality as a new channel within their internal comms playbook. For example, users can pin the most helpful resources for a popular search and then send that pin to Slack.

Looking forward, Design Pickle is excited about upcoming platform features, such as announcements on Dashworks that can be sent to Slack while linking out for more details.

Aaron anticipates Dashworks’ easily integrated, cross-platform announcements will cement the platform’s burgeoning ubiquity at Design Pickle as the rollout continues.

“We’ve already seen high adoption rates from our full-timers. We anticipate that increasing across the board as more happens between Dashworks and Slack.” 

Benefit #3: Simplifying Global Onboarding from End-to-End

Ultimately, both old and new Design Pickle team members are getting into the habit of, as Aaron puts it, “asking before searching.”

Workflows had been bogged down for years by disconnected tooling and departmental systems. That’s being rewired to defer to Dashworks as the company’s single source of truth.

Design Pickle is also building our platform into their onboarding process, so new hires have a low-effort pathway to access relevant files. In other words: They have used Dashworks from day one.

Even more, this shift is happening on an international scale. In Aaron's words: “What I'm probably most excited about with Dashworks is how we are truly a remote-first company.”

For instance, the company’s CEO (“Our CEO loves searching and playing around on Dashworks,” says Aaron) recently set off to Italy, England, and more for six weeks without any snags.

Design Pickle currently employs about 500+ creatives worldwide, so validating its identity as a distributed and global enterprise with the centralization of a small team is massive.

“We’re just getting everyone into the habit of searching before asking. I’m really excited to see this grow alongside Dashworks over the months and years.”

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