All 3 founders worked remotely at larger companies during the pandemic and when we started the company in late '21 we knew we wanted to be hybrid, so it was made top down from the start. For a small team, I personally think there are culture and productivity benefits for being in person. I think other companies have shown remote is absolutely viable for small and large companies, but to your point, there has to be a lot of intention around it. I don't buy into the dogmatic views of hybrid vs remote: I think it's more about understanding what's right for you and the company, and as a leader making the culture, policy, and practices work for what you want. For me and Dopt, hybrid has been a dream :)
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Hybrid vs remote is sometimes polarizing, but hybrid has been really great for us to balance the heads down time and no commute of remote with being able to jam on stuff in person.
You really need both: solid, intuitive product design and good new user onboarding. Even with a great product, new uses will still need help discovering and understanding how to get value from your product.
Tooltips aren't always the answer though. Onboarding that's more seamlessly integrated into the experience are better, like Retool, Superhuman, or Intercom. You can see those experiences here: https://twitter.com/philvb/status/1617921908510699520?s=20&t...
Tours aren't always bad, but they're often just poorly implemented, with too many steps that don't mean anything to the user. Onboarding that's contextual, like embedded tips, or relevant, like targeted onboarding by persona, or action-oriented onboarding, like checklists tend to be better.
After leading onboarding and in-app education teams at Dropbox, I started Dopt [0], which is a react component library and SDKs to make it easier to build tours, but also more contextual and less distracting onboarding experiences like embedded tips and checklists. My hope with Dopt is that you can still build tours when necessary (like 2 step tours to introduce a new feature), but have a bigger and better toolkit for all types of onboarding and education.
thanks for the feedback on the website! we're going to be making some changes over the next month, so we'll make this more clear.
glad you think this is a great solution. it sounds very similar to the conversational design tool you made. we've taken some inspiration from tools like voiceflow. we think they have a nice flow builder.