My guest today is Tess Dixon. With 20 years in tech including a past life as Director of Support at Tumblr, Tess pivoted to design in 2019 and spent the last couple of years learning about and practicing DesignOps — most recently as Director of DesignOps at Condé Nast. She loves documentation, remote-first culture, getting things organized, and supporting an entire team with the best environment possible.

I had a long conversation with Tess and for that reason, there will be two episodes with her. The first one focuses on her background and role as Director of Support at Tumblr, whereas next week’s one will be about her role as Director of DesignOps at Conde Nast. In this first episode, Tess talks about how product managers can work closely with support teams to understand user reactions to new features, how she introduced self-service support solutions to reduce support tickets and how support teams can drive customer satisfaction and sales opportunities.