Neby Teklu on enhancing the user experience

Recent Duke graduate Neby explains the importance of using feedback to make better products at Dropbox.

What is your role at Dropbox?

I work on the Online Revenue Operations team, which essentially seeks to enhance the life cycle of a Dropbox for Business user. Within this team, I work in User Operations to provide support for our Dropbox for Business admins. Beyond reactive support, my team also detects underlying patterns of recurring issues while collaborating with our product and engineering teams to protect the user experience.

Why did you feel that Dropbox would be a good fit for you?

Towards the end of school I became interested in user experience and human-centered design and was eager to gain the grassroots experience that comes with working directly with users. I knew at Dropbox I would be able to learn about our suite of products in such depth that I could communicate with a computer newbie just as effectively as with a software engineer. So when I had the opportunity to work on issues affecting such a diverse user base with brilliant team members, it was a pretty easy decision.

What, in your view, is unique about doing user operations within Dropbox?

There are very few people in the company that have the opportunity to speak directly with our users on a daily basis and can articulate what makes them delighted or frustrated. Empathizing with the people who use Dropbox is highly valued in User Ops, and it’s important that my team reverberates our users’ sentiments throughout the company. In fact, my teammates and I often invite other Dropboxers to shadow us in order to translate feedback into product development plans.

Earlier on in your life you were a Congressional Page! What did that entail?

When I was 16, I had a really unique opportunity to spend a year living in Washington D.C. as a Congressional Page for the House of Representatives. In the mornings I would go to class in the attic of the Library of Congress and in the afternoons I worked in the Members Only cloakroom on the gallery floor. My main responsibility was to relay messages between Members on the floor of the gallery and their Chief of Staff, which meant learning the names, faces, and districts of roughly two hundred Members. I was also in charge of making sure that all of the present Members had properly registered their votes throughout the day (which entailed waking up a few members on long nights of voting) and raising flags over the Capitol.

I was lucky enough to be on the floor when the House passed the $819B stimulus bill in 2009, to be present when then-Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Gordon Brown made an address to the 111th session of Congress, to find a crypt while wandering around the Capitol, to attend a State of the Union, and to witness the inauguration of President Obama in 2009.

Unfortunately, in 2011 the House closed the Page program but I was fortunate enough to be one of the last classes of this one hundred and seventy five year tradition.

What have been some of your favorite moments at Dropbox so far?

This is a tough one, I have several. It’s got to be a tie between winning the unofficial Halloween costume award with my team by dressing up as our lead, and celebrating the Austin office’s first birthday.

What are you looking forward to tackling going forward?

Dropbox’s rapid international growth has really interesting implications on how we plan to support our diverse user base. I was recently conducting user interviews, and you would be surprised how differently people around the world interpret what it means to “share a file.” Being able to not only detect but also mitigate these potential sources of confusion brings up some interesting challenges in how we communicate and troubleshoot future problems.

What is something that many people don’t know about you?

Last week I successfully lassoed three stationary plastic bulls during our Dropbox family farm outing, so apparently I was meant for the rodeo. I guess that’s something I didn’t even know about myself.