About DALI Lab
DALI Lab at Dartmouth College is a unique, student-powered digital agency where creativity meets real-world tech experience. The lab provides paid opportunities for students to build web and mobile apps, VR experiences, data pipelines, and more — all while managing client-facing projects, deadlines, and teams. With over 100 active students and rotating leadership, DALI blends education, entrepreneurship, and mentorship into a thriving, fast-paced environment.
The Challenge
Running a high-turnover team of students — many of whom rotate every few terms — comes with its own set of challenges: ensuring smooth transitions, maintaining communication quality, and preventing knowledge loss. With multiple leadership roles and over a dozen shared inboxes in use, DALI needed a tool to streamline collaboration, avoid email mishandling, and simplify onboarding for new student leaders.
Spark in Action
Spark for Teams plays a central role in helping DALI Lab stay efficient, responsive, and organized.
✅ Shared Inboxes by Role
Each leadership domain — Education, Applications, Partnerships — has its own shared inbox. This setup helps incoming student leaders collaborate on external communications without losing context or relying on memory.
✅ Templates That Scale Onboarding
Spark’s email templates allow new leaders to hit the ground running. Rather than rewriting common responses from scratch, students can reuse and adapt templates — saving time and maintaining consistency.
“When we hire a new student, we don’t want the person managing that role to reinvent the wheel… The templates are really important.”
— Tim Tregubov, Director at DALI Lab
✅ Seamless Collaboration
The ability to assign emails, tag teammates, and comment directly in threads allows student leaders to work together efficiently — even as roles change.
✅ AI Writing & Personalization
Though still early in AI adoption, Tim noted Spark’s “My Writing Style” feature as a helpful way to maintain voice and polish email drafts — especially across different communication tones (e.g., student vs. partner).
What Could Be Better
Despite the strong foundation, DALI’s team faces typical hurdles for distributed student teams:
- Email Overload: Without a clear culture of archiving, shared inboxes can become cluttered.
- Tool Fatigue: Students are onboarded to many platforms (Notion, Figma, GitHub, Spark), so deep tool adoption can vary.
- Disconnected Workflows: A lack of Notion<>Spark sync means tasks tracked in Notion don’t automatically close out in Spark, leading to follow-up gaps.
- Mobile vs. Desktop Experience: Students often work on mobile, while Spark’s advanced workflows are more desktop-optimized.
🛠️ What Helped
To address these hurdles, Spark provided:
- 🎥 Onboarding Resources: A collection of short Loom videos and a live demo walkthrough were shared to boost onboarding success.
- 🧠 Support & Responsiveness: Tim praised Spark’s support team for being quick, helpful, and easy to reach — keeping the tool usable even during occasional bugs or transitions.
- 🧪 Ongoing Collaboration: Spark’s product team gained valuable feedback from DALI on AI features, workflow design, and student-user needs — insights that continue to shape future improvements.
Impact & What’s Next
Thanks to Spark, DALI leadership students are able to respond faster, onboard more smoothly, and handle high-stakes communication with real-world partners — all while juggling full-time classes.
Tim’s hope? That Spark becomes a standard part of every student’s future toolkit — brought with them into startups, internships, and beyond.
“We’ve loved it. I’ve been wanting to push it harder for students… A lot of them pick it up and stick with it. Hopefully they bring it to their startups.”
Interested in Collaborating?
DALI Lab is always open to opportunities for collaboration, especially around product design, research, and AI exploration.
Learn more at: dali.dartmouth.edu