Today, we’re launching Ditto 2.0.

Our team has spent the past year rebuilding the foundation of Ditto from the ground up, to transform the way we all work on product text.

We first started Ditto years ago because, as designers and developers ourselves, we knew all too well the pain of managing product text. We were the first 2 users of Ditto — and the first developers of the product itself. The push to go from prototype to solution (quick!) came from the excitement from real teams, as Ditto was shared within communities and exploded from word-of-mouth growth.

We felt like we were seeing something that many had felt, but nobody was addressing:

• We believed that text was one of the highest ROI aspects of product. Having the right words drove immense business value, but for most teams, it was almost entirely under-leveraged.
• Everyone cares about product text. More than any other single aspect of the UI, the text was what multiple business functions hinged on, including compliance, localization, and personalization.
• We’ve embraced systemization in every other stage of product development, except text. Design systems, frontend components, development frameworks; these have all become mainstream in product development. Product text deserves the same intentionality, investment, and attention.

Within a company, almost everyone had an opinion on text, but each role only had visibility into their own slice of the workflow. When it came to systemization, despite being a concept that resonated with everyone, understanding how best to fit the pieces together—and at scale—was an incredibly challenging design problem, and required constant iteration.

Over the last 4 years, we’ve been able to see the full spectrum of Ditto as a system. Customers from small startups to Fortune 500s brought us the complexity of their existing workflows, from homegrown tools to spreadsheets to ticket systems to massive design files. We also saw the sheer volume of text being managed for products across every industry. Text was crucial in their workflows, and deeply embedded.

As we grew with these teams, we continued building more functionality, and more flexibility, into Ditto. However, taking a step back, we realized we were inadvertently scaling Ditto’s product complexity with the complexity of copy management itself. Users spent time filtering down, organizing, and trying to configure a new single source of truth, rather than being able to work faster and build better products from the get go. As much as users made it work, we knew it was time to rebuild Ditto from the ground up.

Building a valuable, scalable source of truth for product text meant uncovering that complexity, layer by layer. We had to figure out a way to work through the complex, messy processes that teams were coming in with, without adding to the complexity.

For Ditto to function as a single source of truth all the way from draft to deploy, for teams of any size, we needed to revisit its underlying foundation. The changes went beyond a feature release or a UI change. To make systemization at scale truly work, we needed to answer: what were the correct core building blocks?

We picked apart Ditto’s underlying model for how we manage text, with a focus on how we could use text as building blocks that teams created, then connected, then scaled up for reuse.

Beneath the complexity, we were certain about several things:

• We saw text as data and Ditto as the infrastructure.
• In this system, the individual strings were the building blocks.

‍We knew that with the right framework, the mechanics shouldn’t matter to a user that doesn’t want to think about it — it should just work.

Text was more foundational than simply the text boxes that appeared in a design file, especially where repetition and constant iteration came into play.

Ditto needed to treat the text itself as the base building blocks, and build in functionality for linking and reuse at its core— as data that should be managed together. These strings as building blocks ultimately which became the new text items in the rebuilt product. In the rebuilt model, the same text item could work at any scale: as text just being drafted, to reused within a single design, to reused across multiple projects and available in a library, to used directly in development.

And all of this had to work naturally in teams workflows, without adding additional manual work of linking and maintenance.

From tight collaboration with existing customers, we knew we hit the sweet spot simplifying the solution made it more powerful, rather than less.

In the new Ditto, teams can build on their understanding of Ditto over time. Start a project, bring in text items, and automatically connect to what’s repeated in designs to keep Figma in sync. Once you’re ready to keep scaling, publish repeated text items to the library.

Legacy Ditto was about building down — reducing noise, controlling clutter, trying to wrangle an onslaught from design — while new Ditto helps you build up as you go. You can choose what you need to work on, get that connected, and get the right people involved immediately.

With beta users, we pressure tested for this simplicity both from the very start, and at scale. We saw Instead of asking how things work, users jumped straight to bringing Ditto into their existing workflows. They started bringing collaborators into the first session. They understood demo files immediately, and started choosing to pull in their active Figma projects instead. That’s how we knew that the underlying model fit with the way these teams were actually working.

Rebuilding Ditto’s foundation worked its way through the entire code base: we then rebuilt Ditto’s design system, data management, and real-time sync engine. Work in Ditto continued to get smoother, more comprehensive, and lightning fast. With the rebuilt framework as the base, we were also able to build the beginning of automated workflows in Ditto: AI-enforced style guides.

We’re so excited to share the new Ditto with the world.

In addition to all of the customers that worked with us as design partners and beta users (thank you!), the Ditto Team has been using Ditto for our own product text for the last few months, and it’s safe to say the difference is night and day.

Over the past 9 months, retention is already 5x compared our legacy product, with a fraction of the new user guidance. But beyond just product usage metrics, we’ve been floored by how excited teams to use the new product. Teams can jump in, build out their first project, and invite team members, because the barrier to entry is so much lower in new Ditto.

Want to bring Ditto into your own workflows? Schedule a quick demo with our team, or dive right into our product. We can’t wait to hear what you think.

What’s next?

Our work here isn’t done, and we feel like we’re just getting started. The new Ditto sets the stage for an ambitious roadmap. More automations, better collaboration, and smoother localization workflows are just a few things we’ve set our sights on, but you can expect new releases every week.

We can’t wait to continue investing in the future of product development workflows, with product text playing the central role we know it deserves.