Meet Jacob Dollman-Low

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Jacob recently joined Octave from the Ministry of Social Development’s Transformation Programme.

Hey Jacob. We have loved having you at Octave. Can you tell us a bit about your background?
Born and raised in Dunedin, I moved to Welly in 2016 to study a Bachelor of Design at Massey University. I always thought I wanted to be a brand designer, but I fell in love with the broader possibilities and applications of design that I explored throughout my studies.

I interned at a design studio called Openlab in my last year of uni, graduating straight into Covid (nice), and returned to work there as a junior designer in 2020, after that I joined the Ministry as a Service Designer. 

My time in the Ministry was primarily spent in the Transformation Programme, which was seeking to modernise and improve all aspects of the Ministry’s service delivery. I spent about four years in the transformation, split between the ‘Future Services’ team (defining the ‘target state’ user-experience) and the ‘Service Experience Platform' team (building the digital platform that users will interface with, and defining the ‘transition states’ on the way to ‘target state’).

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What were you doing before you joined Octave?

I spent 2025 supporting ‘Run Ahead Design’ at MSD to develop a plan for managing a number of platform releases over the next several years. I was tasked with developing a single design process, and supporting the planning of releases that worked together towards a single goal. My specific goal within the team was to represent user experience in the planning, and organise stakeholders around shared artefacts (primarily service blueprints).

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What interested you most about working at Octave?

I’m looking forward to the pace, variety, and scope of work at Octave that would provide so many challenges and opportunities, especially the chance to work directly with clients from a project's inception through to delivery. There are so many people here that are experts in different areas I would love to learn from, and expand my skillset. I’ve spent a bit of time now working in very big, very broad teams and organisations, so being back in a design-centred space is very very exciting.

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How does strategic thinking inform your approach to development and technology? 

I think strategic thinking helps my approach in three key areas; Efficiency, collaboration, and purpose.

• A strategic perspective showing how everything fits together is super helpful for building efficient workflows between stages of development, prioritising decisions, mapping dependencies, and mitigating downstream impacts. 
• It also allows different people to slot together to build a shared direction, facilitating seamless connections that don’t always naturally form, and helping to spot potential pitfalls or opportunities outside of an individual's area of expertise. 
• A strong strategic voice also helps carry the wants and needs of the user from the start to the finish, so that intent doesn’t get lost in translation along the way.

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Thoughts on AI?

I kinda feel like since smartphones have become an essential part of every aspect of modern life we’ve existed in the least sexy version of transhumanism. AI might be able to bring that back to something much more interesting and helpful. That being said, with AI currently navigating its wild west phase so common in big tech innovations, modesty and intentionality of use is going to set apart that which is useful to the human experience (where it should be for real impact), and everything else that I’ve often heard referred to as ‘AI-slop.’

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What do you love doing outside work?

I’m big on arts and crafts projects, but I can rarely maintain focus on any one practice before finding another, so I’ve bounced between book making and whittling and stamp making and illustration on a monthly basis. Also a bit of a Dungeons & Dragons enthusiast so please feel free to yarn to me about your current adventure.

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Now that you’re here at Octave, what’s it been like?

Super stoked with my time so far. I’ve already talked about the work above so I’ll say the key boon I’ve experienced at work has been the cool people, and the support they’ve been so ready to give me to help me learn and feel welcome.

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