Originally posted on LinkedIn https://bit.ly/2zt4ISV
Modern teams are distributed. From start-ups to large corporations, this has become the norm. It’s not uncommon for sales to be in New York, engineers to be in India, design to be in Poland, & customer success to be in Omaha. Teams are more connected than ever too, with fast wifi available globally. Quickly responding in Slack from a smartphone or joining a Zoom video conference is 3-taps away. Even with an abundance of tools available, only 7% of modern teams feel productive at work and burnout is on the rise.
To understand today’s workspace, we should understand where we came from. How did great teams function in physical workspaces over the last 20 years?
- We would find focus by going to a private office or hiding in a less-occupied area of the building. At LinkedIn, we used to joke that, “if you can’t find an engineer, he or she was working on the 17th floor.” This was 10 flights away from where our team sat on the 7th floor. There’s nothing like 100 feet of glass, steel, and concrete to secure time and space to get things done!
- When we wanted to collaborate privately, we’d book a conference room with a whiteboard and close the door. Conversation and ideas are intense in this environment, shared understanding grows quickly. These rooms are so valuable that anticipating teams often argue with any tenants overstaying their welcome.
- Finally, if we wanted to engage in open conversation, individuals were easily found in the micro kitchens, coffee areas, or lunch areas signaling they were available to chat publicly if anyone wanted to. This environment helped prevent information silos, ideas were shared naturally and people discovered mutual context informally.
In a company that can keep everyone co-located, this closed-loop ecosystem works well. So well that WeWork convinced Softbank they were worth $47 billion to scale the formula around the world. But, it didn’t scale as planned and WeWork has lost $39 billion on its valuation.
It seems surprising that we haven’t replicated this array of physical environments in the digital space – especially at a trillion-dollar or even billion-dollar tech company. Existing communication tools connect us but require a context switch from your actual work to use. People are constantly switching between document/coding IDE/design tools and chat or video conference. Studies show this context switching reduces your IQ by 10 points.
Context switching is compounded by the fact that the modern worker uses an average of 9 work applications from different companies. Besides the obvious distribution of Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Dropbox, and Slack there are an estimated 10,000 private SaaS companies. Back to our “physical workspace” example, you need a closed-loop system that people can navigate without switching work context.
At Kettle, we believe the answer is the world’s first collaborative work browser. A lot of work is done through web apps like Google docs, Salesforce, Jira, Github, or even Figma. And, we all have browsers. My Kettle enabled browser allows me to:
- Secure focus with a personal office on-demand, by automatically turning off notifications, reducing distractions from untimely communication, and redirecting inquiries from teammates to a time I’m available. When I need to power through a complicated viral growth model in a spreadsheet, I focus with Kettle.
- Build a shared understanding in private conference rooms, when we want to collaborate intensely, capturing the context of what we are working on together is easy. We view a live feed of pages visited together. We always know if we’re on the same page. No one has to interrupt the conversation or engage in side-conversations just to follow along in Confluence for design reviews or JIRA for stand-ups.
- Foster open communication in public spaces, by providing context to my teammates if I am working on the same item and avoiding duplicated efforts. For example, our customer success engineer wanted to ask me if she should update our help page. However, because of Kettle she immediately saw I was working on it in Google Docs and decided she didn’t need to interrupt me. This saved both of us time from context switching and an unnecessary message about duplicative work.
Working in a modern distributed team is a lot easier this way. I wrote this from a coffee shop and my team of nine is located in six locations (San Francisco, Lake Tahoe, Portland, Chicago, New York, and Taipei). As a product leader, I have complete confidence in our progress and I am not spending most of my day in partitioned communication. Here’s what an average day looks like for me.
11 hours and 33 minutes
- 5 hrs 32 min in Figma
- 1 hr 20 min in Jira & Confluence
- 1 hr 12 min in Google Meets
- 1 hr in Slack
- 55 min in Google Docs
- 51 min Google Sheets
- 30 min in Gmail
Yes, co-founders work long hours, no one should be surprised. What is surprising though, is that I am a product leader who also designs. I average over 3 hours of uninterrupted focus a day, and that’s in a job heavy on communication and coordination. It’s not uncommon for engineers on Kettle to get 5+ hours of deep uninterrupted work a day. This is the power of a digital workspace designed for modern teams. If you’re interested in trying Kettle and changing the way you and your team focus together please visit www.kettle.ai or send me a message to join our growing waitlist of 2000+ people. Thanks for reading!