23 products left, but today switchboard
Hi friend 👋,
We've been working remotely for a few years now, and I'm still not sure if it's good or harmful. I recall moments when we resolved issues in less than two minutes and how everyone felt the same when we received good or bad news. It's different now. Those who worked in the office prior to the epidemic had a different remote experience than those who have lately joined. We all have job descriptions, but our daily activities vary regularly, and there are many grey areas where no one knows who should do what. I'm not referring to Jira tasks here; this is for "letting him know that we done this" types of jobs. These activities require proactivity from someone, but proactivity necessitates trust, and trust necessitates communication, and communication necessitates spending some time together as well as a dash of emotion. Working remotely silently hurts the environment. On the other hand, not having to spend any time on the road, being able to work from anywhere, and spending more time with family are all fantastic benefits. As a result, it will remain a difficult decision for all leaders.
With all of these concerns in mind, there are wonderful collaborative tools available that actually reduce the chance of grey things. I'm constantly envious of our design team's ability to overcome that challenge. They collaborate on a Figma file, and they even see each other's pointers and design from time to time. The engineering team can accomplish the same thing with VSCode. Consider the product team and all of these Linear pages, Notion, Google Docs, Figma, and so on for a single key issue. Of course, all of these files are transferred one after the other, but when you have numerous themes, the complexity grows enormously. Is it possible for us to work as well as the design or engineering teams all the time?
Today, switchboard is our product.
Switchboard is a collaborative workspace dashboard that allows you to add as many links as you like in it. You can invite a teammate into a workplace and present your screen to have a synchronized view. Consider your new feature. You can build a workspace for it, and any essential links such as the analysis, research results, design, and data page will be open and exist inside it. Anyone in the workspace has access to everything. You can collaborate on the same document, take personal notes, and meet with others right in the space.
It appears to be quite promising, and it has the potential to threaten the way Slack works. Of course, a conversation history is essential, but consider channels with persistent workspaces like this, which display everything related to the channel topic. And all of your huddles take place on that specific workplace. It will undoubtedly boost communication, which is something we all require.
We’ll talk again tomorrow.
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