Workplace Solutions: The more the merrier? Or the more the crazier?
SaaS has been making a solid impact on how people work or how a company operates in the past few years. Merely 10 years ago, we are fascinated by Adobe with its cloud system, changing how designers can work together. And just 5 years ago with the release of G Suite, Google drastically changed the style of working in the office. Today, there are hundreds of SaaS services trying to make our work life “easier”. According to the report “Business at Work” from Okta, there are some interesting facts. With an average of 88 apps used per customer, we can see that larger customers deploy an average of 175 apps, while smaller companies average 73. In addition, the average for the public sector has increased over the past four years.
Working in a startup environment, I witness first-hand how productivity tools have been revolutionizing the workplace, especially with regards to office communication. In the past few years, I have experienced project management tools such as Asana, Trello, ClickUp, and Airtable; and communication tools including Slack, Line, Messenger, and probably the most popular of all, G Suite. These applications are supposed to make my life “easier”, but sometimes don’t really meet the expectations. We always end up going back to G Suite where we store most of the documents.
Every time a new tool is introduced to the team, a question that gets raised repeatedly is:
“Is this integrated with others?”
The obstacle people face nowadays is to switch between 3–4 productivity tools, which is unintuitive. People have the tendency to stick to just one workplace solution. Imagine every time starting a task, you have to decide which software to use and where to place it.
So should we just pick the one champion and put the rest aside? Not quite.
The real issue of multiple SaaS is raised by Scott Bersky, CPO of Adobe and founder of Binance, in his “The 8 Biggest Tech Trends of 2021” where he discusses how using disruptive interfaces has become the trend and states the issue: “How do we stitch it all together?”
Many believe that “One portal for all” would be the solution, as we can see that Facebook has launched its own portal called “Workplace”. Workplace is an interface for users to access all kinds of services under Facebook. However, an interesting startup called “Command E”, which was founded in 2018 and is built to stitch every app together, raised US$4.3 million last May in its seed round and is dedicated to becoming the entry of all services. By using Command E, you can simply press command E on the keyboard, and the window will pop up. You can then either search certain information or access an app, including Google Drive, Slack, Salesforce, Gmail, Superhuman, LinkedIn, Dropbox, Jira, Confluence, Zendesk, Trello, Asana, Evernote, GitHub, Figma, Front, Greenhouse, HubSpot, Intercom, Outreach Salesloft, and yes, even Clubhouse.
It’s simple, however, critical.
The way the team designed the product is to let the user see it as a system-level service, which is part of the default. Therefore, making the product a default to the user’s behavior will be the challenge and goal. So far we can see Chrome, Slack, G Suite, and so on acting as the default for certain functions. Then how Command E becomes the default for either searching or the portal of all workplace solutions will be the next challenge for the company. Would it just require adding the navigation menu, connecting with more software tools, or having a small window version sticking somewhere on the screen? We’ll find out.
