Village Labs

Our most #meta use case for AI yet?.... (posting about my product, by asking my product to post about my product ?? ) I would not necessarily recommend our customers use Village Labs to write their LinkedIn content, but hey... it was worth a try. Here's what I asked our new custom report tool: "Please write a super compelling LinkedIn post for me, Bradford, based on what's happening at my company in the last 24 hours. The goal of this post is to generate interest in buying my company's product. It should be written in the style of a LinkedIn influencer and follow all best practices.?"

This morning, Village Labs scanned all our connected apps (Jira, Slack, Notion, Monday and Docs/Sheets) and picked up that Martin has way too many P0 issues assigned to him that'll block the rest of the team unless we redistribute. The Blockers report is another cool and super useful example of what you can do with Custom Reports within Village Labs.

Here's a sneak peek ?? a new feature to help managers skip writing status updates every week: We've upgraded our custom AI reports. Soon you can get even MOAR customized insights about your team and your company from Village Labs. Think of the possibilities! Never write a status update ever again.... 1. Improved prompt customization 2. Better report previews(!) for quick iteration 3. Add or restrict specific data sources (e.g. Slack, Google, Notion, HubSpot) 4. Add or restrict specific user groups (e.g. Sales or "Q4 Planning Strike Team") 5. Blame Homer Simpson for everything that goes wrong (optional)

Now status updates are dead, too ?? Last week we “killed” the standup. This week we killed off your weekly status update. We just released our “Team Updates” feature and it’s magical. As usual, Atlas' AI does all the heavy lifting with Team Updates, so you can focus on the work that actually matters. Atlas looks across all your tools (Slack, Docs, Meet, GitHub, Jira, Notion, etc.) and finds everything needed for a great team or XFN update. Then we drop it in everyone’s Daily Briefing feed so they’ll never miss a thing. We also have a cool new “follow” feature that lets you follow teams you care about, and make sure their automated weekly updates show up in your feed. This is insanity, but knowledge workers spend about 2.5 hours per day searching for information! (IDC/McKinsey) And think of all the hours managers/directors/VPs spend slaving away on Fridays to send out their weekly status update. Never again! Atlas is here for you. And we’re currently offering 60 day risk-free trials :)

I talk to a pretty diverse group of leaders and companies each week. However different they are, there’s one thing they pretty much universally hate ?? Slack. This usually comes up unprompted when I ask what’s going well and not about remote or distributed work. It’s something like: - there are 150 messages across 15 different channels I’m supposed to read when I wake up or get out of meetings - it’s an incredibly inefficient way of sharing/consuming info? - it's very distracting (esp for eng etc) to be interrupted every few minutes - bad decisions happen in Slack threads - there is so much company knowledge lost in Slack. Think of this as the ‘Slack tax’ on your organization. You pay it because there are obviously a lot of benefits: quick comms, collaboration, connectedness. But the tax gets more expensive the more stuff that happens in Slack. For remote or distributed teams, it’s extremely expensive. At Village Labs, we hate the Slack tax. So we’ve added something to Atlas’ Chief of Staff to reduce it. Because Atlas’ LLM is connected to, and can understand and summarize all the data and content living in the tools a company uses everyday - Atlassian Jira, HubSpot, Google docs, Notion, Asana, Slack etc? - we've added a module that generates summaries of the most important stuff happening across different Slack channels. You can understand it in plain english and dive in more if need be. Slack is just the tip of the iceberg. Atlas gives the quick 1-minute data-rich summary of pretty much anything across your org: what an individual or team is working on, where that cross-functional project is at, or what’s the latest on that issue that you care about, and a whole whole lot more. Atlas is having a huge impact on our team’s execution speed, visibility, and connectedness. Ping me if you wanna stop paying such a hefty slack tax!

Did you ever wonder WHY remote and hybrid sucks so much? It has to do with evolution. Here’s the problem and to solve it ?? On average, remote, hybrid, and even distributed teams have lower productivity and less empathy. That’s because they’re usually missing 2 things: 1. Ambient information flow We evolved from monkeys working in groups, so for millions of years it’s been a huge advantage to be able to pick up context by just being physically near other humans, listening to their conversations, observing body language.?As a result, humans are insanely good at absorbing and prioritizing “overhead” information at the office. Hearing a colleague gripe at the coffee machine, noticing the excited gestures of an executive, or getting pulled into a meeting from the hallway are actually very helpful chance events that happen all the time in person. 2. Humanizing experiences Face-to-face interactions consistently prove to generate more empathy than emails or zoom meetings. They’re also less exhausting because they’re how we’ve evolved to interact and often require physical movement from space to space (vs. sitting and staring at your laptop all day). The physiology of in-person is VERY real here. When your team is spending between 1 and 5 days working from home, they miss out on the “for free” benefits of office work. How NOT to fix it: At the beginning of the pandemic, dozens of “virtual office” companies bloomed into existence, thinking that if we just made your computer look like an office, we’d get the benefits of an office. What we ended up with was a hundred web apps w/ the graphics of N64’s Goldeneye. These apps also missed the point. You can’t replace in-person interactions with virtual ones and get the same effect. What you can definitely do, however, is solve for Information Flow and Humanizing Experiences in a new way. The fix: Solve for remote information flow and human engagement using first principles. Solve for the best way to share relevant information, and make everyone a little more human. Village is built on this foundation and can help your team 2x remote output with our unique insights + AI approach. We call it Atlas: - We sift through the insanely complex information flow from the many tools your team live - We use data engineering + AI to present actionable, insightful, queryable info to every level of your org - If anything, we’re better than in person… because you only “overhear” info that’s tailored to you! We also provide the surfaces your team needs to present their human side. Atlas is your company’s new home page, and your best tool to solve for remote and hybrid work! We are still giving the directory part away for free to a few more lucky companies :) DM me if you're interested

I’m happy to announce: (1) we just launched Atlas, our most-requested feature, and (2) we’re giving it away to the first 30 of you for free ???? But first… a brief history of Village: 1. We started building Village 18 months ago? 2. A few months ago we pivoted away from marketplace incentives as our primary product 3. We have since found product-market fit by turning managers into Superman(agers)? 4. Today: Managers will be able to manage 2x as many people, 2x as effectively? 5. Soon: Remote work will be 10x better, you’ll never waste 4 weeks on perf reviews again, and every frontline manager will have an AI chief of staff to handle all their team admin tasks So what are we giving away? We speak with tons of CEOs, and a lot have previously worked at Uber, Google, or Meta. And they all have one thing in common: they miss their incredible employee directories (Whober, Workplace, etc.)–basically an internal LinkedIn on absolute steroids. It’s your personal home page for your company. It sounds minor until you’ve experienced a good one. And no one else does for some reason. Lattice, Workday, 15Five, all have pretty janky not-helpful versions. Don’t worry–we’ve got you. We just released the Whober/Workplace/etc. you’ve been looking for. Not only does it solve your basic employee directory and remote meeting context problem, but it has live activity feeds that keep people engaged, contains performance data piped in from your daily SaaS tools (Atlassian Jira/GitHub/HubSpot/etc.), and it is where you go to give feedback and fill out pulse surveys. This is the tip of the Village iceberg, but it’s a good place to start–for free, for six months, with data connections. The first 30 companies we hear from will get Atlas free. Welcome to Village. Your workforce will never, ever be the same. DM me.?

Many businesses we talk to say: “our product or team is good, we don’t offer incentives to our customers or workers.” If you’re in this camp, 1. Warren Buffet disagrees, 2. it's hurting your business. People often hear “incentives” and think cash bonuses, reward points, loyalty. They think cost and margin dilution. That’s way too narrow. An incentive is just a thing that motivates someone to do something. As the famous Buffettism goes: “show me the incentive, I’ll show you the outcome.” Here are a few simple (and costless) examples from our customers that I love: 1. Surfacing a real-time internal leaderboard in their employee portal for a “housekeeping” activity that previously was a thankless, but necessary task. Guess what - the number of people doing it skyrocketed. 2. Creating simple “streaks.” Once a customer does a good thing once, celebrating it, and sending them a goal of doing that same thing each week for four weeks. Loss aversion is a powerful motivator. 3. Showing each worker and their manager what percentile they fall relative to their peers for a given activity (in this case QA failure rate). The simple act of showing the data massively improves the metric (it’s called the Hawthorne effect). There are tons of powerful examples like this that folks are setting up using Village’s Automations, either standalone, or part of a more comprehensive incentives framework. The bottom line is, if you’re not constantly thinking about managing and improving the incentives you’re setting for workers and customers to improve productivity, engagement, quality or retention, you’re doing a disservice to your business or team. ?Ping Bradford Church or me if you want to chat incentives - we think about this stuff all day, everyday.