Democratizing productivity... & innovation

20+ digital collaboration tools to make you love remote working

Following my recent Live-Chat hosted by Dr Robin Kiera from DigitalScouting, a few participants asked Robin that I share my recommended list of digital productivity and collaboration tools to utilize among distributed and remotely located teams. Enterprise Collaboration is not a small-sized market. Over 1,350 startups have received $56Bn investment so far to support business go digital.

This article is aimed to inspire you to experiment with some really cool tools that allow the most fierce entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, designers as well as innovation and transformation leaders to improve their productivity and get things done fast. Many entrepreneurs already work on Google's sets of collaborative tools (e.g. email, chat, hangout, docs, presentations, and spreadsheets) as a baseline. I will therefore not cover these essential day-to-day engagement tools here.

I genuinely hope you find this blog useful and that it helps you start thinking, creating, collaborating and communicating more effectively and transparently with your team members, within business units, functional units as well as across geographies. My global teams have used all of these tools for a while. And because they are integrated, one could probably run a full agency or small business on a few ￡1,000 per month. All numbers depend on the size of the team.

So let’s get started.

I have divided this blog into four parts:

1. Project managing yourself and your teams digitally and collaboratively
2. Designing, presenting & engaging with your target audience
3. Voicing your views via video conferencing
4. Moving your creative design and prototyping... digital!

 1 - Project managing yourself and your teams digitally and collaboratively

Slack is definitely one of the most used platforms within the startup, entrepreneurial and innovation world. I personally use Slack every day. Slack is a subscription-based communication tool that offers live messaging, chat and sharing capabilities for small, large and private groups as well as on a direct one-on-one basis. The content inside Slack is shareable and searchable from one search box. The tool integrates with a multitude of third-party services, including Google-drive, Dropbox, Trello, Zoom, Salesforce.com or Hubspot. After raising over $1.27Bn, Slack IPOed in 2019. Slack’s most recent valuation was at $13.5Bn.

Launched in 2011, Trello today has been downloaded over 30+ million times. Trello is a free and subscription-based mobile/web-based collaboration tool that allows teams to organize projects and daily tasks into boards. I have been using Trello now for over 5 years. The tool allows you to present projects through boards, which contain cards that are associated with lists of tasks, which can be linked to specific project members. Cards progress from left to right from one list to the next via a simple drag-and-drop process that mimics the way one would move from design to implementation. 

For those managing a variety of more complex projects, you may find Hive to be a more complete management tool. Hive is a project and program management platform for multi-taskers, designers, marketers, operational leaders, and project managers. The platform uses a lean project management approach combining a multitude of views, including a Trello’s team/ kanban view, a calendar view as well as a Gantt chart view to name but a few. The platform was founded in 2015 in NYC by former management consultant, John Furneaux, one of my husband's former colleague and his co-founder, Eric Typaldos. When I met John in NYC and he shared the vision and strategy behind Hive, I quickly asked my team to trial the tool. Here is a link to a video that describes the application as well as access to a discount code.

There are other well-known tools you can consider out there. The choice must be based on your project needs and feature requirements.  

For instance, created in 2012 and well funded, Israeli startup Monday is a project and team management tool which enables users to track teams and their performance on tasks, assignments, to-do lists and milestones while keeping clients in the loop. The tool provides boards where users can communicate, edit rows, manage meetings, teams, notifications, track activities and visualize each team member’s results and deadlines. 

Also well funded, San Francisco based Asana is a web app that helps teams keep on top of their activities by combining conversations and tasks together. The tool helps teams update, organize and connect with one another. It was founded by Dustin Moskovitz, a co-founder of Facebook, and Justin Rosenstein, an alumnus of both Facebook and Google. 

2 - Designing, presenting & engaging with your target audience

Whether I write or present. I want access to good visuals to include and share with my content. 

I am sure many of you know Unsplash. Unsplash is an online platform providing royalty-free stock photos. The platform enables freelance photographers to upload their photos on the platform. Those photographers can then share a portfolio of pictures that expresses their visual personality though topics including architecture, nature, people, travel, health, arts & culture. These pictures are truly royalty-free so the recommendation is to recognize the photographer as you utilize and share their work. Unsplash was founded in 2013 in Montreal and raised so far $15.8M.

For more formal commercial work, I use Stocksy United, another royalty-free stock photography platform which is actually a cooperative where the photographers are co-owners. While we, as users, are billed flat rates for the photos, the photographers receive half the price for each of their photos, thereby making it truly cooperative digital licensing. Stocksy United was founded by Bruce Livingstone in 2012 in Victoria-Canada. Bruce was formerly the founder of iStockphoto acquired by Getty Images. The venture claims to pay the highest royalty rates within the sector. 

If you need to find a few icons for your presentations consider thenounproject.com. This is a subscription-based online icon platform, which gives graphic designers access to a community of assets and a platform to create and share their creations. Users can download the icons and use them in presentations, advertisements, stories. Users can also interact via a messenger application to comment on new icons utilizing stickers and expression icons.

I have also used icons from streamline icons in my past.

In addition, if you need to add background music and sounds to your creation why not consider Bensounds.com.

When it comes to personalizing images and content, Canva is quite easy to use. Canva is an online photo editing and graphics creation tool that allows writers, designers, and marketers to develop graphics for articles, brochures, presentations, posters and flyers among others. This creative tool includes a stock library of photographs, images, and illustrations as well as pre-designed templates and graphics. Designers can customize content including text, photos and create effects and unique textures. This venture was founded in 2012 in Sydney. It raised $264M, $85M of which were raised in October 2019.

3 - Voicing your views via video conferencing

We all have used alternative video conferencing including Webex, Google Hangout, Microsoft Teams and BlueJeans Network which means that we all have 4 to 5 different apps on our laptops or smartphones to engage in video conferencing. 

Still, today Zoom is probably one of the fastest-growing video conferencing platforms. It unifies and centralizes HD video conferencing experiences on the cloud and eases web meetings on-the-go via smartphone, together as free and paid cloud service options. An interesting feature of Zoom includes its ability to integrate with your Dropbox. This eases fast, just-in-time collaboration while synchronizing up to date documents. Another unique feature is its ability to be easily integrated into other Cloud products and services using APIs. I also enjoy the background change feature which allows you to add those places of the world you like most while on calls. 

We all love Zoom. CEO, Eric S. Yuan, knows that he has some work to do following recent hacking and cybersecurity issues. I have just received a few updates that have now locked some of the more open features. I hope those recent changes make Zoom a more private and secure voice conferencing platform in the long run. 

4 - Moving your creative design and prototyping... digital!

One thing, which definitely occurred during the course of the past few weeks, is that we have had to move some of our more creative and innovative activities online. Those of us supporting others with speeding their digital transformation journeys have been experimenting with the following platforms. The tools below enable you to work remotely and digitally on business models, value propositions, customer journeys or whichever piece of activity that would usually take place on a whiteboard.

• Whiteboard platforms

The first tool we have been experimenting with is Miro. Miro is a subscription-based visual collaboration platform, which enables teams to collaborate and communicate using a digital whiteboard. The startup was created in 2011 in San Francisco. It raised $26.3M so far. The platform allows users to connect with remote teams, manage meetings and collaborate on ideas and concepts using whiteboards. It improves team productivity by streamlining project activities and performance. Miro’s clients include Netflix, Twitter, UpWork, IKEA, Cisco, and Spotify. Like many productivity apps, Miro integrates with a multitude of productivity solutions including Slack, Dropbox, Google Drive, Trello, Slideshare, Unsplash, The Noun Project, YouTube, Vimeo, and Asana, which allow projects to be managed efficiently across distributed teams. Here is a video about Miro. Here is a more extensive introduction. 

Mural is another online brainstorming and visual collaboration platform that eases the delivery of constructive design, commentary and problem solving across functional and cross geographical design workstreams. Also, launched in San Francisco in 2011 it raised $24.3M, $23M of which were raised in January 2020. It may be why I am receiving so much digital and social marketing content from Mural! Mural provides an interface where users can share their ideas and concepts in a structured way. The tools also include a series of useful and pre-loaded templates and frameworks. The interface allows live conversations and voting to speed decision making. Here is a video. 

• Product, interface design and prototyping platforms 

For those of you keen to see live prototypes as you progress your work with your clients, you may find the two following platforms some of the very best solutions in the category.

I will start with Figma, a browser-based digital design platform that allows open design cultures to come to life for design and technical teams. It is called the google of design tools as it provides a great library of integrated components and enables users to gather feedback online in one place. Figma is actually the younger tool of the two prototyping tools described here. The startup was launched in San Francisco in 2012 and raised $83M, $40M were raised last in Feb 2019. The platform allows distributed teams to collaboratively, transparently and in real-time design and create prototypes at the product development stage. The platform can be used for UI/UX designs, graphic designs, and wireframing. Figma’s customers include Square, Twitter, Microsoft, Slack, Uber, Pivotal, Braintree, and Trello to name but a few. 

You can find out more about Figma’s customers here and the Figma tool here. For those interested in designing end-to-end eCommerce websites, this video may be useful. 

Launched in 2010, Sketch is a much older subscription-based product design toolkit. Indeed, Sketch has been in the market for the longest, it is seen as the industry standard and as such, has an extensive list of plugins to make designers’ lives easier when prototyping. It provides solutions for prototyping, vector editing, non-destructive editing, code export, preset export, etc. While the tool is easy to use, the main challenge reported is that it is only available as a desktop option for Mac laptops. Sketch clients include Google, Facebook, Apple, Porsche, and Nintendo.

One of the exciting tools that came to the market to support Sketch is a collaboration application for UI designers & frontend developers called Zeplin.io. In short, Zeplin helps you handover your Sketch designs to developers and technical teams. It turns your designs into specs and provides tailored guidelines and document properties of UI elements for the developers. It also generates color palettes automatically from the colors used, export codes and resources for iOS, Android and Web. Some key clients include Slack, Pinterest, Prezi, and Shopify.

To decide which prototyping tool is best for you, do check this video published in Feb 2020. 

• Live testing and experimentations with real clients

Another side of testing, which is essential for product teams and marketeers, is actually evaluating your concept with real customers without damaging your brand.

Incorporated in 2012 in Melbourne, UsabilityHub is a platform that offers a comprehensive suite of testing tools. It helps a user uncover design issues early, preventing wasted time, wasted effort, and user (e.g. buyer) frustration. So for those having to deliver experiments, minimum viable products, and websites, the tool enables remote users to test designs to help designers and developers make confident design choices and decisions. The professional account option provides users, teams, agencies, and UX professionals with a full-featured testing environment with features like demographic targeting, A/B testing, post-test redirection, and team collaboration. UsabilityHub’s most renowned customers include Adobe, Zappos, eBay, Zendisk, Google, Spotify, Microsoft and Expedia, to name but a few.

Validately is another online platform that enables users to test a prototype or feature before coding it. Users can validate the demand, the response rate and the usability of clickable products, recruit product-specific testers, and analyze the results by watching user videos. Validately’s customers include Salesforce, Discovery Channel, American Express, StubHub, ShutterStack, The Economist, among the few.

On the marketing automation side, an interesting tool is San Francisco-based Instapage. The venture builds tools that make landing page marketing easy and automated. Launched in 2011, the venture has raised $17.1M so far. Instapage claims to be backed by award-winning design and the largest community of conversion marketers on the planet.

Another marketing automation and conversion rate optimization tool is Vancouver based Unbounce. Since 2009, Unbounce has helped marketers to test and build landing pages. The platform enables marketers to create, publish and A/B test landing pages. I seen this tool used in just a few moments to build and test quickly user experiments. It offers 80+ templates and a cloud-based builder. It also allows users to capture leads on their landing page and send them directly to MailChimp, Salesforce, AWeber, Constant Contact. 

I realize that I did not tackle any of the more operational tools we also use on a day-to-day basis to move the business forward. These would include personal assistant and scheduling tools - x.ai or Calendly, as well as sales and marketing tools - Marketo and Hubspot - among others. There are so many other tools that integrate with one another to make digital businesses easy to operate. And I will leave you with this shortlist at this stage.

We are in the age of digitization and the 4th industrial revolution. It is real. Everything we do is gradually moving to the cloud. All of us have pretty much to jump onto the bandwagon, or some of us will be left behind. Many of us can today work and connect with distributed teams anywhere in the world regardless of business constraints.

Do spend some time investigating the digital tools and platforms that make the most sense for you. Also, remember that digital transformation and innovation will gradually touch everything we do. Tools are tools. Mastering how best to use and integrate them in your day-to-day is key at the end so that we can all focus on delivering true, transparent and effective business value!

Get started. Enjoy. Be creative.

Do not hesitate to reply to this blog if you have any views to share or questions for me.

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