Lockdown, Not Knockdown: #3 Productivity & Collaboration Software

Digital Industries Booming in The Covid Era

Read my other articles in this series: #1 and #2 .

As I was saying in my previous article , working from home has definitely made us less fashionable. In fact, back in early 2020, many companies were fearing that their employees, depressed and irritated by constant lockdowns, would replace working from home with watching Netflix, eating chips, and living in a robe. However, as the recent Wharton research paper , developed in partnership with Microsoft and the Boston Consulting Group, suggests, they were wrong.

Interviewing 9,000 managers and employees from companies in 15 European countries, the paper revealed that 39% of the respondents were equally as productive working from home as they were from their office, while another 34% claimed to have been more productive at home. I strongly identify with the latter group.

This article takes a better look at the tools that have been helping us stay productive. Sure enough, those tools have been around for much longer than the pandemic, however, it took Covid and its side effects, such as the abovementioned working from home, to really catapult the productivity software into the spotlight.

Someone who had rarely used Microsoft Teams before the pandemic, I am now one of its 115 million daily users (an impressive 26% increase compared to before Covid). That said, I will not be talking about the ubiquitous industry titans such as Microsoft or Google here, nor will I be focusing on the pandemic-induced and sensational growth of video and web conferencing (the word is Zoom) because all these already have enough people talking about them. Rather, my preference is to look at smaller startups that are now competing with Google and Microsoft as equals.

Productivity/collaboration software

The birth of personal and team productivity software goes back to the 1980s, coinciding with the advent of office suites. Office suites encompass word processing, spreadsheet, presentation tools, and graphics, among other things. Microsoft Office was pretty much the only game in town. In the late 1990s, questions like: "Mom, can I please please turn on the computer and spend 15 minutes drawing in Paint?" were not an anomaly, because apparently, Microsoft Paint was trending those days. (I can neither confirm nor deny that I am talking about myself here).

30 or so years after, Microsoft is still the dominant player in the office software space, but Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) is steadily catching up. However, with the rise of remote working in the last decade, and its peak in 2020/21, it was clear that the traditional office suite couldn't cater to the diversity of individual preferences. Much like the traditional paper agenda planner that, due to its lack of personalization, gave rise to the explosion of bullet journaling, office suites gained substantial competition in the 2010s in form of smaller and customizable project management software.

Sure, both Google and Microsoft offer communication, task management, knowledge management, and presentation tools, but are their solutions all-encompassing? What works well in a large bureaucratic setting, might not be suitable for a small startup or even an individual remote worker. This and similar considerations brought about the birth of numerous niches within the productivity market, valued at around US$ 70 billion in 2021.

What had been a non-critical issue before, in 2020 it became vital. As mentioned by Gartner , the global uncertainty and unpredictability have forced many companies to take a very good look at their process flows, strategy, and decision-making. Having the right tools to do so has become a must.

Team messengers

How many times have you joined a company and were honestly overwhelmed by acronyms, organigrams, and your coworkers' names and roles? Not to mention the documents, folders, and the entire institutional memory that you were unaware of. Of course, when you join an organization, your inbox is at zero. There is so much information you need to consult and rarely is there a proper handover.

Slack , a team messenger tool, was born out of pure coincidence. Its founder, Stewart Butterfield, had originally intended to create a multiplayer video game which ultimately didn't work out. However, Butterfield quickly realized that the system he and his team had created to manage the development process, could be easily reused in other contexts. As a result, Slack was launched in 2013 and quickly found its target audience among web developers. Later on, it expanded to other types of teams.

Slack has been publicly traded since 2019. Its business model is freemium, and it still hasn't reached profitability. Expectedly and much like other companies mentioned in this article, Slack experienced record growth throughout the pandemic and was ultimately purchased by Salesforce, an American cloud computing company, in 2021. Despite its global success, Slack has some downsides, the most important being security and data encryption. As a response to that, numerous Slack competitors arose over the previous years, such as Rocket Chat , Google Hangouts , Flock , Ryver, and many more.

Task and project management

Countless software solutions have emerged over the previous decade as an alternative to managing to-do lists, tasks, and projects on paper sheets, post-its, and whiteboards. It started with Asana whose founders launched a company in 2008 (even though the product officially launched in 2012). Asana is a project management software-as-a-service (SaaS) that allows you to specify goals, distribute tasks, check timelines and monitor progress for teams of any size. The company, which has a freemium business model, went public in September 2020.

If you're a fan of productivity tools, you must be familiar with Kanban. The Kanban approach has been popularized over the previous decade. Kanban means billboard or signboard in Japanese, and is a project management method splitting what needs to be done into categories, such as 'In progress', 'Done', and 'To do'. That way, the overall process is leaner and quickly adapts to newfound reality.

Trello , a task management application launched in 2011, was entirely based on the Kanban technique during the first decade of its existence. It is a collaborative tool that just ahead of the pandemic announced its first 50 million users. Competitors such as monday.com have been trying to steal Trello's thunder by constantly adding functionalities. Consequently, in 2021, Trello was fully rebranded, going beyond Kanban and introducing multi-team, multi-project dashboards, and visualizations. As of 2017, Trello has been owned by Atlassian, the giant behind popular tools Jira and Confluence.

Atlassian is an Australian unicorn founded in 2002 by two college friends. Atlassian applications are mostly used by software developers, but also by project and team managers. Atlassian's flagship project is Jira, a project and issue tracking tool based on Kanban. Much like the competition, Jira works on the freemium model and offers four core packages: Jira Core (project management), Jira Software (for agile project management in software developer), Jira Align (for portfolio and strategic management), and Jira Service Management (for operations). Unsurprisingly, Jira and Atlassian in general have been doing more than well during the pandemic. In 2020, the company hired 1,200 remote workers, and in 2021 it wants to hire another 1,000.

Knowledge management

At this point, everybody is familiar with Dropbox . Founded in 2007, this cloud-storage, file-sharing service revolutionized modern document sharing across teams and individuals. Of course, Microsoft (One Drive ) and Google (Google Drive ) swiftly followed suit, but Dropbox had already made a name for itself. Dropbox, which in its early phase was one of the highest valued American startups, went public in 2018. Despite its overall profitability, it has sparked controversy because of several security breaches .

Beyond file sharing, knowledge management tools (wikis) abound these days. Confluence , Atlassian's wiki, has been around since 2004 and is mostly used by software developers and teams. On the other hand, other well-known apps such as Microsoft OneNote and Google Keep are mostly used by individuals for their personal organization. Evernote , a company that has been around since 2000, started as a note-taking app, which it still is today, but it has grown to be a wiki over time.

Wiki is any website or database developed jointly by different users, allowing them to create and edit content. Wikis for both personal and team use have been growing rapidly over the previous few years. Notion , a San Francisco-based app, was launched in 2016 and grew to be valued at US$2 billion in 2020. Notion says it's a one-in-all workspace allowing you to take notes, manage and share data and knowledge, organize tasks, projects, and teams, and make lists. Like most of the tools described in this article, it is free for individual purposes or small teams.

This article, like all my essays and other personal work, was drafted in Notion; the research for it has been organized and links stored in Notion, too, and I'm using the tool for organizing my life in general. Notion's beautiful interface and functionalities have attracted many millennial and Gen Z users. Thanks to its new API, Notion integrates with Slack, Jira, Google, and more.

The strength of Notion also lies in the fact that it is 100% customizable. Users produce and share templates for all types of purposes. Notion's most prominent competition, Clickup , was founded in 2017 in California and is purportedly valued at $1 billion. The company claims to offer more than Notion at a lower price.

Design templates

The reason why many of us have always dreaded using PowerPoint is that, simply put, we are not designers. (Drawing in Paint was a failed experiment). Creating beautiful presentations and evocative infographics has always been a pain. Not so since Canva arrived.

Another Australian unicorn, Canva , is a graphic design platform where users can create and share presentation templates, social media graphics, posters, documents, and other content. Canva launched in 2012, has been growing ever since, and is used by 55 million users in 190 countries. The company currently has a whopping $15 billion valuation. Canva is free to use, with additional functionalities packaged and priced as Canva Pro and Canva Enterprise. The company also prints and ships the content produced and shared on the platform. Competitors, such as Adobe Spark , PicMonkey , or Crello are all trying to catch up with Canva, but at the moment, that seems to be an insurmountable challenge.

Time management and scheduling

In his 2020 interview with Guy Raz (yes, I am referencing the How I Built This podcast in every article), Tope Awotona, the founder of Calendly , a US scheduling platform, said that when going to investors and presenting his idea, most of them looked at him in disbelief, saying scheduling was a 'solved problem'. Indeed, Google Calendar has been around since 2009, iCal since 2012, and Microsoft Teams (and its built-in calendar) since 2017. Yet what happens when hundreds of users need to decide on a meeting date and time, and they're using different email and calendar providers? How many emails or phone calls does scheduling a meeting under such circumstances take?

In an ideal world, none. Doodle , a Swiss appointment scheduling tool, has been trying to solve that very problem since 2007. Doodle is great for small groups and individual use, but Calendly is more business-oriented and integrates with Outlook, Office 365, and Google. Launched in 2010 in Atlanta, Calendly is currently used by around 10 million users and valued at US$3 billion. Other SaaS alternatives such as YouCanBook.Me , TimeTap , or Setmore are trying to keep up, but Calendly is clearly one of the great pandemic successes.

Make it customizable, practical, safe, simple, and beautiful

If we think of the product life cycle within the productivity and collaboration software space, we can clearly spot which companies mentioned in this article are in which stage. While all-in-one wikis such as Notion and Clickup are in the introduction/early growth stage, companies such as Canva and Calendly are growing aggressively. The traditional, Kanban-based project management platforms such as Asana or the Atlassian tools (Jira, Confluence, Trello), list-making apps such as Evernote, as well as file-sharing platforms such as Dropbox, have reached maturity. Finally, in the world of freemium and Google Workspace, the usage of licensed office suites is rapidly declining.

So what conclusions can we draw? In an industry with disappearing entry barriers, many product substitutes, significant buyers' and providers' power, network effects, as well as the overall fierce competition, it is arguably difficult to survive, but it is not impossible. The four keys to success are security, modularity and customization, simplicity, and all-in-one works

Security. Companies such as Slack, Dropbox, or Zoom have been hacked time and again. In the post-pandemic, flexible work, it is going to be more important than ever to provide lean and secure solutions. Therefore, it is essential to have cybersecurity issues such as leaked passwords, false encryption claims, malware, and other flaws straightened out.

Modularity and customization. Think again of the old-fashioned paper planners for a second. if you're like me, you've been accumulating paper agendas since you were approximately 12 years old. While they've served you well, you have always been on the hunt for more. More space to plan or to take minutes, hourly instead of just daily schedules, more to-do lists. Then the following year, after long and careful research, you would find the planner with those specific requirements; but alas, it would be without a timetable template or a grade-tracker. This agony would go on every year. Lo and behold, bullet journal arrives in the early 2010s. Bullet journaling is a method of customizing a fully empty journal into your own planning and productivity master document. Suddenly, the sky is the limit. You can do it all by yourself.

Something similar happened to digital productivity tools with the arrival of Notion or Canva. On there, everything is made from scratch and is meant to be customizable and shareable. In the end, your workspace is going to be different from mine, but that's perfectly ok because our organizational systems are different, too.

Simplicity. The more intuitive the user experience, the better. Think about fewer clicks, more integration between the tools, lighter footprint. Of course, also think about the interface - forget about clunky.

All-in-one. Finally, even though I deliberately organized this article according to different tools, you have certainly noticed that the trend is towards all-inclusive, rather than granular. While office suites were all the rage twenty years ago, and Kanban boards and to-do lists ten years ago, the busy, creative startup or small business employee of today requires templates up the wazoo, dashboards, portfolios, powerful visuals, and the ability to have everything organized in one space.

In sum: as the prototypical customer changes, so should the productivity tools. Realizing and adapting to that is the formula for thriving.