Generative AIs like OpenAI’s GPT-4, Anthropic Claude and Google Gemini have already changed how SEO is being carried out. If you follow the SEO industry you may already be aware of the dozens of tools and thousands of Youtube videos on using AI to generate content at massive scale to appeal to the Google algorithm to rank a site. For an industry that loves a quick and easy win, AI has been better than Christmas for them.
With the release of OpenAI’s new model, GPT-4o mini, which is powerful enough to generate readable content, its pricing at 60 cents per million output tokens has pushed us across a new threshold. And it is scary.
You can now produce content dynamically for less than the advertising revenue you would receive for a single page visit. In this article, the author shows that generating an article with GPT-4o mini can cost as little as $0.00051525, 5 hundredths of a cent. Google’s Adsense calculator shows that for a site that gets 50,000 visits a month, a single page impression with advertising generates about $0.0026 in revenue per page visit.
This is what they call an arbitrage opportunity.
Whatever approach you take with SEO for your business, this is the competitive environment we will all be operating in.
The current standard practice in SEO is based mainly on winning through volume of content. That content has gone through “on page optimisation” to make sure that it is long enough and that not only does it have all the proper keywords, it has more than the competitors. The pages have been interlinked into “topic clusters” and linked also to “pillar pages” to make them more enticing for the Google Algorithm.
SEO practitioners used to do this by hand. Sometimes with “spinners” that would generate semi-sophisticated mad-lib style articles in bulk. But now it can all be automated.
What is also being automated is the low quality of this content. Content produced to maximise ranking in Google Search results has always been low quality, whether it has been written by hand or generated by AI.
And this is where not just quality, but looking beyond the page, can give you an edge in SEO.
A leak of Google Search related documented earlier this year has given some potential insights into what factors Google uses to rank search results.
One of the most important factors is user experience – how people are interacting with your site when they visit it. Clicks on a page, scrolling through your articles, and how much time they spend on your page, are all major signals.
This is simply engagement and it is so simple it makes sense. High quality, interesting content that visitors engage with results in higher rankings in Google Search results.
Freshness of content is also another factor. This can be a bit of an unfair bias against evergreen content. And forcing sites onto a treadmill of content refreshes of such content feels unfair, but has anyone ever felt the Google Algorithm was fair?
Links from other websites to your own content is also still worth pursuing and has value – depending on the site linking to you.
Finally, Google is not just tracking visits from its own search results pages. It is also tracking visits that arrive from other places, like social media. This is another clue it uses to calculate a site’s ranking.
What does that mean? SEO – Search Engine Optimisation – can’t only be about optimising your content for search engines. Search engine. It’s really all Google, right?
The signals that Google is relying on are richer than just keyword counts on the page. And this is pushing SEO out into the broader spheres of marketing and branding.
And this is a good thing. Because it makes it possible to compete against AI generated content and sites full of keyword heavy content that no human would willingly read.
Choosing the right keywords is still part of SEO, but “keywords” doesn’t mean “magic words”. “Keywords” means clear titles that tell visitors what a page is about. And it means that the content on the page is going to cover the information they are looking for. Without repeating them dozens of times.
It means you need to communicate clearly, and to understand your audience well enough to know what they are looking for, how they are looking for it, and how they themselves talk about it.
Clear communication and understanding your audience. See, SEO is just marketing once you start focusing on quality over quantity.
If visits from social media are a signal to the Algorithm, then of course social media needs to be looked at through the SEO lens.
And it is simply the same formula – clear communication and understanding your audience. Provide them what you know they value and they will interact with your posts, they will follow your links, they will visit your site and they will do business with you.
Learn to think in formats beyond the article. Think short, think concise, think nuggets of wisdom novel insights, and clever “soundbites”. And consider how those same valuable communications, short as they are, can be incorporated into the content on your website and how an insight shared on social media can lead your audience to deeper engagement on your website.
At this level, interacting with your audience, your potential customers, on social media and providing them value – be it knowledge, insight, amusement – you are no longer doing SEO, you’re building your brand.
SEO has been a volume game for years. If you’ve ever used on page optimisation tools you’ve seen it in action. You want to compete for a keyword? Simple, analyse competitor pages that are ranking for those keywords and write a longer article than theirs with more keywords than theirs. You will pop up in the rankings. Until they do the same back to you.
The best thing about this kind of stupid cold war game is that the results are terrible. Adding AI to the mix is making it all happen faster, but the results are not any better. There is a reason that the term online for AI generated content is “slop”. It’s the new spam.
Spending time to understand your audience, providing value and crafting content that they engage with, isn’t simple, but with thought and patience it’s doable.
It won’t be a quick win, but that’s what will allow you to compete against an industry that won’t stop believing in the easy win while they fill the internet with words no human will ever read.
A VC’s Product-Market Fit FrameworkProduct-Market Fit is one of those business goals that is easy to understand but that doesn’t come with any clear guidance on how to reach it. Everyone has a playbook for achieving Product-Market Fit and a lot of it is survivorship bias with a pinch of commonsense.
In this article we’re going to give you a quick rundown of a VCs take on Product-Market Fit. The VC is First Round Capital and they’re basing their approach to Product-Market Fit on the experiences of the 500 startups they’ve funded, including several unicorns.
The structure and advice is aimed primarily at sales-led B2B startups. You’ll see that they talk about length of sales cycles and integration times. These aren’t concerns B2C startups need to worry about. Even if your business isn’t B2B there are still some useful insights to gain from their model.
First Round Capital, FRC for short, calls their PMF “extreme Product-Market Fit”. That’s some tasty positioning.
FRC splits their PMF model into 4 levels composed of 3 “dimensions” of fit with 4 “levers” you can tweak to fix your fit.
The levels:
The dimensions:
Satisfaction – How much do your customers like your product? How badly do they need it?
Demand – How long does it take to close a sale? How many of your sales are outbound vs inbound?
Efficiency – This is all those numbers that startups should obsess over:
The levers:
The Persona – This is just Ideal Customer Profile with the numbers filed off. You can tweak this by making it broader or narrower – HR Managers vs HR Managers in Fortune 10,000 Financial services?- or changing it all together.
The Problem – Ideally a pain point that your Persona will do anything to be rid of. You want to look for urgency and huge upside for the client from your solution. If you’ve picked the wrong problem you may need to pivot
The Promise – Your Unique Value Proposition. It’s not your product, it’s how you communicate the benefit your product will deliver. Be prepared to fiddle with this as you learn more about your customers and as your product matures.
The Product – What you’re building. Will it deliver on your promise and are people willing to pay for it?
FRC have used their experience across their stable of startups to establish clear criteria on what level a startup is at. This is a very VC-focused model, but if you ignore mention of funding rounds and look at the other criteria you’ll be able to see where you fit in.
For each level they provide their take on which of the 3 Dimensions of Satisfaction, Demand and Efficiency you need to be spending your time on, and they are sensible. Though how you shift those dimensions using the 4 Levers or Person, Problem, Promise and Product they leave out.
They like to cover that in person, and, really, the 4 levers are the heart of your business model and aren’t amenable to advice given in a document as broadly applicable as a framework is. There is no generic advice that will help you fix your Product or anybody’s Product. That’s why startups are hard.
Let’s look at their levels.
At Level 1 you’re a nobody making promises. You’re relying on your personal network to find customers and your conversion rate is terrible.
Here’s the basic criteria according to FRC Level 1:
To make it to the next level they suggest you focus on Satisfaction. Getting to 5 customers who really need your product because it solves a problem puts you on the path to doing the same for 50.
At this stage you should start to feel like you’re on the path to PMF. You’re landing customers from outside your network. Organic growth is kicking in.
Here’s FRC’s criteria for Level 2. Note the low customer count. FRC’s PMF model is very much targeted at products with a 5 to 6 figure+ Annual Contract Value (ACV):
To make it to the next level you really need to work on Demand and how to generate it. You can grind your way to 20 customers, but you can’t 5-10x that effort and simply keep grinding your way to 100 or 20 customers.
You need something generating Demand on your behalf.
The most helpful Levers for pushing on Demand are typically fine-tuning your product positioning and finding scalable channels, whether that’s outbound sales, SEO, paid marketing, referral or a combination of these.
Level 3 – Strong
When you’re at Level 3 you’ve basically made it. Demand is inbound and growing. Customers know your name. You’re able to onboard customers with minimal or no customisation while still delivering value they are happy to pay your contract for.
Here’s the criteria for Level 3:
The business is working. To reach the next level you need to focus on Efficiency. Some numbers need to go up – work on getting your LTV:CAC ratio over 3. Other numbers need to go down – reduce your CAC payback time below 18 months. You’re a mature business with processes that work. Optimise them to get to the next level.
Everyone knows who you are. Your efforts are spent scaling and streamlining. You’ve found PMF and you’re getting close to addressing your Total Addressable Market (TAM).
Guess what? That thing you did – create a product and drive it to PMF? Now you need to do that again. And again.
Here are the criteria for Level 4:
There’s no moving beyond Level 4 of PMF. To keep growing you simply need to repeat the process. There are four ways to do this that leverage everything you’ve learned and built:
This was a condensed version of First Round Capital’s approach to PMF. You can read the full 13,000 word version here. You probably should. It goes into greater detail, has great examples and interesting interviews with founders on their journey to Product-Market Fit.
As we said, it is tailored to B2B startups with $$$ Annual Contracts, but there’s a lot of quality experience and insight packed into it that everyone looking to found a startup can learn from.
The tools your team needs to work asyncA step beyond simply remote workers, an async team isn’t hampered by time zone differences. By working within the constraint of non-overlapping working hours an async team can unlock productivity gains.
Asynchronous working is a model where team members operate independently, setting their own schedules without the need to be online simultaneously.
Most asynchronous teams are remote teams, where different members are in different time zones. But they don’t have to be. A team could share an office and work asynchronously.
Async relies heavily on clear documentation, intentionality, and trust.
With intentionality, everyone needs to be thinking ahead, on their day, on their week, and on the current project cycle. This intentionality leads to better decision making, greater accountability, and increased productivity.
That intentionality, at all levels, is reflected in documentation. This encompasses “check-ins” where team members record their plans and results for the day/week in a shared document and the reasoning and results behind decisions as the occur.
This increased level of process documentation provides trust in the progress being made and trust in the performance of the team.
For this article, we’re going to give quick overview of the tools that can be used for documenting an async team’s progress.
When you’re working async you want a single place where everyone on the team (or in the organisation) can look to for documentation.
It needs to be shared, extendable, and, if possible, easily integrated with the other tools you use.
At the lowest level this is a folder on Google Drive that everyone can access. You can make it work, but the UX will cause a lot of friction.
Products like Coda, Notion, Confluence, and Basecamp are collaboration platforms that provide a single place for all documentation.
They’re customisable, team members can collaborate in real time on single documents or asynchronously.
They provide commenting features so feedback and discussions can be shared to progress group decision making asynchronously. These are paired with notifications so feedback isn’t missed and can be addressed in a timely manner.
Depending on your choice for your single source of truth, your platform might also cover your project management needs.
This includes breaking projects down into tasks of the right granularity, scheduling, assigning team members, and then tracking their progression from start to finish.
Coda, Notion and Basecamp have kanban board-style task management built in, while Confluence can be integrated with Jira and Trello, products also provided by Atlassian, Confluence’s developer.
Basecamp is at heart a project management system with additional collaboration features. Coda and Notion are general collaboration tools that you can use to build more complex project management processes on top of their kanban features.
Confluence is a collaborative knowledgebase, but Atlassian’s Jira is a powerful, dedicated project management tool that integrates tightly with it.
If you have sophisticated project management requirements, you should investigate Confluence + Jira first.
If you don’t mind a very opinionated but straightforward project management tool, then Basecamp is a strong option.
If you have the time and the inhouse skills to roll your own project management system, then Coda and Notion are the perfect tools for developing just the features that you need.
Email is great, but it’s best as a one-to-one medium, and even then the information contained in an email thread ends up hidden in a couple of inboxes. No-one else in the team can do anything with it.
This is where a messaging service like Slack comes in. Using it does take discipline. One of the core tenets of async work is not requiring an immediate response from other team members. This is contrary to the idea of an instant messaging platform like Slack.
An async team needs to use Slack as a public message board rather than as a live chat. With this there is some overlap with your Single Source of Truth (and most offer integrations with Slack).
However, there will always be times when live, synchronous communication is the best solution for resolving an issue. Slack can be one of the tools for this situation.
As effective as hopping into a Slack chat to resolve an issue can be, nothing beats a video call. But they need to be used sparingly and respectfully. With a global team it is possible to have team members with no time zone overlap. That’s when you need clear and fair ways to decide who is taking calls in the middle of the night.
For those synchronous discussions, Zoom and Google Meet are the most popular, though many corporate teams also use Microsoft Teams.
For async video – perhaps as process documentation or providing background for a request or as material to review before a meeting – Loom is the popular choice. The simplicity it provides in recording screens along with voiceover, and the ease of sharing videos, makes it the goto tool for these kinds of videos.
Your team covers a variety of roles, each with their own specialised tools. The ones we’ve covered in this article are the basics you need to look at when you want to start working asynchronously:
Using these tools as a starting point for your own experiments in async working, you can start building a more flexible and effective remote team.
Vanta’s Path to Product-Market FitIn 2007 Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape as well as the VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, published a blog article titled “The only thing that matters”. You can still read it today. It is considered to be the driver that pushed the concept of Product-Market Fit into the spotlight for tech startups.
The idea of Product-Market Fit was originally coined by Andy Rachleff, a VC and startup CEO, who Andreessen quotes in his article:
Rachleff’s Corollary of Startup Success:
The only thing that matters is getting to product/market fit.
Rachleff started out in VC when tech startups were hardware focused – making a disk that was 10x faster or a router with 1/10 the latency. The challenge for hardware startups was always could they actually build the hardware that delivered the numbers they were promising. If they did, customers would throw money at them. These hardware startups had a high technical risk, but a very low market risk. A 10x improvement in anything would sell itself.
With the rise of the internet, software companies began to dominate the startup scene, but they had the opposite problems of hardware startups – very low technical risk and very high market risk. A software startup, and their investors, could have high confidence that they would be able to deliver the product – it was just coding, not wrestling with physics or manufacturing – but no way to be sure if anyone would buy it.
This had an interesting effect on startup investment, splitting the market into seed investors who were willing to shoulder the risk to help startups launch and, once their market was proven, traditional venture capital who would pay a premium to buy-in at later rounds.
So, product/market fit is important, it’s valuable, and it’s essential if a startup wants to grow into a unicorn.
Product/Market Fit sounds a lot like making sure a product is right for a market. That it “fits”. And it seems obvious. This gives too much emphasis on the market and misses that Product-Market Fit is a two piece puzzle for the startup. It needs both pieces.
The market needs to also fit the product. It needs to want the product. It needs to want the product badly enough to pay a good price for the product. And it needs to be big enough to buy lots of the product. You can’t build a business on a great product that everyone in the market wants and loves if the market has only a handful of customers.
Perhaps it should really be Product & Market Fit.
To explore Product-Market Fit we’re going to look at the example of Vanta, a certification compliance tool provider, and their journey to product-market fit and how, in creating their product, they created a market everyone else had overlooked or underestimated.
Vanta helps businesses achieve and maintain certification for a variety of standards. Initially they focused on SOC 2, a US-centric standard but often held by non-US companies who want to do business with US organisations. They have since expanded into ISO27001, HIPAA, GDPR and other certifications.
They use a subscription-based model, and given the importance of certification and the huge amount of time it takes to obtain, monitor and maintain it, they can charge 4,5, and even 6 figure annual subscription fees depending on the size of the client and the certifications they require. And the clients are happy to pay them because they understand how much money Vanta is saving them.
So Vanta is in a nice spot (ignoring competition for the moment). But it took a while to get there. The founder and CEO, Christina Cacioppo, persisted through 4 major stages of product experience over the 5 years it took for her to go from starting to create products to finding and developing the idea that would lead to Vanta.
Cacioppo got her start working as an analyst for Union Square Ventures in New York, where she spent her time evaluating companies seeking investment and meeting with their founders.
Regular meetings with founders through her role gave her the confidence to start her own company:
“I got to the point where I said, ‘I do want to go start a company.’ But I wanted it to be a software company, and I didn’t know how to code. And I knew a lot of non-programmers started companies, but I didn’t want to go that route. So I resigned, took my bonus and taught myself to code and build products,” she says.
The products she built were not successful. They included a book tracking website, a video messaging app for Android and a startup job board. While none of her ideas grew into sustainable businesses, they did teach her that she needed product development experience. So for the next stage in the Vanta product path she joined Dropbox in 2014 and worked for two years as a product manager on their Paper product.
It was here that she got her first exposure to security and compliance. As a product manager on Paper, she wanted Dropbox to push it to new accounts when they signed up for Dropbox’s file sharing service. Dropbox’s legal department shut that down, telling her that Dropbox was SOC 2 compliant and Paper wasn’t, bundling Paper would invalidate contracts requiring compliance, and that it would take 18 months to make Paper SOC 2 compliant. For Cacioppo that was the end of bundling Paper with Dropbox.
In 2016, after two years at Dropbox, Cacioppo left to try again at starting her own company. Following trends at the time – speech was big, Amazon Alexa was exciting – she pursued several product ideas.
First was an AWS drop shipping solution for e-commerce merchants. Next was an AI tool for transcribing meetings. Another was a microphone that transcribed notes into Slack. Part of the problem was that speech-to-text AI wasn’t really there yet, and the other was that these products were generic “business tools” that no-one really wanted..
She then took a step back and tried to find a use case for the speech tech they had spent so much time with. She found that use case in biologists doing lab work.
“They’re doing things with their hands, they have gloves, they’re working with chemicals. Imagine trying to type out notes while you’re cooking a complicated meal,” Cacioppo explains.
The biologists loved the microphone and iPad app Cacioppo and her team built for them. She had product fit. But there was a problem – “…the market for this was the size of my thumb…,” Cacioppo explains.
There was no market fit. She had a great product, but not one that a sustainable business could be built around.
At this point Cacioppa and her team stopped relying on brainstorming product ideas and took a leaf from the Lean Startup playbook and began a process of customer discovery.
“We decided we weren’t allowed to build anything at all. We had to just talk to people—and talk to them until we had a lot of confidence and a mental model of customers, their jobs, the problems they might have and how we might solve them.”
This is where Caciopppo’s time at Union Square Ventures and Dropbox paid dividends. She had a network of potential customers she could talk to, including coworkers who themselves had moved onto to found their own startups.
But when you talk to your potential customers, who can have widely different experiences, how do you know when you understand their common problem well enough to start building?
Her team had a nice heuristic for making this call – “…we decided we had to keep having these conversations until three-quarters of it was stuff we already knew”.
By sitting down with people and doing basic things like talking through their calendar with them – the highlights and the challenges – it did not take long to stumble onto security as an area of interest, and compliance as a challenge within that area.
It did help that Cacioppo was aware of how many large security businesses there were. It wasn’t just a large market, it was enormous.
Drawing on her own difficulties with compliance working on Paper at Dropbox, Cacioppo and her co-founder at the time decided to focus on SOC 2 compliance.
SOC 2 ensures service providers handle their clients’ data securely and responsibly. It is detailed and covers security, integrity, availability, privacy and confidentiality of data. Which also covers just about every process in a business. They all touch data to deliver their services.
An established strategy for founders early in their product ideation is to do things that don’t scale. One day their SaaS will be a software driven unicorn, but today, at the beginning, they need to do things manually, in person, to validate their product with their first customers. It’s hard work and people are reluctant to try it. Cacioppo wasn’t.
The first version of Vanta wasn’t even software. It was a consultation and a spreadsheet. Caciooppo interviewed the team at a startup called Segment and produced a gap assessment in spreadsheet form that they could use to guide Segment’s SOC 2 compliance.
Their next step was to ask the question, “Would this spreadsheet work as-is for anyone else?”. That is, was SOC 2 compliance standardisable? Could they productise it? And the answer, after the same spreadsheet was well-received by a second startup, was “Yes”.
So, like many startups of the era, Vanta took a spreadsheet and built an SaaS around it. But initially there wasn’t much Software in their Service. There were forms where customers could enter AWS credentials, but behind the scenes Vanta employees, often Cacioppo in the early days, would pull the data by hand and enter it manually before returning the report to the customer. They told these early customers that their software “was slow”.
From that manual start they continued to build out the software to automate and integrate the compliance process with customers’ operations.
At this time Vanta was accepted into the Y Combinator startup accelerator program. This gave them access to hundreds of other startups who became a source of customers.
SOC 2 compliance is all about proving that you have all the necessary security controls and procedures in place to protect client data. Achieving compliance is time consuming and expensive. More so if you need to pay a consultant to guide you through the process.
By productising the SOC 2 compliance process – creating a user-friendly interface to the numerous checklists, developing integrations to third party service providers, providing progress tracking and team features like collaboration and task assignment – Vanta took a time-consuming process that required expertise and a huge amount of domain knowledge and reduced it to the point where it was almost a data entry task. And that task could be shared across an organisation instead of having one person, or a small team, devoted full time to carrying it out.
The outcome of this was an increase in the number of businesses achieving SOC 2 certification. And as a startup, why wouldn’t you? It was required for some industries, like financial services and healthcare, and it was required by enterprise clients who saw it as part of securing their supply chain. It made your business look good and at the same time increased your own security by forcing the adoption of best practices across all of your processes.
Those businesses achieving SOC 2 compliance were doing it through Vanta. Between their initial seed round with Y Combinator in 2018 for $3,000,000, when they had a handful of clients, and their series A round in May 2021, Vanta had grown to 1000+ customers and ARR of $10,000,000.
These numbers, along with their $50,000,000 Series A round at a pre-money valuation of $500,000,000, raised a lot of eyebrows and inspired competitors to jump into the market, including:
Despite the competition, the market continues to grow and Vanta grows with it. Vanta now has over 5,000 customers and their current valuation stands at $1.6 billion, a true unicorn in a market they helped create.
A story like Vanta is great because we get to see the missteps and the delays, allowing us to skip straight to what works.
What works is customer discovery, validation, and having a network.
Customer discovery works. Talking to potential customers, as many as you can. Listening to them and understanding their problems and finding the commonalities that can point towards a product.
But customer discovery may not be straightforward. Cacioppo had distinct advantages when she started the process. Her time at Union Square Ventures gave her an insider’s knowledge of how venture capital and startups worked. Not just the process, but as an analyst she would have had access to information on business structures and budgets, etc. And she came away with the beginnings of a success-focused network.
Her time at Dropbox helped expand her network and gave her not just practical product experience, but also firsthand experience at the challenges businesses face as they execute. For her, it was the challenge of compliance.
Finally, validating your product works. Validating your product idea in the quickest and most immediate way possible, even if it is manual and hard to do. Better a week of long hours over the keyboard rather than months of coding to discover no-one cares.
There is no predictable path from idea to unicorn, but hopefully this article pointed the way to shortening your path.
The lessons might save you a few years of development on your next product. Or you might now be thinking it’s time to get a job and build up experience and contacts in the industry you’re interested in. That could also save you a few years in the long run as you search for the perfect product.
Unlocking Growth: Smart Resource Allocation For Digital Products
Your business is built on software and software is expensive to build because it is hard to build. You’re an SME so allocating your limited resources strategically is essential. This article will cover how to assess your current resources and capabilities, identify the best areas for innovation and ROI, and allocate resources to support your strategic growth initiatives.
It’s a complex process, so we’re going to give a quick overview of the strategies and decision-making involved so you know where to start and what you should be looking for.
To illustrate resource allocation we’re going to use the same imaginary company we use in all the articles in this series – Conferensity. They’re a B2B event management platform with aspirations to become a comprehensive conference solution.
Their strategy involves expanding their web-based software’s capabilities and developing two apps – one for conference admins and another for attendees.
While these are three digital products, 1 website and 2 apps, there is actually a fourth project – the updated backend that will implement the features the website and apps will provide interfaces for. This backend will also require extensive work to provide all the necessary admin features to manage the new frontend features. By dedicating their resources to these four digital projects Conferensity is actively working towards achieving their primary business objective.
Here is some of what they want their products to do:
Their first app will be for conference admins, duplicating the client-accessible website’s functionality. The second app, designed for attendees, will allow attendees to reserve seats, purchase tickets to the conference, and pay for any related services, purchase refreshments and merchandise. It will also have features like schedules and venue maps, presentation start reminders, live questions via chat rooms, presentation feedback, and special features for speakers.
Their strategy encompasses a website overhaul and the launch of two apps supported by a robust back-end system. The success of these digital projects is critical to achieving their goal of increased market share and revenue.
A comprehensive evaluation of your resources is essential for effective strategic planning. This assessment provides a clear understanding of your strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement, enabling you to make informed decisions about resource allocation and project prioritisation.
There are a lot of resource areas you can look at. But we think the five below are the ones that are going to really make or break your plans. By carefully examining the following five key resource areas, you can ensure that your project goals are in line with your capabilities:
To identify areas for growth, you need to conduct an analysis of market trends, customer needs, the competitive landscape, and your own internal capabilities. This assessment provides insights to pinpoint opportunities that can drive growth.
The process begins with market research to understand emerging industry trends and identify customer needs. By engaging with customers through surveys, feedback mechanisms, and user testing, you can gain insights into their experiences and expectations.
This customer-centric approach is essential for uncovering opportunities to enhance the product or service offering in meaningful ways. Equally important is benchmarking against competitors to identify areas where your business can differentiate and capture a larger share of the market.
Analysing the competitive landscape reveals gaps in the current solutions, allowing you to strategically position your innovations to stand out and appeal to target customers.
In parallel, you must assess your own internal capabilities, evaluating the technological feasibility of potential innovations. This involves conducting technical studies to ensure the planned developments can be realistically achieved with the available resources and expertise.
Financial projections are then used to estimate the potential return on investment, considering the costs of development, marketing, and sales efforts.
By taking this comprehensive approach, you can identify the most promising areas for innovation – those that are not only desirable from a market perspective, but also viable and financially sound for you to pursue.
This strategic alignment between market needs, competitive positioning, and internal capabilities is crucial for maximising the impact and return on innovation investments.
Conferensity, a B2B event management platform, provides a good example of how to identify areas for innovation that can deliver ROI. Let’s break down their process:
When allocating resources, you need to make strategic decisions to ensure each investment supports the company’s growth goals and maximizes ROI. Let’s look at the decisions Conferensity made and the reasoning behind them. This can serve as a guide for other SMEs allocating their resources.
Conferensity recognised that the attendee app was a critical touchpoint for user engagement and revenue generation. They decided to allocate their most skilled developers to this project, ensuring that the app’s user experience and functionality would be of the highest quality.
This focus on development resources was based on the understanding that a superior attendee app could significantly enhance the overall event experience, leading to increased user retention and higher transaction volumes.
To efficiently progress with their backend development, Conferensity opted for staff augmentation by partnering with a near-shore team extension provider. This strategy allowed them to extend their software development team with experienced professionals who could handle the standard backend features. The benefits of this approach included cost savings compared to hiring full-time staff, access to a broader skill set, and the ability to scale the team up or down as needed. This flexible staffing solution enabled Conferensity to maintain focus on their core competencies while ensuring timely and efficient progress on their backend infrastructure.
Investing in cloud infrastructure was a strategic move for Conferensity to support the scalability and reliability of their expanded platform. They understood that as their user base grew, the demand on their system would increase. By choosing a scalable cloud solution, they ensured that their platform could handle this growth without compromising performance, thus providing a seamless experience for their users and maintaining a high level of customer satisfaction.
Conferensity allocated a significant portion of their resources to the marketing and sales efforts for the new apps. They targeted high-profile events to generate buzz and early adoption, understanding that these events would provide the visibility needed to attract more users. The alignment of marketing and sales efforts was crucial to ensure that the message about the new apps reached the right audience at the right time, ultimately driving adoption and revenue.
Adopting agile practices allowed Conferensity to manage their resources with flexibility. They could swiftly reallocate resources in response to feedback and market demands, ensuring that their projects remained on track and aligned with user needs. This approach to resource management was instrumental in allowing Conferensity to adapt to changes quickly, whether in response to user feedback or shifts in the market landscape.
The allocation of resources for web and app development is an important task for you when pursuing innovation and market share. By evaluating your current resources and capabilities, identifying areas with potential for growth and ROI, and making decisions about resource allocation, you can support your growth initiatives. This approach ensures that each investment is aligned with your company’s objectives, utilising resources and positioning your business for success in the digital landscape.
Getting Resource Management Right In Active ProjectsYou’ve spent weeks, maybe months, working out detailed plans on how you’re going to make building your app or your website work. But reality isn’t very cooperative. Perhaps your schedule starts to drift. Maybe revenue doesn’t hit the level you predicted. Does your plan need to change or do you simply need to take a different approach?
This article explores strategies for optimising resource allocation and management and navigating trade-offs between time, cost, and quality.
This is a broad topic, a huge topic, so for this article we will focus on five key resources:
To illustrate resource management we’re going to use the same imaginary company we use in all the articles in this series – Conferensity. They’re a B2B event management platform with aspirations to become a comprehensive conference solution.
Their strategy involves expanding their web-based software’s capabilities and developing two apps – one for conference admins and another for attendees. While these are three digital products, 1 website and 2 apps, there is actually a fourth project – the updated backend that will implement the features the website and apps will provide interfaces for. This backend will also require extensive work to provide all the necessary admin features to manage the new frontend features.
By dedicating their resources to these four digital projects Conferensity is actively working towards achieving their primary business objective. Here is some of what they want their products to do:
manage venue communication and arrangements (such as contracts, venue layout, and extra services like conference Wi-Fi, local tours, etc)
handle communication with speakers, panel members, and guests (including contracts, accommodation, presentation reservations, and travel), and
provide opportunities to make purchases through the app for everything from refreshments to accommodation and perhaps one day flights.
Their first app will be for conference admins, duplicating the client-accessible website’s functionality. The second app, designed for attendees, will allow attendees to reserve seats, purchase tickets to the conference, and pay for any related services, purchase refreshments and merchandise. It will also have features like schedules and venue maps, presentation start reminders, live questions via chat rooms, presentation feedback, and special features for speakers.
Their strategy encompasses a website overhaul and the launch of two apps supported by a robust back-end system. The success of these digital projects is critical to achieving their goal of increased market share and revenue.
Broadly, resource management needs a strategic approach to ensure that every investment contributes to your overarching business goals. These are the basic strategies you should apply across every aspect of your product development:
Now let’s look at specific recommendations for each of the 5 main resources we’re concerned with.
When it comes to managing your project’s financial resources, the first step is to create a detailed budget plan. This means breaking down the costs for each phase of the project and allocating funds accordingly. It’s important to be as comprehensive as possible, accounting for everything from software licences to employee salaries. Using tools like Xero or QuickBooks can make this process a lot easier, helping you track expenses and stay within budget. But creating a budget is just the beginning.
To really stay on top of your project’s finances, you need to schedule regular financial reviews. These assessments give you a chance to take a closer look at where you’re overspending or underspending, and make adjustments as needed. It’s a bit like checking your project’s financial vital signs – if something looks off, you can take action before it becomes a bigger problem.
Even with the most careful planning, unexpected expenses can still pop up. That’s why it’s smart to set aside a portion of your budget as a contingency fund. This is basically a financial safety net that ensures minor setbacks don’t completely derail your project.
How big is the contingency fund? That depends on your risk factors. If you have a lot of confidence in your success, then 5% – 10% is a good rule of thumb. If you are building a new product and your team’s experience is limited in this area, then 10% – 20% is the norm, but you might want to go even higher.
Conferensity chose to allocate a significant portion of their financial resources to the development of their backend system, as it was the foundation for their website and apps. They also set aside a contingency fund to cover any unexpected costs that might arise during the development process.
When it comes to managing your project’s human capital, the first step is to take a good, hard look at your team’s skills. You need to figure out where the gaps are and decide whether it makes sense to train your existing staff or bring in some fresh talent. It all depends on your timeline and how quickly you need to get things up and running.
Hiring a bunch of new people can cause major delays, delays that may not make sense if you only need their skills for a short time. That’s where flexible staffing comes in. Consider extending your team via staff augmentation with some near-shore software developers. They can help fill in those skill gaps and handle any temporary spikes in workload without the long-term commitment.
But here’s the thing: no matter how you structure your team, you need to keep them motivated and engaged. It’s not just about getting the work done; it’s about making sure your team is happy and invested in the project’s success. Regular feedback sessions, recognition programs, and opportunities for growth can go a long way in retaining your top talent. Losing the wrong people is a risk you need to manage because it can cause huge setbacks.
In Conferensity’s case, they decided to invest in short course targeted training for their existing development team to make sure they had the skills to build the critical backend system. But they also brought on board an extended team to help with the frontend development of the website and apps. By using a mix of training and flexible staffing, they were able to get the right people in place to make their project a success.
No-one invests in bare metal infrastructure out of the gate any more. Cloud-based services like Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft Azure can host your applications and store your data, offering scalability and cost-effectiveness as you find your market. As your business grows, you can easily scale resources without investing in expensive hardware. With the cloud, you pay only for the resources you use, reducing overall IT costs until you reach unicorn scale.
Cloud providers also offer security and reliability, including protections against cyber threats like DDOS, and ensuring data accessibility through robust backup and disaster recovery solutions.
But the cloud is just part of your solution. To streamline your development process, you should look into agile development tools. Jira or Trello, for example, are project management tools that can help you keep your team on track and ensure everyone is working towards the same goals.
When it comes to version control, tools like GitHub or GitLab are important. They allow you to track changes to your codebase and collaborate with your team. Continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) is also worth considering. By automating your build, test, and deployment processes using tools like Jenkins or CircleCI, you can improve your development process. This streamlines your workflow and reduces the risk of manual errors that can slow you down.
Conferensity opted to host their backend system on AWS, taking advantage of its scalability and reliability. They also implemented Jira for project management and GitHub for version control, enabling their development team to work efficiently and collaboratively.
Process automation is a strategy for enhancing operational capabilities and improving efficiency in web and app development. By identifying repetitive tasks and automating them using tools like Jenkins, Ansible, or Puppet,businesses can save time and reduce the risk of errors. This allows development teams to focus on other aspects of the project, contributing to faster delivery and quality products.
Data-driven decision making is another aspect of effective resource management. By leveraging data analytics tools such as Google Analytics or Mixpanel, businesses can gain insights into user behaviour and preferences. This information can then be used to make decisions about product development, prioritising features and improvements that align with user needs and expectations.
By basing decisions on data rather than assumptions, businesses can optimise their resource allocation and ensure that their products meet market demands.
Finally, implementing a quality assurance and testing process is important for ensuring product excellence. This includes testing and bug fixing throughout the development lifecycle. Automation tools like Selenium or Appium can streamline the testing process, reducing the time and effort required while improving the accuracy and consistency of results. By catching and addressing issues early on, businesses can avoid rework and delays, delivering quality products to their users.
Conferensity implemented a data-driven approach to decision making, using analytics tools to track user behaviour and gather feedback. This allowed them to prioritise features and improvements based on actual user needs.
Conducting competitive analysis helps identify opportunities to differentiate your offerings in the market. Tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs provide insights into your competitors’ online presence and marketing strategies, enabling you to make decisions about your own positioning.
Establishing a customer feedback loop helps ensure that your product development aligns with user needs and expectations. By gathering feedback through surveys, interviews, and social media monitoring, you can understand your customers’ preferences and pain points, allowing you to prioritise features and improvements.
Exploring partnerships with businesses or influencers can help expand your reach and strengthen your market position. By collaborating with companies that offer products or services that complement your own, you can tap into new customer segments and enhance the value proposition of your platform.
Conferensity actively monitored their competitors’ offerings and sought out feedback from their users to ensure they were meeting market demands. They also formed strategic partnerships with event venues and vendors to enhance their platform’s value proposition.
In this article we’ve explored various strategies for optimising resource allocation and management in live projects. By focusing on five key areas – financial resources, human capital, technological assets, operational capabilities, and market position – you can effectively navigate the challenges of web and app development.
Through the example of Conferensity, we’ve seen how these strategies can be applied in practice. By creating a detailed budget plan, investing in team training and flexible staffing, leveraging cloud-based services and agile development tools, implementing process automation and data-driven decision making, and conducting competitive analysis and establishing customer feedback loops, Conferensity was able to successfully develop their backend system, website, and apps while strengthening their market position.
Ultimately, effective resource management requires a strategic and holistic approach that aligns with your business objectives and adapts to changing circumstances. By implementing the strategies and practices discussed in this article, you can optimise your resource allocation, improve efficiency, and deliver experiences that meet the needs of your users and thus drive revenue.
Prioritise Success: Set & Track KPIs for Web & App ProjectsWhen it comes to web and app projects, success is not solely determined by meeting deadlines and adhering to budgets. While these factors are undoubtedly important, the true measure of success lies in delivering tangible value that positively impacts your business. This is where Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) play a crucial role.
KPIs are not merely figures on a spreadsheet; they are the vital signs of your project. They provide a clear indication of whether you are progressing as planned or deviating from your intended course. KPIs serve as a guiding light for your decisions, ensuring that you remain focused on the most critical aspects of your project.
In this article, we will cover the importance of setting and tracking KPIs for web and app projects. We will explore a case study of Conferensity, a B2B event management platform, to illustrate how aligning KPIs with strategic goals can drive success.
Additionally, we will discuss the process of identifying the right KPIs, tools and techniques for effective tracking, and the significance of analysing and reporting on these metrics. By the end of this article, you will have a comprehensive understanding of how to prioritise success in your web and app projects through the disciplined application of KPIs.
To illustrate the importance of KPIs, let’s consider Conferensity, a B2B event management platform with aspirations to become a comprehensive conference solution.
Their strategy involves expanding their web-based software’s capabilities and developing two apps – one for conference admins and another for attendees.
While these are three digital products, 1 website and 2 apps, there is actually a fourth project – the updated backend that will implement the features the website and apps will provide interfaces for. This backend will also require extensive work to provide all the necessary admin features to manage the new frontend features. By dedicating their resources to these four digital projects Conferensity is actively working towards achieving their primary business objective.
Here is some of what they want their products to do:
Their first app will be for conference admins, duplicating the client-accessible website’s functionality. The second app, designed for attendees, will allow attendees to reserve seats, purchase tickets to the conference, and pay for any related services, purchase refreshments and merchandise. It will also have features like schedules and venue maps, presentation start reminders, live questions via chat rooms, presentation feedback, and special features for speakers.
Their strategy encompasses a website overhaul and the launch of two apps—one for conference admins and another for attendees—supported by a robust backend system. The success of these digital projects is critical to achieving their goal of increased market share and revenue.
When it comes to selecting KPIs for web and app projects, businesses must consider a wide range of metrics that cover various aspects of their operations. These KPIs can be broadly categorised into financial, customer, operational, and product-related metrics.
Financial KPIs, such as Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR), Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), and Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), provide insights into the financial health and growth potential of the business. These metrics help in making informed decisions about resource allocation, pricing strategies, and long-term financial planning.
Customer-related KPIs, including Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), Churn Rate, Customer Retention Rate, and Net Promoter Score (NPS), focus on understanding the effectiveness of customer acquisition and retention strategies. These metrics help businesses identify areas for improvement in customer experience and loyalty.
Operational KPIs, such as Support Ticket Volume and Resolution Time, Code Deployment Frequency, and Server Uptime/Downtime, measure the efficiency and effectiveness of internal processes. These metrics are crucial for ensuring smooth operations and delivering high-quality services to customers.
Product-related KPIs, including Active Users (Daily/Monthly), User Engagement Score, Feature Usage Rate, and Product Stickiness (DAU/MAU Ratio), provide valuable insights into how users interact with the product. These metrics help in making data-driven decisions about product development, user experience improvements, and feature prioritisation.
For Conferensity, a B2B event management platform, the most relevant KPIs would likely include:
By focusing on these key metrics, Conferensity can make data-driven decisions that align with its strategic goals and drive the success of its web and app projects.
Tracking KPIs effectively requires a combination of tools and techniques tailored to specific metrics.
For financial KPIs like MRR, ARR, and CLV, businesses often rely on financial software such as Xero, QuickBooks, or NetSuite.
These tools can be integrated with billing and subscription management platforms like Chargebee or Recurly to automate revenue tracking and reporting.
Customer-related KPIs, including CAC, Churn Rate, and NPS, can be tracked using CRM systems like Salesforce, HubSpot, or Pipedrive, and pro-actively managed using services like ChurnZero, Totango and GainSight.
These platforms allow businesses to manage customer interactions, monitor customer health, and analyse customer feedback.
Specialised tools like Delighted or Promoter.io can be used to collect and analyse NPS data.
For operational KPIs, such as Support Ticket Volume and Resolution Time, tools like Zendesk, Freshdesk, or Jira Service Desk are commonly used.
These platforms help streamline support processes, track ticket metrics, and generate performance reports.
For monitoring Code Deployment Frequency and Server Uptime/Downtime, businesses may use tools like New Relic, Datadog, or Pingdom.
Product-related KPIs, such as Active Users, User Engagement Score, and Feature Usage Rate, can be tracked using product analytics platforms like Mixpanel, Amplitude, or Heap.
These tools require instrumenting the app or website to send user interaction data to the analytics platform. This data is then processed and visualised in dashboards and reports, enabling businesses to gain insights into user behaviour and product performance.
In the case of Conferensity, they would likely use the following tools and techniques to track their key KPIs:
Tracking is only the beginning. The real value comes from analysing the data to gain insights and making informed decisions. Services like Tableau or Microsoft Power BI or Google Looker can transform raw data into actionable intelligence. Regular reporting is crucial, but the frequency and format may vary depending on the KPI and its significance to the business.
For critical KPIs like revenue, customer acquisition, and churn rate, companies often opt for real-time dashboards that provide a constant pulse on performance. This allows decision-makers to quickly identify and respond to any deviations from the expected trajectory.
Other KPIs, such as customer satisfaction scores or feature usage rates, may be reviewed on a weekly or monthly basis, as they tend to change more gradually. These periodic reviews provide an opportunity for deeper analysis and strategic planning.
Many companies adopt a multi-tiered approach to KPI reporting. Operational teams may review granular metrics daily or weekly to optimise their processes, while executive teams focus on high-level KPIs in monthly or quarterly business reviews. This ensures that insights are communicated effectively across the organisation and that each level can take appropriate actions.
To maximise the impact of KPI insights, you need to build a culture of data-driven decision-making. This involves providing training and resources to help your employees interpret and act on KPI data. Regular cross-functional meetings, where teams share their KPI learnings and collaborate on improvement strategies, can also be highly effective.
The optimal reporting cadence and review process will depend on the unique needs and goals of your business. The key is to strike a balance between timely action and thoughtful strategic planning, ensuring that KPI insights are consistently translated into meaningful business outcomes.
Incorporating KPIs into your business strategy is a process that requires careful planning and execution. Here are some key steps to help you effectively implement KPIs:
For Conferensity, and any business investing in digital growth, the disciplined application of KPIs is not optional – it’s a cornerstone of strategic decision-making. By setting, tracking, and analysing the right KPIs, you ensure that every step you take is a step toward success.
The Future of Business is Core+There’s an interesting interview on VentureBeat with Gilles Langourieux of Virtuos. Most of the interview is about the gaming industry, but Gilles says some interesting things about dynamic team sizing and how businesses are changing the way they structure their software development teams.
SoftwareSeni isn’t part of the gaming industry, but these ideas tend to cross industry lines, and since remote teams are a big part of what we do, we’re always interested in new takes.
Here’s one of Gilles’ quotes. The game industry is notorious for hiring fast and firing faster, but flexibility in team size can benefit any industry:
We’ve been relying too much on fixed teams. We need more flexibility. We all know that there’s a peak in production, and then after that peak you need fewer people. If you’re trying to develop games with fixed teams only, you have that vicious cycle of hiring a lot of people and then letting them go when you’re done
As Gilles points out, having providers who can supply talent on demand is good for everyone:
…one of our main reasons for existing is to provide both quality and flexibility to our clients, so that everyone’s jobs are more stable. You have smaller core teams that are more stable on the customer side, and then we also maintain stability by being able to transition people from one project to another, one client to another.
He’s pointing the way towards a particular vision of the future of software development. This concerns every SME that wants to be more than a lifestyle business, because every business is a software development business now.
The important phrase is “smaller core teams”. The vision is that your inhouse software development team is small and contains the deep understanding of your product and directs your long term strategy for product growth.
The core team gives you continuity and quality control while overseeing a managed remote team that shifts dynamically in size and skill set.
It’s a thought-provoking idea. Because it’s not really about reducing fixed costs in software development.
It’s really about SMEs adopting a new level of flexibility, making them able to react quickly in the market, and, more importantly, allowing them to push their products forward based on vision instead of based on office headcount or inhouse skillbase.
It’s a fundamental shift in mindset that we’re going to see more and more businesses adopt because it’s going to deliver results.
We’re calling it Core+ – your core team at the heart of an on-demand team that changes in size and structure to meet the latest challenge.
If you want to take the Core+ approach you’re going to need your in-house team to already have experienced oversight roles in place. This is essential to maintain control over your product vision. Let’s go quickly through the roles you’ll want to have in place.
This core team should include a product manager who deeply understands the market, customer needs, and the overall product strategy. They will be responsible for driving the vision and roadmap for the product.
Alongside the product manager, you’ll want an experienced technical lead or software architect. This role will ensure the technical feasibility of the product vision and make the high-level design decisions. They’ll also be responsible for maintaining code quality standards across the extended team.
Having a strong project manager with remote team management experience is also essential. They’ll coordinate the efforts of the core team and extended remote team. Effective communication, deliverables, and risk management will be key (though of course you’ll be running Agile to severely limit the risk).
Depending on the size of your business and your product’s complexity, you may also want to include other roles like a UX designer, data analyst, or operations manager. The goal is to have a well-rounded core team that can provide leadership and direction across all aspects of the product.
If you need to hire to build your core team, look for people with experience managing remote teams and/or working with remote/hybrid teams. Everyone on the team should be a strong communicator – they’re all going to be involved in presenting a coherent vision of your product to your remote team. As that remote team shifts in size across product and business cycles it is communicating and maintaining the product vision that is going to determine your success.
With the right core team in place you can strategically, even tactically, leverage remote teams to drive growth. You’ll be able to adapt to market changes and scale development up or down as needed, all while maintaining a strong product vision and high quality standards.
This Core+ approach can give you a competitive edge in the marketplace. By making team scaling responsive you get to decide where you want to place your big bets and how fast you want to move. This level of control is what helps you take the lead and stay there.
AI is going to make remote teams and video calls less frustratingWhile COVID changed the nature of work for lots of people, at SoftwareSeni online and remote work has always been a part of our experience.
Team extensions for software development is the key service we provide our partners. Regular virtual stand-ups, code reviews, as well as one-to-one meetings for things like discussing design decisions and troubleshooting are part of the normal working day for our teams.
As comfortable as we are with video meetings, we are quick to adopt any practices or tools that can help us streamline and get the most from them. So we’re looking forward to trying out the new AI powered features announced by Zoom and Google.
Let’s have a look at the features we think will make a real difference for everyone who relies on video meetings. Having said that, this quick overview is biased towards mixed local/remote software development teams.
This one seems like it is targeted at meeting with multiple participants, but we think this will help everyone. First, being freed from taking notes so you can focus on what is being discussed is a big win. Second, having a thorough summary of even a one-on-one meeting means no-one has to worry about the quality of their note-taking skills or their memory.
We’re also assuming that these summaries end up being incorporated into, say, your Google Drive, if you are using Google Meet. Then they become searchable and discoverable and easy to incorporate into your planning and follow-ups.
This is an extension of the previous feature, but is worth pointing out. What we like about this is, again, documenting the meeting is handled by Google’s or Zoom’s AI. They’ll extract the major talking points and action items for anyone who missed it.
If that’s not enough detail, both services offer transcripts if you need the full text of the meeting.
Like watching Netflix with subtitles on, but more useful. Captions on meetings can really help with the inconsistent audio across multiple speakers.
Both Google Meet and Zoom also provide the option to deliver translated captions. We find that despite our multilingual team’s high level of language mastery, translated captions improve the clarity and quality of communications in video meetings.
The captioning and translation is not perfect, but like watching movies, the combination of speech and text reduces the effort and concentration needed to follow what is happening.
This isn’t really a thing we care about, but maintaining privacy by having your background blurred out or replaced is an option we can get behind. We should all want video calls to be comfortable for everyone.
Duet for Google Meet is also promising “studio lighting” and other image enhancements, as is Zoom. This is starting to veer into the world of “filters” and how we appear on camera compared to “reality” (remember the lockdown boomers rendered as potatoes on call?). But again, if these features help team members feel more comfortable on call or even simply enhance everyone’s experience by providing clearer views of each other, then we’re all for it.
Zoom’s AI Companion is all about deepening integration with their suite of calendar and messaging tools. We’re a Google Workspace shop, so Zoom’s features like AI-powered meeting scheduling is not going to impact us. The nature of software development doesn’t really require it. You’re either participating in scheduled stand-ups, etc, or you’re hopping on a call you’ve just coordinated via chat.
Zoom also has features that monitor and report on conversations. They sell it as a feature to help improve the quality of your sales team’s calls. Not the kind of thing our developers need for their day-to-day interactions with other team members.
We’ll let you know, but we suspect that, despite the immense investment in tech and infrastructure these features represent, we’re only going to see an incremental improvement, more of a quality of life increase than an efficiency multiplier.
Calls will go more smoothly because captions and translations, as well as transcripts and summaries, will allow everyone to focus on the purpose of the call instead of the technology of the call. Those transcripts and summaries should reduce the flurry of follow-up emails and messages after calls, which will be welcome.
Once your business gets above a handful of people, communication becomes the key component in your success. Our headcount is north of 150 so we know this firsthand. In the balancing act that is making your business work, a balancing act that includes not just optimizing who you work with but where they work from, video calls are going to be part of your internal comms mix. These new features should help you bring them closer to the quality and effectiveness of in-person meetings.
But we’ll wait and see if it turns out that way.