Tag: productivity

Workomo 2.0 - manage your network in one place

To everyone who has been following Workomo’s (and my) journey over the last 2 years, apologies for the hiatus — our entire team took a break from writing to channel our energies towards building Workomo 2.0.

Since the beginning, our vision behind Workomo has been to build an intelligent hub where a professional’s entire network lives, including valuable context around these people. So what is Workomo 2.0 and how did it come about, you might ask? Read on to find out…

1. Workomo 1.0 journey — tiny steps with mighty pivots

The driving force behind our vision, as I had articulated in my original blogpost in June 2019, was my own frustration with the limitations of LinkedIn esp. its lack of relevance, noisy feeds, extremely weak search, and no workflow capabilities.

First landing page

Starting from launching the first landing page and opening the waitlist in mid-2019, over the next 1 year, we actively iterated on what’s the most burning problem we should be solving first, and what’s the easiest solution we can build for it. After about 15 MVP iterations, we got the most traction from users for the simple use case of displaying a distilled professional profile of a person before you meet them and doing so with minimal typing or manual work from users.

While the use-case sounds simple, achieving this simplicity required creating a highly automated people-intelligence API even for the first cut. We created the v1 of this platform & built a Chrome extension that delivered this people-info directly in workflows like calendar, Meet & Zoom in a “zero-typing” experience. We launched Workomo 1.0 on Product Hunt in Aug’20, trended #1 for several hours, ended in the top 10 products of the day, and got featured in their newsletter.

Product Hunt launch

2. Learnings from active users 

Between Oct-Dec’20, the Workomo Chrome extension got tons of user love. People used it for everything from Lunchclub meetings to interviewing over video. We also started receiving active feedback on what users want Workomo to be, in order for them to use it more deeply & eventually pay for it. The most important of these being:

#1 A more holistic network management experience that has utility even outside of ‘meeting a new person’, and where users can do many contact-management actions (eg. add a contact, search etc.)

#2 Ability to bring your own insights into Workomo (a.k.a note-taking)

#3 Significantly better profile-matching accuracy

#4 Even deeper integrations into a user’s workflows, to make the UX more intuitive

#5 Multi-calendar, multi-address book & multi-platform support

Sounds familiar? Our users had themselves defined the product manifestation of Workomo’s original vision — creating a smart & simple professional relationships management hub.

3. Alpha launch of Workomo 2.0

Perhaps for the first time, we knew exactly what we needed to build to effectively solve a burning pain point for our users. And this time, our goal wasn’t just to get users; we wanted paying customers. It was time to turn on monetization.

During Jan-Mar’21, we built our entire web app from the ground up to include all the above capabilities. In parallel, we created a significantly upgraded v2 of our people-intelligence API with improved identity-mapping accuracy, shorter data-display times for real-time workflows, and higher profile processing capacity. Powered by a herculean effort from Team Workomo, we soft-launched Workomo 2.0 alpha in Apr’21 to existing users.

Workomo 2.0 is your “one-stop-shop” smart Rolodex that deeply integrates into calendars & address books, aggregating contacts as well as important info about them in one place. 

What’s even cooler? Your Workomo Rolodex actually interacts with your life, showing you profiles of people you are about to meet, enabling you to take people or meeting notes when and where you prefer, sending you smart pre and post-meeting reminders, and making everything about your network contextually searchable. Basically, everything you wished LinkedIn could do for you! 

Workomo is now an end-to-end product suite :

  • Supports multi-calendar and multi-address book integrations (both Gsuite and Office 365)
  • Can be accessed by a progressive web app on both desktop and mobile browsers as well as a Chrome extension
  • Displays people-info across calendars, browser Meet & Zoom PLUS…
  • A super-cool, on-demand “assistant” experience coming soon on your favorite messaging app

Here’s a 60 sec. product intro of Workomo.

Workomo web app

4. Paying customers across multiple countries

Even before starting the company, I had always imagined the following 3 elements as being integral to my vision:

#1 Effective aggregation — auto-capture any important person I interact with on any platform

#2 Minimize manual work— drastically reduce the inertia of managing my network

#3 “Fabric” user experience— be present everywhere in my life but show up only when I need you the most

As a founder, it gives me immense satisfaction to see that Workomo 2.0, as it stands today, is perhaps the closest manifestation of my original vision and the way I had imagined the product to be.

Given the depth of the product now, we gradually turned on monetization over the last quarter with our “Premium” ($8.99 per month) and “Pro” ($14.99 per month) plans. Super-stoked to share that we now have paying customers across multiple countries including the US, UK, and India. Overall, Workomo has touched users in more than 20 countries since our first launch.

5. What’s next?

We are about to soft-launch a game-changing integration into a top mobile messaging platform— a one-of-its-kind experience wherein a customer can interact with its Workomo Rolodex entirely in an on-demand “assistant” experience to add contacts, fetch contact profiles (what we call ‘cue cards’), add people/ meeting notes & get smart reminders.

Stay tuned for more updates on it!

We keep marching on…

Workomo 2.0 is a result of the courage, conviction & hard work of Team Workomo — Swaraj, Nidhi, Pankaj, Harsh, Sujith, Rhythm, and Stas. Super-proud of this team for overcoming all kinds of challenges thrown at it, from the pandemic and delivering in a fully-remote & distributed team, to solving extremely hard data problems & cracking an intuitive design language.

This journey from 0 ➡1.0 ➡2.0 has been intense, gut-wrenching yet full of learning & transformational at a personal level for each of us.

We would love to have you try out Workomo 2.0 (sign-up here) and get your feedback. Till next time ✌🏽

PS: check out a 60 sec. intro of the product.

Note: This post first appeared on the Workomo blog here.

How Innovators use Workomo #3: know your Zoom interviewer

Since opening up our beta in Aug-end, we have been seeing job-seekers successfully leverage Workomo to prep on their interviewer before jumping on a Zoom call. Am sure two questions are crossing your mind as you read this — Why is getting to know your interviewer before the call important? And why should I use Workomo to do my prep, instead of looking up the person on LinkedIn or Google Search? Let me answer both these through what we are hearing from our users.

Q1. Why is getting to know your interviewer before the Zoom call important?

Because the majority of interviews are happening over Zoom & Meet, and it’s that much harder to leave an impression over video compared to in-person. Because you can’t use your body language & energy to ‘charm’ someone over software. Because economic uncertainty driven by the pandemic has made competition for the same jobs that much more intense. Because unlike 15 years back, it’s likely that your interviewer is a digital ‘creator’ of some sort and extremely passionate about it — something that you can use to your advantage.

Gone are the days when “reading up a company’s website” and “asking intelligent questions in the end” itself differentiated a candidate — these are now table-stakes. One positive to come out of the present video interviews paradigm is that as a candidate, you know beforehand who you are interviewing with. I remember my days of interviewing for major consulting firms and Investment Banks as a young Associate — sitting in their offices for a whole day, with people coming in one-after-another for rounds😓 There was NO way I could know each of them beforehand.

Now it’s different. Details of every interviewer is present on your Zoom meeting calendar. Powerful software like Workomo can automatically identify & pull in relevant insights you need to know about them, all accessible to you with 1-click. Imagine opening the conversation by bringing up the fact that your interviewer worked at Google in 2012, which is when you also interned there. Or that you noticed his Twitter handle mentioning ‘idolize Maradona’, and that you feel today’s Messi is better🙇🏽‍♂️

via Wikipedia

Q2. Why should I use Workomo to do my prep, instead of looking up the person on LinkedIn or Google Search?

Because you probably don’t have more than 1–2 mins to prep before rushing into your Zoom interview. Because you are cognitively overloaded with working-from-home, taking meetings all day from your messy living room, and not having the bandwidth to even remember the last name of each interviewer, let alone doing 5–7 clicks and jumping through many hoops to get to someone’s profile. Let me not even go into running a comprehensive cross-platform search on LinkedIn & Twitter, & trying to distill all this info into key insights that you can then use. Even a 10x salesperson who does this day-in-day-out for a job struggles with this.

We have designed Workomo grounds-up to solve these pain points & make it a “remote-first” people insights product:

  1. No typing or remembering names — Workomo integrates into the calendar and automatically identifies people in your meetings.
  2. Aggregates data from multiple sources — through the Chrome extension, a contact’s ‘Cue Card’ is available at 1-click. This Cue Card combines data from multiple public sources, so you don’t need extensive search.
  3. Designed to be digested in <60 secs — people insights in the Cue Card are distilled so you can skim them quickly and access all the right talking points.
  4. We remind you to do people-prep at the right time & places — with the goal of making interview-prep more productive, we use a combination of smart triggers (a timer on the extension icon, a meeting card auto pop-up on the calendar, within the meeting invite card in Google Calendar, pop-up right as you enter a Zoom or Meet call) so you don’t forget to prep but also, don’t waste precious time doing it.
  5. Utilize pockets of time during a Zoom or Meet call — there are often waiting-room scenarios in video calls. Now you can use these to continue your prep, as Cue Cards are seamlessly accessible WITHIN the Meet window and RIGHT NEXT to Zoom windows. So prep & plan your talking points without leaving your Zoom or Meet context.
Viewing Workomo Cue Cards within Meet

As a job seeker, you are presently wading through unchartered territories of virtual interviews. There are no playbooks to succeed at it. As tribal beings, evolution has wired us to respond to and judge based on in-person energy & cues (that’s what conferences, coffee shops & bars were for). I mean, how do you beat evolution & still leave a solid impression in a Zoom interview?

The answer is — do your people-prep before the meeting. You are living in the age of the creator economy, where professionals are increasingly voicing their passions, interests & expertise digitally. Finding common connections & areas of interest can help you break the ice in even a drab Zoom call. And with software like Workomo, you can do this in 1–2 mins, without eating into your packed schedule or taxing yourself mentally.

PS: this post is part of the “How Innovators use Workomo” series, in which we share how our most retained users are using the product. Check out the previous posts on using Workomo for networking on Lunchclub & prepping on candidates as a hiring manager.

Game design playbook for products

Recently came across an amazing talk by Rahul Vohra on how to incorporate game design principles in any software product (Superhuman has, of course, nailed this). Sharing my notes from it below:

#1 Similar to how games have levels & rewards that create instant gratification, create in-product goals for the user that are concrete, achievable & rewarding. For instance, the #inboxZero goal that Superhuman sets for users. Goals take any product beyond just utility & make it fun 🎯

#2 Design for nuanced emotion. Product value needs to be defined beyond just tangible jobs-to-be-done, to include “how it makes the user feel”. Emotions like joy, pride, achievement, trust, fun! Eg. showing a serene pic 🏞 to the user on achieving the in-product goal.

#3 Similar to how games have complex control sequences that are fun to master and expand the game’s potential, software products too, can have rapid & robust controls that match the user’s context of multi-tasking & expecting instant gratification. Eg. smart keyboard shortcuts 🎮

#4 Introduce toys that increase the fun quotient and incent users to spend more time with the product, while also strongly gelling with core features and enhancing value delivery. Eg. fun universal search bar with surprising auto-suggest elements 🔍

#5 Help the user get zoned into the product experience to create extraordinary engagement (almost a “flow” state💻) by making each next step obvious and minimizing energy to be spent in any sort of decision-making. Eg on archiving, moving the user to the next message in milliseconds 🚴🏼‍♀️

#6 Continuing the objective of creating an in-product “flow” state for users, giving clear and immediate feedback to users with no distraction ⛷

#7 Final strategy for creating a “flow” state within the product is to introduce certain challenging skills and make it a little hard for users to master them. Overcoming challenges create dopamine, a feeling of achievement within the user. That feeling will stick with users for a long, long time 🧗🏽‍♀️

Finally, these game design principles need to be executed within the wrapper of your product’s core design language. This includes design principles that you have specifically chosen like say, minimalism, full screen to minimize distractions, there when you need & away when you don’t, etc.

If I have to summarize my overall takeaway — in this era where any software is cheap to replicate, products can stand out by designing for what emotions your target users will feel as they use the product. And making it fun!

PS: Suhas Motwani, great job in organizing this session!

Note: this article first appeared on the Workomo blog here.

The value of “Deep Work” in this age of distraction

A few months back, my better-half Mahak Sharma shared this podcast by Cal Newport (computer science Professor at Georgetown University) with me. The topic was “Deep Work” — Prof. Newport defines it as “focusing, without distraction, on a cognitively demanding task”. The concept immediately resonated with me, as I have been following Robin Sharma for a while now and he always talks about creating “Tight Bubbles of Total Focus” (TBTF) as key to creating game-changing value. When done well, you enter into what is called a “Flow” state, where you get fully immersed in solving whatever problem you are working on, so much so that you lose the concept of time and few hours seem to go by like minutes.

New addendum: got some comments on LinkedIn, requesting for a clearer definition of Deep Work. It’s something that I too, have been trying to get a hang of.

Personally, I see the following characteristics of Deep Work:

  • Focus on problem-solving, rather than straight forward logistical stuff like con-calls, emailing, paper-pushing, social media etc.
  • Has to be demanding on the brain, maybe something new to you that requires real learning & causes cognitive strain.
  • Due to the above 2 points, will typically require intense focus & concentration.
  • Will typically be an “alone” task, requiring you to step back, think, analyze and process individually, rather than participating/ discussing in groups where energy gets dissipated and mental free-riding happens frequently.
  • (This one I love) more often than not, Deep Work should result in some sort of tangible output or deliverable like a note, piece of analysis, requirements doc, assumptions list, maybe even just a powerful enough insight that you document and use as a stepping stone for further problem solving.

Based on my own experience, Deep Work is becoming so much more important in this era of increasing automation and changing economic paradigms. However, interestingly enough, people are finding it much harder than before to do Deep Work. This is mainly due to increasing levels of “noise” & distractions around us — buzzing phone notifications, dopamine-inducing short form content, multi-tasking across email, chat, meetings etc. I feel another reason is easy access to online info & content, which doesn’t make doing Deep Work obvious enough to all. When I was growing up, learning a new concept in Math or Physics required sitting in libraries for hours, submerged in numerous books. Unless you went deep, there were little other ways to become even conversationally-knowledgeable about a new topic. Now, with content, videos and social media discourse at everyone’s fingertips, it’s easy to get skimming-knowledge and talking points on any topic, in probably under an hour. While it’s good for increasing our breadth of knowledge, it decreases our ability to go deep, and persist with hard problems.

Whether we like it or not, even today, it still requires doing Deep Work to solve truly hard problems and consequently, create differentiated value that the market will richly reward. Over last few months, I have been trying to consciously train myself to do Deep Work. Luckily, it’s like a muscle that gets stronger with more training.

Here are some of the approaches that have worked well for me so far:

  1. Focusing Deep Work sessions only on tangible problem solving & creating actual solutions — logistical work like routine ops, communication activities like responding to emails & chats, grabbing a coffee with someone, brown bag lunch sessions etc. aren’t Deep Work. Prof. Newport calls them “Shallow Work”. It’s not to say that these activities aren’t required. But let’s be clear that if we focus too much on them, they might consume 80% of our time and yet, impede our ability to create value. Good examples of Deep Work would be new product development, design, writing on new subjects, figuring out fresh ways to drive growth, thinking through new competitive positioning for your company etc.
  2. Doing “Shallow Work” only later in the day — I have started devoting my peak hours (early morning till late afternoon) to doing as much Deep Work as possible, and reserving time in late afternoon/ early evening & even late night, to do Shallow Work. This really works, as issues that require Deep Work are hard and don’t have obvious solutions or playbooks. You need to be at your best levels of concentration to be able to tackle them.
  3. Logging out from social apps on the phone — at least in my case, compulsively going to Twitter and LinkedIn was a big distraction. So, I have logged out of them on my phone. Having to enter a password everytime creates an inertia that breaks the compulsive tapping/ scrolling behavior. If I truly need to tweet, post or read, I can enter the password & access the app during downtimes eg. while in taxi or train or waiting for a meeting.
  4. Creating Deep Work “blocks” — instead of blocking out entire days, what has worked well for me is creating time blocks of 2–3 hours each, where the focus is to only do Deep Work. Even if one such block can be executed everyday, it’s a big win. Doing 2 such blocks creates an outstandingly productive day.
  5. Doing a 60 sec retrospective end-of-day — typically after dinner, I do a 60 sec retrospective with myself, trying to quickly evaluate whether I ended up doing any true Deep Work or not during the day. A way of keeping myself honest is focusing on whether I created any tangible deliverable of Deep Work value during the day. It could be a piece of analysis, a mock-up, a pitch document, a PRD, even a blog!

Deep Work is both a process and a journey. When I see so many people around “being busy just for the sake of being busy” and working for 10–12 hours but mostly doing Shallow Work, I feel the ability to do Deep Work over many years will give anyone an unbeatable competitive advantage in today’s world. A friend recently told me “I find reading a book really hard”, and my mind immediately went to “people who have the patience & concentration to work their way through books will have a natural advantage over the rest”. As all great leaders & companies have shown time and again, doing hard things over many, many years is the key to winning. ‘Cos 95% of people out there can’t do it.

What is your view on Deep Work? What rituals have worked for you in implementing it? Would love to learn from you.

Bonus Idea: here’s another great talk by Prof. Newport on “Why following your passion is bad advice”. A topic for another blog someday 🙂

Willpower is a ‘reservoir’, and that’s why focus is important!

Over last few months, I have been trying to install a few fundamentally-new habits for myself, mainly related to health, fitness and reading. And this has led to an important realization — willpower is a ‘reservoir’! What does this mean?

  1. Installing a new habit depletes willpower — as you push yourself to learn a new skill, start a new ritual or basically do anything you aren’t used to, it requires a major dip into the willpower reservoir. And each such dip ends up depleting the reservoir…every single day you push yourself till the habit becomes second nature.
  2. Focus is important to optimize willpower usage — given the reservoir is of finite capacity at any point in time, you can only take so many dips before depleting it to a critical level. This makes focus really important. Focusing on utilizing every ounce of this willpower just on a few, really important habits/ skills/ rituals/ initiatives, ensures you get maximum long term returns. So, if you are planning to start getting up early AND start working out AND start eating more greens AND start networking more aggressively AND start spending more quality time with family, you will exhaust your willpower reservoir very soon. Choose only 1–2 at a time, choose carefully and choose wisely!
  3. Take rest to replenish — as your willpower reservoir gets depleted, take rest to replenish it. Our generation is almost programmed to keep pushing ourselves relentlessly and keep moving from one goal to the next. As you achieve a milestone, take a break. Give yourself a pat on the back for learning something new, and let the willpower reservoir fill up again before taking on the next goal.
  4. Willpower capacity can be increased via practice — interestingly, the reservoir can be expanded. It’s like a muscle. As you install more new habits, while the contents get depleted, the reservoir capacity itself increases. So the next time you take a break after achieving your goal, you will end up with more willpower than before. Isn’t that cool?

Here’s wishing you an ever-expanding willpower reservoir!