Today’s modern workforce waste so much of their time chasing down details, going to handfuls of meetings, and sifting through hundreds of emails to find answers that will help them achieve their business goals. As a result, information management often becomes a struggle, workers lack focus on the big picture, and leaders are less likely to get valuable information from their teams. Hence, to address such problems, a plethora of collaborative productivity software solutions have been created to help businesses and their teams spend more time collaborating and less time hunting down information.
With a robust collaboration software solution, organizations can easily create a centralized repository with important details, comments, files, status, and more. In this way, businesses and their teams can seamlessly communicate, collaborate, and cut costs while remaining effective.
In this article, Kevin Gibbs, the co-founder and CEO of Quip, a trusted provider of collaborative productivity software for mobile and the web, shares insights on team collaboration and explains how collaboration tools have transformed the professional business setting and paved the way for the creation of a global, distributed, and mobile workforce. Gibbs also talks about their newest open API for Live Apps and shares with SourceForge how Live Apps for Quip empowers businesses by helping their teams to stay connected in an ever-increasing mobile world.
Q: Please share with us a brief overview of your company (year founded, size, solutions, industries you serve, etc.)?
Kevin Gibbs, the co-founder and CEO of Quip
A: Quip was founded in 2012, by myself and Bret Taylor. Prior to Quip, Bret was at Facebook and I was at Google, and the industry was experiencing incredible change with the emergence of the smartphone. We had to rethink how we delivered products and business models were being reinvented. This dramatic shift in consumer technology changed the way we interacted in our lives with friends and family. But despite this seismic change, Bret and I looked at the tools we were using to get our work done and they looked archaic in comparison. I had a supercomputer in my pocket, and the state of the art in productivity software involved writing on a virtual 8’11” sheet of paper and attaching it to an email. We became obsessed with this disconnect and kept asking ourselves, “What would productivity software look like in a decade? If you redesigned the productivity suite around communication and mobility, what would it look like?”
Today, Quip can best be described as a hyper-collaboration platform. It combines chat, documents, spreadsheets, and more with live customer relationship management (CRM) data; thus, enabling people, teams, and companies of all roles, sizes and industries to work faster — and better — together. It was designed to be mobile-first, so it works well on any platform and device you use.
Q: What exactly are collaboration software solutions (collaborative productivity software) and what are its uses?
A: Collaboration software at its core enables better communication and ideally — increases collaboration and transparency across a team or company.
Done right, collaboration software solutions are able to break down siloed work streams, eliminate the need for hour-long meetings — and instead, enable teams to work faster and more efficiently together. A great example of this is how 21st Century Fox is re-imagining the culture of the company to remain on the cutting-edge of the media industry. 21st Century Fox wanted to drive innovation and execution across their film, television, and internal operations, so they turned to Quip, to improve communication and work output by connecting their production teams, marketing organization and IT — creating a culture of action and driving faster decisions.
Q: How exactly does collaborative productivity software change the professional business setting? What are some of its features that have made remote work the new normal?
A: Technology advancements, like the smartphone, have completely changed the way we work and communicate with one another. In fact, while Bret was at Facebook, mobile was having a radical impact on their business. They needed to retrain their engineering teams on mobile technologies but found everyone spent their time on laptops! So, Bret actually got rid of his laptops and forced himself to use his mobile phone for everything.
Since then, working from mobile phones has become the norm. Where we’re seeing collaboration tools like Quip make a big impact is in helping remote employees feel more connected to their colleagues — no matter where they are. This connection is not only beneficial for employee morale, but also business growth and success.
Q: Collaborative productivity software enables teams to communicate, share, coordinate, and solve problems efficiently. How can this powerful tool enhance team collaboration and productivity and help organizations achieve their business goals?
A: When teams have a central place to communicate, share, and coordinate, problems get solved with fewer cycles, meetings, and headaches. However, collaborative productivity software solutions are not all created equal. Some drive efficiencies that are specific to different tasks, industries or roles — like to-do lists or kanban boards. What we set out to accomplish with Quip is a collaboration hub, which acts as a digital whiteboard to help teams work faster together in order to accomplish their goals.
Q: As a trusted provider of collaborative productivity software, in what ways can your solutions help businesses build a stronger team?
A: Quip transforms how teams work, allowing them to work smarter, faster, and from anywhere. With Quip, teams can create, edit, discuss, and organize live documents all in one place.
Quip helps teams at a broad range of companies, including Amazon, 21st Century Fox, and Electronic Arts collaborate across projects more efficiently and effectively. Instacart, the same-day grocery delivery service, also uses Quip to increase visibility and drive engagement across all of their different teams and projects. In fact, 60% of the Quip documents that Instacart created a year ago are still being used today. It shows the value of these live documents that are bubbling with up-to-date information and not in some old decaying document management system. Quip essentially becomes the “brain” of the company.
Q: What makes Quip a stand out from other collaborative productivity software available in the market?
A: Quip is very unique because it is a platform that combines documents, spreadsheets, Live Apps, and chat with real-time CRM data into one seamless experience — and location.
One of the biggest pain points of teams today is that projects are managed in silos — in an app or an Excel — while the work itself happens somewhere else, leading to fractured communication, duplicate efforts, and incomplete projects. Rather than moving work forward, your team has to “sync up” through long email chains and time-wasting status meetings.
Quip avoids this completely, enabling users to seamlessly manage and work on projects and content right in one place. Additionally, with Live Apps — applications embedded directly into Quip with real-time data — all relevant content for any project can be gathered on a single canvas.
Q: Recently, Quip opened up its platform with Live Apps. Can you tell us a bit more about Live Apps for Quip? What are they used for and how can this powerful set of tools enhance collaboration experiences for users?
A: Live Apps are interactive, real-time applications that can be added into any Quip document. For most of us, a typical workday includes a handful of disconnected applications where we do fragments of our work and resort to different strategies to fuse our workstreams together — which usually includes a lot of email and meetings. With Live Apps, users can bring all relevant content and data directly into one place, completely eliminating the need to toggle between multiple tabs and windows.
Q: Live Apps are interactive, live-updating apps that can be added directly to Quip documents. How does it work? Can you also share with us some of its key features and/or capabilities?
A: When we rolled out Live Apps last year, we also introduced an open API for Live Apps that enables customers, partners, and developers to build their own custom Live Apps for Quip. It is easy to add many third-party apps right into Quip, with a simple “@mention” or by clicking the “@ Insert” button on the top of the screen. Third-party Live Apps available in Quip and on the Salesforce AppExchange today include Smartsheet, Draw.io, Vidyard, and more.
With Live Apps, Quip docs are now packed with tons of unique tools you’ve never had in a document before. You can embed polls and calendars, annotate images, track your next project, and bring your favorite third-party apps right into Quip — then collaborate on them with comments and @mentions. Live Apps save you from the need to toggle back and forth between windows just to get work done.
Q: How can Live Apps for Quip empower the sales, marketing, and product teams? Or in what ways can Quip improve team collaboration?
A: We built Live Apps because we believe that documents should go far beyond words and images on a page. With Quip Live Apps, users can quickly and easily view and act on outstanding tasks and their owners, real-time performance data on marketing campaigns, or the health of accounts in Salesforce.
For sales, marketing, and product teams in particular, each can benefit from a few different Live Apps:
- Sales teams greatly benefit from the Kanban Board Live App, which enables users and teams to stay organized with interactive cards, columns, and color-coding. Users can simply drag and drop cards between columns to organize teamwork and keep projects moving forward.
- Marketing teams often utilize the Calendar Live App to quickly and easily visualize, track, comment, and collaborate on product launches or events to create deep alignment.
- Product teams are able to use the Jira Issue Live App to gain insight and collaborate around their issue tracking data. This is perfect for development teams who want to run scrum meetings or unite their JIRA issues to requirement documents in Quip.
Q: Looking ahead, what emerging collaboration technologies or trends do you think will impact or shape the professional business setting? How is Quip addressing these?
A: One of the emerging trends that will shape the professional business setting will be a significant decline in emails and meetings to share updates. Looking at emails alone, there are more than 269 billion emails sent and received each day (The Radicati Group, Email Statistics Report 2017-2021) and the average person spends 25 percent of their day checking their inbox (according to Deloitte). That’s a very inefficient work stream.
Customer demands are ever increasing and businesses will need to find new ways to work faster, smarter, and more effectively. We can already see some of these changes with the rise in enterprise messaging and shared documents. We still have a long way to go, but our vision for Quip is that teams should be productive without email. The teams who use Quip can accomplish more and move faster because they are working together. On average Quip users experience 43 percent less email, 38 percent less meetings, and are able to complete projects 37 times faster in Quip (Quip Customer Survey, 2016).
Q: What does the future hold for Quip? Are there any updates and/or product integrations and offerings that customers should look forward to?
We’ll definitely have some news coming up as we near Dreamforce this September — keep an eye out!
About Quip
Quip is a Salesforce company that aims to change the way teams communicate and work by creating a new class of collaborative productivity tools. As a leading provider of collaborative software solutions for mobile and the web, Quip empowers teams to work together faster, smarter, and more efficiently. Quip combines documents, chat, checklists, spreadsheets, and more in one central hub, thereby making collaboration easy and accessible from anywhere.