A lot of talk has been made of trends redefining the tools people use to collaborate and get things done: cloud computing, rise (and ubiquity) of mobile, consumerization of enterprise IT, etc. These aren't "predictions" anymore — they're well-accepted facts, and the opportunities to build large companies on this trend are getting smaller. So, what's next? What will the third wave (details within) of collaboration look like? To answer that question, I turned to 18 product leaders and executives working in the field and asked, "What are the trends forming today that will redefine the tools we use to work together tomorrow?"

1. COLLABORATION 3.0
8 Trends
that will define our tools tomorrow

2. The First Wave
of Collaboration
(Late 1980’s and 1990’s)

3. The race to digitize and connect ignites
Docs, mail, calendar, etc. become digitized
On-premise tools for project management, instant
messaging, CRM, ERP, etc.
The Internet and email allow people to find information and
communicate at an unprecedented scale
Selling expensive software (and hardware)
into large enterprises or channel partners is
the distribution channel
• Field sales teams
• Large fixed-term contracts
• Long sales cycles
• Account management teams

4. The Second Wave
of Collaboration
(2000’s – Present)

5. Information and work become decoupled
from hardware
Cloud storage makes information available on any Internet-connected
device
Ubiquitous smartphone access means you’re always connected
Huge impact on remote working
The cost of building
and servicing
technology plummets
Cloud computing
Open-source tools
Distribution is now the
major challenge, not
building technology
The “CIO-gatekeeper”
gives way to bottoms-up
distribution…
and better tools
Apps and services now often
achieve adoption in spite of - not
because of - management
Cheaper, easier to use consumer
products penetrate the
workplace

6. What does the
next wave look like?

7. About This Panel
Organized by Alex Schiff and Nick Confrey from
We asked 18 product leaders and executives from leading startups and large
companies:
There are a ton of trends that have been redefining the tools people use to work together
in the last 10 years. Cloud computing, the consumerization of enterprise IT, the ubiquity
of smartphones, and much more, to name a few. By now, these aren’t really open
questions or hypotheses — they’re well-accepted phenomenon.
As you look ahead into the next wave of collaboration, what are the trends forming today
that you think will redefine the tools people use to work together tomorrow?
We took the best quotes from their responses, and organized them into 8 trends
redefining the tools we use to work together.

8. Trend 1
the demise of email

9. Justin
Rosenstein
Co-Founder of Asana
The working world is reaching “peak
email” - meaning, the inbox has hit its
peak level of usefulness for achieving
the complex knowledge work and
coordination of our time.
Email is simply no longer up to the
task for true teamwork and at this
point, email is actually holding
business back.

10. “This isn’t to say that email
is going away; the post
office hasn’t gone away
either. Email will just be
used for less. And, already,
email is no longer the best
place for coordinating and
managing actual work.”

11. Micheal
Defranco
Founder & CEO of Lua
Time and again people are saying, not
every conversation is right for email
and, beyond that, we hear executives
concerned that time spent nose-to-phone
is impacting interpersonal
relationships, client relationships and
just practical safety - especially for
those working in the field.

12. Trend 2
always on becomes the default…
with a catch

13. Davorin
Gabrovec
CEO of Databox
Enterprise mobility
and BYOD are driving a huge need for
more real-time analytics and data.
There will be 1.3bn mobile workers by
2015, and enterprises who want to
leverage this trend are now forced to
provide access to business data
anytime and anywhere.

14. Omer Perchik
Founder & CEO of Any.Do
With this new generation of mobile-first
tools, modern teams have
evolved accordingly and now demand
realtime communication, data
mobility and powerful integrations
between their tools to be able to
effectively sync as one.

15. Ryan McDonald
Director of Product
Management at Convo
People take for granted that they
have the world’s information at their
fingertips at all times now, and yet it’s
still shockingly hard to find old
conversation threads, reference past
decisions, or tap institutional
knowledge in the workplace.

16. “Taking action, whether
it’s making a decision or
giving feedback, should be
as effortless as swiping
right on a Tinder profile.”

17. Molly Graham
Head of Business
Operations at Quip
Right now, having a device in your
pocket enables you to remain
connected to work without giving you
the power to actually be productive.
Anecdotally, this tends to produce
more anxiety about work as a result,
causing you to be “always on”, rather
than enabling you to be more
efficient...
we have to reimagine what
productivity looks like in a world of
touch screens, intermittent
connectivity, push notifications,
location information, etc.

18. Trend 3
rise of wearables and sensors

19. Christopher Yin
Product Manager at
Coupa Software
While software has improved, what
has not improved is how we interact
with software - input is still manual.
With smartphones and connected
devices, we're seeing what life is like
with sensors embedded everywhere,
capturing and inputting data in for us.
A small example is something I
noticed in Taiwan - inbound buses
auto send notifications about arrival
time to those close to the bus stop.

20. Micheal
Defranco
Founder & CEO of Lua
I believe that wearables in workplaces
like hospitals, nursing homes, areas
impacted by natural disasters, and
others are going to become standard
in the years ahead.
To interrupt a meeting to check one’s
phone to get an update on something
is now not seen as a benefit – email on
the go has lost its shine.

21. Trend 4
relevance becomes king

22. Robi Ganguly
Cofounder of
Apptentive
Employees who can efficiently parse
the volume of communications they
have and focus on the areas of import
will succeed in being the most
valuable, in the know, team members.
The rise of "follow" models in the form
of RSS feeds, Twitter and Instagram
give insight into how employee
communication and information
sharing will have to evolve.

23. Alastair Mitchell
CEO of Huddle
The cloud collaboration players that
will be left standing are those that
recognize people require ubiquitous
access to the information relevant to
them — not visibility of every
document, every piece of feedback
and discussion going on within the
business.

24. Trend 5
cloud storage becomes
commodized

25. Neil McCarthy
Director of Product at
Yammer
Another trend I see forming is cloud
storage companies creating
collaboration products in an attempt
to decommoditize their product
portfolio.
The four main cloud storage products,
Google Drive, DropBox, Box, and
OneDrive, are in a price war which
can only end in the commoditization
of cloud storage (we’re possibly
already there).

26. Alastair Mitchell
CEO of Huddle
Services grounded in standalone file
sync and share technology have
realized they’re playing a zero sum
game and collaboration is where the
true value lies.

27. Trend 6
from data silos to API pipes

28. Jason Shah
Co-founder of Do.com
Your CRM lives in one place, your files
live in another, and your tasks live in
yet another. And not enough systems
talk to each other.
We are willing to live with this - and
indeed, we create this fragmentation -
because the user experience and
quality of each individual application
is high enough to justify the cost of
fragmentation.

29. Benedikt Lehnert
Chief Design Officer at
Wunderlist
Tools that create data and/or usage
silos are dead.
Future tools need to be open for
integrations and exchange in order to
reduce effort for the users.
It just makes sense that I can create
to-dos right out of my email client and
attach various files I have stored in my
cloud storage.

30. Eliot Sun
CEO of Kloudless
APIs are a good glue to make this
happen… Problem is, APIs themselves
are also fragmented, each with its
own unique set of features and
documentation.
…
In a more grassroots effort, API-for-
APIs companies like Segment.io,
Oauth.io, and Kloudless enable
developers to integrate many APIs at
once with a single API.

31. Alexander Mimran
Founder of Minbox
As software gets smarter and APIs
more robust, all we'll have to do is
point one at another and let them
figure out what to do.
APIs now are like toddlers playing in a
sandbox: in order for them to share
and get along, they need to be
watched or they'll take a mouthful of
sand.

32. Trend 7
smarter,
not just better organized

33. Alex Moore
CEO of Baydin
First, deep learning and other
techniques in artificial intelligence are
finally arriving.
Voice recognition has moved forward
by leaps and bounds over the past few
years, as have image recognition and
machine translation.
These techniques will be applied to
collaboration in upcoming years,
though the categories of problems
that they can solve will probably
surprise us.

34. Tom Limongello
Product Management
at Crisp Media
The next wave of collaboration will be
to pull apart some of the granular UX
controls from web 2.0 and replace
them with Voice UI controls and
computer assisted inferences so that
a user will not have to do the same
prep work for every business
interaction with colleagues or clients.

35. Alex Cote
Co-founder at Cloze
Our devices and apps will become
more situational aware and able to
assist and prompt—learning from the
ever expanding amount of contextual
information that continues to become
available.

36. Randy Lubin
COO of Meetings.io
(Acquired by Jive 2012)
Automation bots, acting as
collaborators, will take on varied
work.
…
Many startups now have bots in their
chat room that can answer
sophisticated queries and carry out
tasks (e.g. run unit tests on the latest
build and deploy it to the production
server).

37. Alexander Mimran
Founder of Minbox
Us lazy apes are still having to do too
much, dammit! Smarter software
means we'll have less lifting to do.
Auto-responding, auto-organizing,
auto-managing.

38. Benedikt Lehnert
Chief Design Officer at
Wunderlist
A lot of the things we do manually,
such as researching information or
replying to most emails could be
automated based on our personal
behavior patterns or preferences. The
tools we use could also react to the
context the users is in.
A simple example: Switch off work
email notifications when I come home
and only notify me if my direct reports
are sending a message with really
urgent content.

39. Trend 8
changing the human element
of “work”

40. Omer Perchik
Founder & CEO of Any.Do
With the increasing usage of these
apps at the workplace, we're
witnessing a growing need for
supporting team collaboration
scenarios while preserving the value
for an individual user.
This trend resonates perfectly with
Jeff Bezos's quote from 2007, "We
humans co-evolve with our tools. We
change our tools, and then our tools
change us.”

41. Neil McCarthy
Director of Product at
Yammer
A trend I see forming today is the
application of graph theory to
collaborative productivity, similar to
Mark Zuckerberg’s application of
graph theory to social networking.
When we’re working together in
teams, we’re actually collaborating
around a set of objects that are
related to us, our team, and each
other.

42. Robi Ganguly
Cofounder of
Apptentive
Customers should have access to
company collaboration tools. They
should be routinely invited "in" to the
conversation and able to talk with
multiple employees, across different
organizations.
As this single view of the customer
emerges, we'll see an exponential
growth in the amount of internal
communication that is very tied to
customer empathy and relationships.

43. Christopher Yin
Product Manager at
Coupa Software
While we have tools to share code,
documents, messages - a crucial part
that is missing is camaraderie,
teamwork, praise, and the human
element of collaboration.

44. Randy Lubin
COO of Meetings.io
(Acquired by Jive 2012)
Teams are also becoming more fluid
and ad hoc contributors need tools to
quickly get up to speed with a team /
project’s context and may require
just-in-time education to gain
necessary skills.
New reputation signals will be needed
to better select short-term
collaborators. New contracts and
arbitration conventions may be
needed to reduce the transaction
costs / time in bringing on ad hoc
teammates.

45. Tina Egolf
Product Manager at
Podio
Our basic paradigms about work are
more than 200 years old, but they are
not laws of nature.
We now have all the technology we
need to actually start talking about
these paradigms and question the
way we structure our work, the way
we build organizations and the way
we perceive ourselves as “workers”.
Freedom, responsibility, transparency
and meaning won’t be optional buzz-words
for fancy (employer) branding
campaigns.

46. Brought to you by
@alexschiff
alex@fetchnotes.com
@nickconfrey
nick@fetchnotes.com