ManagedIT - issue 54

James Goulding (JG): Please tell us a little about Wrike and why demand for the platform is growing so fast. Andrew Filev (AF): Wrike is the leader in collaborative work management. It’s a new but very fast growing category. Its roots are in project management, but work management is more than just project management. For individuals it could extend down to task management; and for companies it could extend up to programmes, operations and workflows. Any digital work you can imagine, we try to capture and organise and make more sense of for companies. Another side of the same coin is collaboration. Before starting Wrike, I was managing a services organisation and one thing I noticed is that digital work cycles are usually very fast, and in a fast environment you tend to plan work in one tool, be it a spreadsheet or a Microsoft project file, and then work on that project somewhere else, so things quickly get disconnected and plans get out of shape. I realised the only way to address this was to bring collaboration into the tool. Individual workers today rely primarily on email and instant messaging and a lot of them are becoming inundated with messages so that at the end of their day or week or quarter they have a hard time reporting on what they have achieved and why they are moving slower on strategic initiatives. It is to everybody’s benefit – individual workers, managers, directors, executives – to bring more transparency to the digital work cycle so that the company can focus on the most important priorities. Equally importantly, people need to focus on the same priorities. If we are working together and I am working on one thing and you are working on another, no matter how hard we work on our individual things, we will never get the bigger project done. Digital processes are increasingly collaborative and more and more often cross functional boundaries. Unless there is better visibility into a project across teams, things will get stuck and pile up in bottlenecks. The category is growing very fast. Tools like ours and freemium tools are already deployed in about a quarter of a million organisations. What we see now is that companies are getting more serious about those deployments. Some of these are now on a much larger scale, because of cross-team collaboration. It is not about deploying 10 different silos, it’s about scaling that to larger organisations; one of the recent trends we have seen is uptake in the mid-market and enterprise, which is where we are leading the charge right now. JG: Have customers quantified the benefit of using Wrike in any way? AF: The first thing people look at is productivity; they try to think about the hours saved; how much time is saved searching for information; all the benefits of having information organised in context rather than having thousands of individual instant messages and emails. We like to go one step further for our customers because, ultimately, businesses and departments in those businesses need to connect digital collaboration platforms to business outcomes. It varies team by team; for a marketing department the outcome might be the launch of an integrated marketing campaign to generate a set of leads or the rolling out of a global branding initiative across a number of countries. For a services team, it could be customer satisfaction levels for the projects their teams are involved in. For IT departments, it could be around budgets or the user adoption of tools. Ultimately, it is very important to connect the work that teams are doing with business outcomes. Looking at the different case studies, we typically find that if a company can gain more visibility and operationalise a process, it leads to 20% improvements in KPIs, through velocity, through a reduction in waste, through reductions in the time it takes to approve or redo things. We typically see a 20% boost in those metrics. JG: How do customers stop Wrike from being just another business tool that adds to the problem of information and app overload? AF: In the last 5-10 years, there’s been an almost Cambrian explosion of different purpose- built applications that are all very powerful in their small context. If you look at marketing, there are 5,000 different marketing tech applications. It is mind-blowing. Often, one company will deploy 20 different tools for different needs. It all makes sense until you run an integrated campaign and need to bring the tools and the people using those tools together and move the work thorough all those stages. The Wrike stuff Individual workers today rely primarily on email and instant messaging and a lot of them are becoming inundated with messages At the end of last year, Vista Equity Partners took a majority investment in Wrike, the fast growing collaborative work management platform. The investment will help to fund and accelerate Wrike’s global expansion. James Goulding spoke to founder and CEO Andrew Filev about why the company he started in 2006 has been one of America’s 500 fastest growing companies for the last four years and how it addresses the challenges faced by today’s knowledge workers MANAGED.IT 21 Andrew Filev www.managedITmag.co.uk Q&A Continued...