Collaboration 2.0 — Mapping the tools we will use for working remote and hybrid

20 min readAug 17, 2021

During the pandemic time, most of us were forced to work from home. It was quite challenging because we didn’t have enough time to adapt to the situation and were compelled to leave the office and start working from home within weeks. Without a doubt, that was a major change in the way we work and what tools we use. We surely live in a unique time — covid disrupted our traditional view on work. This change forced the most conservative of organizations to switch to remote work and adapt to it much faster. But this unlocks unusual opportunities for new approaches in a collaboration. And most likely this tectonic shift will stay with us for a long time.

Most of the collaboration tools were given momentum last year but they also catalyzed an explosion of new emerging companies which brought new solutions and services to the market. It seems as if we have reached a point of no return: Big tech companies in the United States like Facebook, Apple, and Twitter have indicated that work-from-home is here to stay. Over the last five years, the remote workforce has grown 44% and over the previous 10 years — 91%. That’s a pretty big growth trend — a huge shift!

Our progress on vaccination is quite good already and at the end of this year we could get back to the offices. We can not say that working in the future will be 100% remote but a more flexible hybrid approach with frequent WFH with 2–3 days at the office will be a common thing. But in any case collaboration tools will be an essential part of the work. Due to these new facts, collaboration tools will need to be adopted more wisely. There are also macro trends that catalyze the development and adoption of collaboration tools:

Millennials become a major workforce (and Gen Z is coming)

For Millennials, the internet has become as necessary as other utilities like water or electricity. Most of them use dozens of apps and services that are rapidly evolving and demand better and better UX. They also start to project this high standard to B2B applications including collaboration tools. Generation Z is entering the workforce and will soon account for over a third of the global population. And as the new generation, they will probably require new tools.

Organizations are digitizing their work

Organizations are digitizing the processes to gain more efficiency. Flexible and adaptable software will determine the success of these digital transformation efforts and how businesses will compete in the digital era. According to IDC, 65% of global GDP is expected to be digitized by 2022, driving over $6.8 trillion in global spending on digital transformation from 2020 to 2023.

Work has become more distributed

Companies are adopting distributed models of work via the remote + HQ/local hubs approach. Additionally, businesses become faster, time to market is now shorter than ever and organizations cannot afford slow inefficient processes. Teams forced to work cross-functionally and iterate more efficiently. As a result, organizations are becoming more reliant on tools that facilitate remote collaboration.

Teams need more effective tools to orchestrate the work

Communication sometimes harms productivity. Businesses have adopted a number of applications such as Zoom, WeChat, WhatsApp, Microsoft Teams, Slack, etc to make the communication better. While these applications help teams to communicate, they were not designed to provide a system to track and coordinate units of work or set up processes for a rapid execution.

Collaboration tools

There are different classifications of collaboration tools. I personally use this breakdown: Virtual office; Messaging; Voice; Video; Docs, presentation & spreadsheet; Personal productivity; Whiteboards; Design; Сonferencess & Networking, Remote management & OKR. I do not pretend that this structure is complementary but it covers all existing key segments but I will probably add a couple of additional segments in the next iteration.

Virtual offices

It seems as if we had a completely different life before COVID: conferences, socials, casual hangouts with colleagues were a big part of our lives. Now, as companies such as Microsoft and Twitter declare remote as the future of work, the key question is what the working environment will look like in the near time: will it be 100% virtual, offline or hybrid? Will we need an OS for the collaboration? Also, Gen Z (heavy players) are slowly becoming a big part of the working force. Platforms that create virtual offices believe that they could imitate the office environment in the virtual HQ. The platforms are all racing to prove that the world is ready to be a part of virtual workspaces.

There are two types of approaches for virtual office creation:

(1) Focus on collaboration — Slack 2.0 with the bells and whistles

(2) Leveraging gaming culture from multiplayer games to increase engagement.

But both of these approaches try embedded features to promote spontaneity, such as “shoulder taps”, open space, watercooler chats or game zones.

We still see the early days of virtual office solutions but there are already dozens of companies trying to tackle this market. The three that have risen to the top include Branch, built by Gen Z gamers; Gather, created by engineers building a gamified Zoom; and Teamflow. Gather just raised $26 million in a Series A round and already onboard more than 4 million users. Teamflow, has raised an $11 million Series A just three months after raising a $3.9 million seed. Tandem is now drifting towards remote HQ but without replicating the physical office and environment with a better slack-ish and zoom-ish experience.

In Europe, we also see new players in virtual HQ play. For example, Teemyco from Sweden, creates an environment for office meta-universe with open space, kitchen and other aspects of the work environment. The London-startup Cosmos.Video is building a new virtual office leveraging gamified approach for collaboration.

The main hypothesis for early players in this domain is that the future of work will be a blend between gaming and socialization for distributed teams. The key question is if this platform will evolve in the OS system for productivity and collaboration. If the answer is yes it could be a good spot. A virtual office could become a potential platform for a collaboration ecosystem. We already see the first steps in these directions: Teamflow (and others) already have features for virtual visual collaboration (aka Miro) and functionality for virtual events (aka Hopin). These companies should solve a couple of problems to become really big: retention and upsell. Retention is still the biggest problem for the virtual office platform, e.g. Gather still got the majority of revenue from one-off events. Also, major users of virtual HQ are still small companies (up to 30 people and mostly remote). Problems will emerge when these companies start to scale, so these companies will probably need slightly different products and functionality.

Messaging

Messaging became an essential part of communication during the remote work era and this tool is usually the core instrument behind team productivity and collaboration. Most of us usually spend the day working via email, chat and forums. Slack was one of the pioneers who redefined messaging for the corporation. After Slack´s success, other players launched collaboration services as well but most of them failed, except Microsoft (the first attempt with Yammer also wasn’t too successful). Teams had very aggressive marketing, growing much faster than other competitors in the last years and probably this forced Slack management to sell the company.

In terms of trends we see more demand for better UX, the improved security and the elimination of messaging distractions. The rapid rise of Slack has catalyzed the messaging app explosion, all aiming to solve one huge UX challenge: creating a friendly platform where coworkers can have productive discussions. Many Slack followers are also focusing on real-time “instant” messaging. But from time to time, this harms productivity due to intrusive notifications. Maybe the future of messaging is the more smooth version without pop-up messages, which distract us from work. Companies like Threads are trying to solve this problem and offer a platform for asynchronous communication that is less time-sensitive and creates threads in which individuals could engage in their own rhythm. Quill is also focusing on collaboration optimization around threads, which help to focus on a specific topic.

Сhat apps like Slack have done their best to kill the email. But maybe if the email would look like a chat it could make working with it more productive. That’s the idea behind Spike, a productivity startup that has built an email app that organizes emails into chat bubbles with an interface that encourages users to keep it short and simple.

Mass adoption of collaboration messaging tools has raised concerns regarding security. For many corporations, it becomes the key selection criteria. For example, Wire, the end-to-end encrypted messaging app and service, just raised a Series B funding, or Mattermost, a more capitalized player, is building an open-source messaging app designed for businesses with serious privacy and security needs.

In Europe Cord tries to make messaging more collaborative. Integration with different working tools makes it possible to message the specific application window, like a comment to a graph or a design. Bubbles works in the same domain and helps to discuss different issues in a visual context (async).

Video

Video collaboration is in a slightly challenging messaging position. We all usually discuss small questions in messengers but for the complex issues we schedule a ZOOM meeting. Zoom had good momentum in recent years. But we should keep in mind that the company is already a legacy player — it has more than 10 years of history: due to size, it is getting too difficult for a company to manage different subsegments of customers. The key question for a video collaboration post Zoom is how to make it more productive. It can be the verticalization of Zoom or emerging tech, which facilitates video calls and builds infrastructure for better navigation and knowledge management will be the next frontiers in video collaboration. JJ Oslund published a good article about the reasons why the verticalization of Zoom is inevitable.

Asynchronous video collaboration has become more important nowadays. Loom brings a new approach to collaboration and helps to replace presentation with the pre-recorded video. Also, we see the beginning of Zoom unbundling: Coscreen makes it easier for engineers to collaborate in the specific application via video, like co-editing code in real-time. And Dive build a dedicated communication platform for celebration and socials.

The rapid growth of video communication catalyzes the development of a meta-layer. It would be great to have access to recordings of all your meetings. There is a new generation of products which helps to solve this problem, e.g. Rewatch. It is a central system of records of all video chats in an organization, making it available on-demand. By using Grain users can mark the most important piece of information from video calls and share it via a clip with its own unique URL. We all start to see the second derivative in video conferencing — new tools that make meetings more user-friendly, like Krsip which uses AI to mute background noises during the calls. Interactio also plays an interesting game providing synchronous language translation during video meetings. Zoom has announced that it’s acquiring a company in a similar domain — Kites which also has been working on creating real-time translation and transcription software.

In Europe, we also see the emergence of video tech. Appear.in was a pioneer in the European collaboration space and now it is focusing on a better collaboration experience after the acquisition (with a new name Whereby). Companies like Vaam and Tella are building platforms for sharing pre-recorded video. These services help prerecord a video for a sales pitch or customer communication and share it via a link. European companies Claap, tl;dv, or Acapela leverages video for asynchronous team collaboration to fight Zoom fatigue. Livestorm is building a video platform with more dedicated features for online webinars.

Voice

Voice has become an important tool in the tech world. Mass adoption of voice tech started with assistants and speakers. The second wave began after the success of Clubhouse which appeared in a lot of headlines in recent times. Other big techs like Twitter, Spotify, Facebook, Telegram, Discord, and LinkedIn are also experimenting with similar features to Clubhouse’s live audio streaming rooms. Voice services and devices have become an essential part of our life. This tech brings a new type of interaction. The question is when the voice reaches mass adoption in B2C and starts to find more diverse applications in business. It is also interesting how collaboration tools could leverage voice tech?

We already see the first players in the field of voice tech. For example, Yac utilizes asynchronous voice messaging to help to cut down on meetings and calls, and Slashtalk decentralizes conversations to remote teams. In Europe, we see companies like Riff and Voiceline which focus on synchronous and asynchronous voice collaboration respectively. Mote is building a Chrome Extension for adding voice notes and feedback to documents.

Most of these companies are pretty early in terms of development. Voice still is not widespread in the collaboration environment. The success of voice collaboration tools will probably link to the success of popular voice B2C services — if they succeed voice becomes much bigger in business communication.

Docs, presentation & spreadsheet

For remote or hybrid work knowledge management becomes very important. There is a different generation of products on the market that we use for collaboration and information exchange from old tools like Google docs/ spreadsheets to the new generation of tools that rethink the way we work with documents and share knowledge.

A new generation of tools has better UX and they usually try to create a multiservice environment. These tools often build themselves as an “all in one” product and have some features around spreadsheets, messaging, or project management but tend to have the best product fit as a knowledge base for teams. A clear example of it is Notion that combines the functionality of collaboration and knowledge base. Slite is working in the same domain; the company aggregates documents and provides a wiki-like experience. The next generation of companies will have additional functionality on top of the knowledge base, like Guru, which embedded knowledge base into the employee working environment. Companies like Onna help to find the right data in the complex working environment.

Presentation is also an important aspect of corporate knowledge and information sharing. MS PowerPoint has already been decades on the market but it wasn´t built for a (remote) collaboration culture. This opens a spot for new players. Pitch for example is trying to do for the presentation software market the same what Slack did for the team communication sphere. mmhmm platform from the former co-founder of Evernote helps to bring more engagement into video conferencing calls adding more flexible features for presenting.

The most efficient way to store complex numerical information is through spreadsheets. MS Excel is one of the most popular tools for storing data. But nowadays we see more companies creating more complicated tools, like spreadsheets on steroids, eg Airtable which transformed a simple spreadsheet into a no-code relational database with sophisticated prebuild functionality or Casual which focused on simplifying excel and making it collaborative.

We also see the next generation of tools that create web apps for convenient review of spreadsheet data. Accidentally, all the following companies are from Europe. Grid provides an easy visualization for spreadsheets and opportunities to change and track how the inputs affect the outcomes. Rows is a low-code platform that lets people analyze web apps using just a spreadsheet interface. Pigment replaces spreadsheets for more sophisticated business planning. Graphy helps teams create, share and collaborate on dashboards. And Layer adds collaboration and workflow features on top of the spreadsheets.

The challenge for these spreadsheet companies is that while at their best they are democratizing databases for non-technical workers, their first customers and early adopters are much more technical than the people these tools could ultimately empower. It is a long way from when non-technical workers could build tools easily. But we already see first successful steps.

Personal productivity

A new collaboration environment raises high standards for personal productivity. Sometimes managing a personal working environment at home is more difficult than in an office. Productivity tools help to organize work more effectively.

Probably one of the biggest problems is the meeting scheduling, especially when all our communication travels online. Calendly has a blockbuster year and I understand why: this tool makes scheduling (and rescheduling!) much more convenient. Meeting management getting more difficult leads to less productivity because you don’t have time to concentrate on important things. The new generation of tools tries to tackle scheduling: Reclaim.ai, an intelligent calendar assistant and time management platform helps to customize calendars according to long -term goals.

Superhuman is another productivity tool and it has already been on the market for a long time helping users to be more productive at working with the emails. But we see the emergence of the new generation of tools like a Berlin-based Amie developing — a productivity app that combines a person’s calendar and to-dos in one place. To-dos from time to time could save a lot of time like a Superlist that was created as a replacement to the Wunderlist.

Most of us spend a big part of the day writing messages, emails, posts, etc. Doing this you usually cannot avoid making mistakes and typos, so tools like Grammarly solve this problem. There are also other tools that help us to write better content, e.g. Craft docs. — a tool with the same functionality as Notion but with a strong focus on UX around content writing.

Project management

Project management tools that help teams to organize and complete tasks have a long history. Legacy project management tools are usually difficult for many new users to adopt. These tools were designed for dedicated project managers or tech specialists and not for everyday users who often lack the skills to design a project, make customizations or integrate third-party applications. Additionally, they create information silos because they are not linked to the underlying work and communications about that work. Atlassian is one of the dominant players in the pure task management game.

But now it meets the pressure from a new generation of a platform like Notion which is building an ecosystem around collaboration and knowledge exchange. Taskade helps teams collaborate around projects that can be re-organized based on how the individual user works best through tasks. Monday.com, once started as a project management tool, is expanding now in the WORK OS: an environment that helps users build software applications and work management tools that fit their needs using no-code and low-code frameworks.

Project management has long been a people-led aspect of the workplace but that has been slowly changing. Trends in automation, big data, and AI have ushered in a new wave of project management applications. Forecast mixes automation and project management and helps to make collaboration more effective. This platform is able to read and integrate data from different enterprise applications in order to build a bigger picture of the project and potential outcomes. Legacy player Wrike also joined the game and integrated AI tools inside their platform.

We can assume that the next generation of project management tools will be more focused on specific verticals or business applications. For example, Airfocus is building a platform for product management with a dedicated toolkit for this area. So maybe the new successors in this field like Asana or Monday.com are the pioneers and we will see more new vertical players emerging in this field.

Visual collaboration tools

Even the classical whiteboard, a staple in classrooms and office spaces, has taken the digital leap so that you can pair the benefits of visual thinking, teaching and collaboration with the convenience of technology. The leading role in this field probably belongs to Miro. After fresh financing last spring the company has expanded into more complex collaboration tools, adding new integrations and features. The company has the ambition to become a leader in the collaboration process.

But there are other companies which benefited from a growing market as well. Mural & Lucid are other big players in visual collaboration tools. This market is so interesting that other players also started to launch similar products, eg Microsoft Whiteboard, Figma’s FigmaJam, Freehand from Invision, or MeetingBoard/Board that belongs to the French company Klaxoon.

The key question for virtual boards is whether they will still be a separate product or be integrated into the other environment. We already see what a whiteboard includes in its starter functionality for a new generation of tools, like Teamflow or Cosmos (partnering with Miro).

Digital visual management has also become more popular and it brings visual collaboration to the “conservative” industries. iObeya helps digitize management planning processes like lean and agile for enterprises.

Design

Most of the design tools were initially built for illustration. It took some time until we saw a new generation of tools that were dedicated to web products. The second wave starts when people realize that design is not a single-player process and nowadays the collaboration aspect of design has become critically important. When designers need to collaborate with other teams, they can currently turn to products like InVision and Zeplin. Sketch & Figma was a new player who brought collaboration to the design process and now many other players projected Figma’s experience on other products.

One of the challenges during the design session is versioning. Abstract is a platform that helps to manage versioning and workflow for design projects. Avacode also operates in this domain and helps share or inspect the right version of the code.

Another problem is fragmentation. The working on design, content, and coding is still separate. Figma made the first attempt to eliminate hands-off and generate code but still didn’t replicate good developers. Framer X is described as a “fully integrated design, prototyping and developer handoff tool. Relate from Israel, an early player in this field which is trying to fully eliminate hands-off.

Engineering

The engineering teams are also widely using video tools like Zoom, Teams or Slack . But they also leverage a bunch of specific services. One of the essential developer tools is Github. Millions of developers and companies build, ship and maintain their software via GitHub or Gitlab and manage projects via Jira. Basically, these tools are the main instruments for developer collaboration. But we see new emerging tools that are built on top of the code repositories that make hybrid/remote collaboration more convenient: ZenHub, the GitHub-centric project management service for development teams. The tool makes it easier for teams to plan the development sprints.

A variety of collaboration tools could lead to a cumbersome working environment and blurred focus. Engineers usually use a lot of tools for communication and project management so it is easy to lose important information or forget to react to the new ticket. A product like Veamly solves this problem for the tech team and helps to aggregate all project info in one place.

Video\Voice communication becomes very important due to the shift to remote work. Zoom-ish experience is good for a general meeting but not as optimal for code co-editing or reviewing. Companies like GitDuck or CoScreen help to solve this problem and offer a more convenient collaboration environment and prebuilt integration option for developer teams.

Remote management & OKR

Managing people is perhaps the most challenging part of the work. It is especially difficult in the current environment when you see your colleagues one or two days per week (in the best case because a lot of companies are still fully remote). There is a new generation of a management platform which helps to make management experience more smooth. For example, Fellow hopes to ease the learning curve for new managers as well as to improve and reinforce the habits of experience. This platform helps team leads to interact with their reports in the current challenging environment and teach them valuable skills. BetterUp and Coachhub help to develop soft skills online which is very important because you should prepare your managers for hybrid or remote environments.

Remote/Hybrid culture building is difficult. And as a famous quote by Peter Drucker says: “culture eats strategy for breakfast”. So we need a new toolkit that will help us to manage culture remotely. Remi platform enables remote companies to proactively build and measure culture. The product establishes regular check-ups to understand employees’ moods and problems. Collaboration culture is also an important aspect of work and tools like Time is Ltd. Platform enables managers to understand complex collaboration data to help create a new approach to measuring productivity, engagement and collaboration inside companies.

Probably one of the most popular management tools last year were OKR platforms. The acronym OKR stands for “objectives and key results,” a planning method that has become popular among American technology firms and now expanding in another vertical. Now we see the Cambrian explosion of the OKR platform because of our need for a better visibility due to the new working culture. Leaders in developing the OCR platform are WorkBoard, Ally and Workpath in Europe.

Conferences & Networking

Last year was life-changing for the conference industry. Major events were canceled and the sector was forced to conduct rapid experimentation. So in a couple of months since the beginning of the lockdown we saw an explosion of online events. If you ask me to pick one startup of 2020, I will most likely pick Hopin. The company had tremendous growth last year and it closed several outstanding rounds of financing.

Hopin was a pioneer in this field and it captured significant value as the first mover. But as we saw from the other industries the next thing will probably be about the verticalization of digital conferencing tools because Hopin only provides generic features. There is an industry that requires more dedicated tools. We already see first movers in the field, like Morressier, which is building virtual conferences and publishing platforms for the scientific community. Pluto provides a more immersive experience and helps to hold more show-ish conferences.

There is still a debate on how conferences will look like in the post-Covid era. I believe that huge conferences like WebSummit or Techcrunch Disrupt will take place offline as before. They will probably add some online propositions but live-events will still be a major part of the working process. For this kind of event a hybrid platform like Brella will be perfect. This service helps to hold a conference in online + offline format. The smaller conferences will most likely keep being held online, e.g. for big corporations staying online is a good choice due to the fact that they could increase their audience. Perhaps these companies will stay with solutions like Hopin or Pluto

Networking during COVID has become a very challenging thing. It is possible that you can meet interesting people through Hopin but you are limited by event number and can’t do a targeted search. There are startups, like Lunchclub which are helping users to schedule weeks 1:1 with new people. Using points (internal currency) you could do a more precise search for matches.

Conclusion

Debates over remote, HQ or hybrid types of work have become increasingly popular nowadays. One group believes that due to the lockdown, our work habits have changed significantly and the future is all about WFH; the other group thinks that we will be back in the office once the pandemic ends. The answer is probably somewhere in the middle: we stay a couple of days in the office and other days at home or spend winter in a warmer place. Anyway, due to these tendencies, we need new tools to collaborate more efficiently. In terms of general trends we see the following processes:

Verticalization of collaboration tools: Coscreen, Morressier
Raising popularity of async. communication: Claap, Acapella
Voice doing a first steps in B2B collaboration: Yac, Mote
Personal productivity becoming a thing: Reclaim.ai, Amie
Emerging of the second derivative of collaboration tools: Guru, Krsip
Security getting more important: Wire, Mattermost, Worldr
Collaboration becomes more contextual: Cord, Bubbles

We can assume we’ll continue to see huge numbers of new companies in the collaboration space and the trend of remote/hybrid teams will catalyze the development of new tools and services.

Thanks for help Nimrod Priell; Rahul Goyal; Charlotte Ekelund; Dvir Ben-Aroya; Till Pieper; Robin Bonduelle; Hjalmar Gislason; Eden Vidal; Peter Parkes; Mike Bartlett and Sagi Shorrer

P.S. As a bonus I added a map of the European and Israeli collaboration 2.0 landscape:

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If you are building something in this space (or thinking about it) please let me know on Linkedin and I appreciate any feedback!

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Further read:

Collaboration 2.0 — Mapping the tools we will use for working remote and hybrid

Written by Denis Kuznetsov

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