Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

As UX researchers, we take our cues from the product development organization on where we should spend our time. We need access to the big picture. Without that, we risk being brought in too late on projects, unable to influence product and business decisions. To fill this need, our team at Kira conducted a workshop with product managers and designers to collaboratively create a research roadmap — and we’re sharing our process in this post.

Staying on the same page with a remote team is no easy task, which is why the team document is a remote work lifeline. Documentation can both act as an artifact — a final presentation to share with others — and serve as a living workspace — where we draft our thoughts and collaborate with our team online.

Zendesk is a customer service software company with support and sales products designed to improve customer relationships. Their platform gives customer service agents the tools they need to rapidly and efficiently serve on the front-line of their brand’s customer experience.

The conversation about how much we all dread meetings isn’t a new one. There are too many of them. Most of them are colossal wastes of time. Heck, one in three people admit that they’ve felt drowsy or even fallen asleep in a meeting. But, when that meeting is happening virtually and people are only dressed appropriately from the waist up? Well, it becomes even more challenging to keep participants engaged in the conversation.

I sometimes find myself wondering how we’ll remember 2020 when we reflect on it in the future. Will our dominant memories be anxiety and uncertainty over how long the pandemic would last? The grief of losing so many people to the virus? Or the frustrations of canceled plans and events?

The relationships with IT has historically been driven by top-down decisions about which technology teams can (or must) use. However, in this age of remote work, it’s crucial that employees have the technology they need to collaborate and execute from anywhere in the world. To discover what works in this new world of collaborative IT, we spoke to three experts at Distributed 2020: Chet Mandair, CIO of Guidewire; Gopi Parampalli, VP of IT at EA; and Keith Pemberton, Sr.

We’ve all been there. You’ve prepared for an amazing meeting with Miro. The ice-breaker was selectively chosen to get everyone engaged from the start. Each frame was created with painstaking attention. The breakouts organized for maximum collaboration. The board is a work of art fit for a Miroverse template. As you kick things off, you get a chat message asking for the link to the board. Another asking for access because they can view but not edit.

Collaborating remotely has historically been a challenge — and now that so many more of us are home and interacting virtually, those challenges are more apparent than ever. Fortunately, Miro makes collaboration significantly more manageable. Simply put, collaboration is the act of working together to create something. It might be a website, a diagram of some kind, or a vision statement. The key is people coming together to work. But before Miro, there were other ways to collaborate online.

The perfect meeting is an elusive concept. We’re all familiar with the mind-numbing “I talk, you listen” model of the corporate presentation and the chaos of open-ended brainstorms with no clear takeaways. If our calendars are starting to look like brick walls of meeting blocks, this pattern can lead to frustration and burnout. It’s time to challenge the status quo and make meetings more efficient, engaging, and interactive.

During his lifetime, Carl Sagan was known for many things. He was an astronomer, astrophysicist, television producer, screenwriter, and celebrity-thinker who made advanced astronomy accessible to the layman and opened the window to space for millions of people around the world. For those without the time to read one of his books, we can remember him through some of the quotes he left behind. One of my favorites goes like this: “Who are we, if not measured by our impact on others?