We use email a lot at Zenbe. After all, we built an email platform from scratch about 3 years ago because we felt like it was the right time to take email in a new direction.

However, as a team we found it difficult to be truly productive with email alone. Why? A few reasons:

• Hunt-and-peck syndrome
  Important emails get mixed in with less important emails. Rules, tags, and personal discipline help, but I still have to scan or search more often than I should to find what I need.
• “Oops, I forgot to CC you!”
  I just sent out my latest product proposal to my business partner and product designer. But I forgot to CC the lead engineer. So I forward it to him. But then the product designer replies to the original email and the lead engineer doesn’t get the reply. ARGH! Now everyone’s out of sync and I need to fix it somehow.
• Frequent distractions
  I’m searching for that proposal you sent me two days ago when an email with specials from Amazon.com pops into my inbox. Trying…to…resist. Oh well, I guess finding the proposal can wait.

Sound familiar? Our frustration with issues like those lead us to ask a few questions:

• How do we reduce the amount of mental context-switching people have to do when processing their email? When the first email of the day I read is a marketing proposal, and the second email I read is about hiring, my mind has to leap from one topic to another. This decreases productivity.
• How do we make sure the right people are involved in a conversation? And if we forgot to include someone, how do we make it easy for them to get caught up with what we’re discussing?

We tried a number of different tools to try to solve these problems. Instant messaging, a wiki, an internal blog, and Google Docs are just a few. But that just scattered the information in multiple places.

Our solution is embodied in our new product: Shareflow. Shareflow allows you to have focused conversations with the people that matter.

Instead of emailing individuals or groups, you share email, files, comments, events and more in a “flow”. And then you invite people to the flow where the conversation ensues in a central place.

Any participant can share and comment on things in a flow. But the flow creator decides who gets to be a part of the flow to keep the conversation on topic. People can be added or removed from a flow at any time.

My most important communication with my teammates is now contextualized in the different flows I participate in. When I’m working with a conversation in a flow, I know the right people are seeing the information and we’re not going to be disrupted by an off-topic email.

To make things more concrete, I’ll give you a few examples of how I use Shareflow day-to-day.

The “Team Zenbe” Flow

Who has access?

Everyone who works at Zenbe.

What do we share?

Anything of interest to the entire company. Examples include:

• Documents describing new product or marketing initiatives.
• Links to articles relevant to our industry or products, and internal comments.
• Questions about a feature we’re building, or the timing of a product release.
• Events like company holidays or outings.

What does it look like?

Here’s an actual screenshot. This is just a section of the flow. Content is ordered from most recently updated to least recently updated. In this screenshot you see two tiles. One is an interview with an inspiring entrepreneur that I posted along with my comments. The other tile is a document Peter wrote about Shareflow for the entire team to review. You see people’s comments right below the original posts:

The “Founders” Flow

Who has access?

The four Zenbe co-founders: Alan, Peter, Robert and myself.

What do we share?

Information related to business development and strategy. Examples include:

• Contact information for people we meet and network with.
• Copies of emails (yes – you can send an email directly to a flow!) to or from partners and advisers.
• Documents and proposals we sent or received. On a side note, our inline document viewer makes reading documents right in the browser a breeze, regardless of the original document format.
• Events related to trade shows, demos, or other business meetings.

What does it look like?

I can’t show you! It contains private information. But that’s one of the great things about Shareflow. Only the founders have access to the “Founders” flow. Unlike a typical social network where everyone in the network can see everything, in Shareflow you get to choose who participates in each flow.

Our “Founders” flow allows us to distribute who takes the lead on a certain strategic initiative or relationship but ensures that if that person is unavailable for a call or meeting any of the other founders has enough background info to step in.

The “Zenbe Developers” Flow

Who has access?

All of the developers at Zenbe.

What do we share?

Geeky development stuff mostly. The fancy term for it is “organizational knowledge management.” Examples include:

• Questions and suggestions about our programming conventions and libraries.
• Links to tools and technologies we find interesting.
• Discussions about bug fixes or feature development.

What does it look like?

The screenshot below depicts some recent posts on the Zenbe Developers flow. Will and Jeremy created and shared a ruby script that generates command-line reports from our bug tracking system. We’ve also been discussing the technical details of Google Wave. Will posted a YouTube video which was automatically embedded in the flow.

We have similar Flows for other functional groups at Zenbe, like system operations, user interface design and customer support.

The “Son of Zengeist” Flow

Who has access?

Everyone who works at Zenbe.

What do we share?

“Son of Zengeist” is like our virtual water cooler. It’s where we share stuff that’s not directly relevant to anything in particular, but is interesting or funny.

It’s nice to visit the “Son of Zengeist” flow to take a break every now and then. Here’s a screenshot of how we’ve been entertaining ourselves recently:

How Shareflow and Email Work Together

I still check my email first thing in the morning. We still email each other at Zenbe, mostly for one-on-one conversations. A lot of times I’ll get a useful email from someone and post it to Shareflow. From within Zenbe Mail it’s just two clicks, or if I’m using another email service I can forward the email to a Shareflow-specific address.

Next I check my Shareflow activity. I click “All Flows” to scan the most recent activity across all flows I participate in, or I click on an individual flow to focus on what’s happening there.

Because every flow is built around a context, my distractions are minimized. When I am browsing a flow, I am literally “in the flow.” If that flow is updated I see it right away, but unlike getting a new email the flow update is almost certainly relevant to the topic I’m currently thinking about.

I also no longer have to nag my coworkers so much with questions like “Did you get that email I sent you?” Now I say “Hey, go check out that file I shared on the Team Zenbe flow” and I know they’ll see what I’m talking about because it’s not buried in their inbox.

Shareflow For Everyone

Shareflow is already available to paid Zenbe Mail accounts. In the next two weeks we’ll launch it as a standalone service.

We think it’s an incredibly productive way to communicate and want you to try it regardless of what email service you use. You can invite anyone to join a flow, not just people in your organization.

Free and paid plans will be available. Check back here for more news soon.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009 at 11:30 am and is filed under Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.