Making a productive SHIFT
A Product Review on ‘Shift’: the workstation of tomorrow
If you were to ask me the one indispensable skill a product manager should possess, I’d say the ability to be productive rather than busy. My experience in successfully shipping multiple multi-million dollar B2C products has taught me that my cognitive capabilities are limited and thus being productive is quintessential. I’m always looking for ways to automate routine tasks in my life so that I am able to focus on more critical tasks. Shift is one of my most significant discoveries- so much so that I included it in my article ‘Products from a Product Manager’s Product Stack’ which earned recognition from the company’s CEO!
In this article, I will-
- Establish what Shift is
- Explain why it’s significant
- Explore how it can be improved
What Shift is
Shift is a desktop application that aims at increasing productivity by offering a suite of user-configured features to create one centralized workstation for streamlining and organizing accounts, apps and workflows. From the business point of view, Shift offers a 3-tier subscription model: Basic (0$), Advanced ($99 per year), Teams ($99 per year per user) billed yearly.
Why it’s significant
1. No more clutter
Before Shift, my browser was cluttered with countless tabs making navigation a hassle and segmentation of work/life/play a nightmare. To top it up, having multiple email accounts was a nuisance because I was constantly caught in the cycle of logging in and logging out.
With Shift, I was able to customize my workstation as per my preference. I integrated my personal and professional email accounts (top-left), created a Cornell workspace and a Product Management workspace (mid-left) and integrated apps that I used frequently (bottom-left). Navigation became hassle-free and I am no longer overloaded with information!
2. No more distractions
As a student and a working professional, I have always faced the challenge of not being able to comprehend information as quickly as it comes: emails, alerts, notifications- all while switching contexts to multitask. While it may feel like we are getting work done, the effect is quite the opposite.
With Shift, I am able to organize tabs and bookmarks by account or workspace. Shift also features customized alerts and mute notifications that helps me avoid interruptions when enabled. Focused browsing has enabled me to take control of my tabs, keep context and conquer the digital clutter without distractions!
3. No more search paralysis
Gone are the days of me wasting time searching for that one email, document, invite.
With Shift’s unified search, I can query across all of my mail, calendar or drive accounts with just one search.
How it can be improved
Although my obsession with Shift has been well-established, having a tuned product mindset has enabled me to look beyond what it has to offer to what more it can offer. However, the caveat was that I was one user in one segment of the clientele. Shift is a product that people use differently based on their role and industry.
To capture this diversity of usage, I interviewed ~8 users from various companies in sales, marketing, engineering and product roles. My hypothesis from my background research was that large enterprises find it challenging to use Shift as enterprise software and thus only resort to using it in personal capacities. I was therefore mindful of the company size while performing user interviews ranging from <50 employees to 1000+ employees. My hypothesis was proven right and we’ll see that company size has a big impact on the challenges people face with Shift.
The notes from the user interviews are available here:
I’ll detail three major pain points that I discovered during my research, as well as potential solutions for each.
Problem 1: Lack of Intelligence
As a productivity app, Shift currently lacks intelligence. The learnings from the user-interviews point to the direction of users wanting more intelligent recommendations based on their user behavior.
Solution: Shift Dashboard 📈
I envision Shift Dashboard as a personalized, intelligent dashboard giving a single snapshot of how the individual user works on a day-to-day basis. Sensitive to time, Shift Dashboard would start the day with an organized summary of the time spent on different applications in the past 24-hours. It would also create an intelligent, interactive aggregated list of all messages, tasks, meetings, files, and contacts from the user’s Shift workstation nudging the user to focus on tasks based on her priorities. Contextualization through grouping information based on project, team or keyword would be a key feature of Shift Dashboard. This also loops back to the over-arching goal of the company to declutter in the era of information overload.
One thing to keep in mind is that one of Shift’s competitors, Station, has introduced intelligent recommendations by automatically categorizing sites by application, which is a differentiator from Shift.
A simple iOS and android application that can access the Shift Dashboard would benefit users to view their tasks and plan accordingly through the comfort of their phones.
Tradeoff: User Privacy is a tradeoff here and so data needs to be accessed through permissions that can be granted or revoked at any time.
Problem 2: Lack of Automation
The user interviews surfaced an important pain-point across enterprises: many expected automation tools for the price they were paying. It's worth noting that if one considers Shift’s competitors in the Enterprise software space like Citrix Workspace, it provides its users with workflow automation tools which is a prominent selling point.
Solution: Shift Workflows 🔂
I envision Shift Workflows to be the one tool for automating workflows in personal and professional settings to reduce human errors, remove bottlenecks and boost productivity. Shift Workflows would employ WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) to cater to enterprise and personal workflows.
Though defining the features would require a comprehensive user-requirement study, for context, consider the use-case of a document-centric workflow. Collaborations in businesses often entail multiple apps and document repositories. Manually organizing a workflow across all of them, typically by email, is a time-consuming, error-prone, and repetitious task that puts version control and project deadlines at risk. The document workflow feature in Shift Workflows on the other hand, would allow all documents to be automatically and securely transferred, reviewed, updated, and authorized within the same system. Suggestions and approvals would both generate automatic notifications.
One of the personal workflow use-cases would be to automatically align personal and work calendars to assist keep personal and professional lives distinct while still informing colleagues of our personal commitments. From an implementation standpoint, if I add anything to my personal calendar that has the word “appointment,” Shift Workflows will automatically replicate the same block of time plus buffer time to my work calendar in an anonymized form.
Tradeoff: An important consideration is the confidentiality aspect at each step of the workflow, specifically in business workflows. Customizable access-control features can be implemented during later iterations to counter this tradeoff.
Problem 3: Lack of Scalability
I had mentioned earlier in the article that I hypothesized that as the company size increases, users find it challenging to adopt Shift. Although Shift has an enterprise version, it is predominantly being used in individual capacities. The pain point that materialized through interviews was that the application is not traditionally built out to scale due to lack of role-based access controls. Another encircling pain-point is the differing security protocols of enterprises which makes Shift non-compliant. The next step for Shift is to tailor the application to leverage this opportunity and make it a go-to workspace for large enterprises.
Solution: Workspace for Enterprises 🏢
The capabilities of Shared Workspaces are currently limited. To empower today’s hybrid workforce, shared workspaces must be tailored for enterprises. Consider an enterprise X. The idea is to create an all-in-one workspace solution for the enterprise. Workspace for Enterprises would require a single sign-on to access apps and data that is personalized to the employee, similar to the Personalized Shift Dashboard. It would be pre-built with integrations for emails, apps and files. Additionally, there would also be a unified search specifically for within the enterprise workspace. Employees with suitable access control would be able to create workspaces within the enterprise workspace. The admin dashboard would pull actionable insights into one simple dashboard featuring controls such as endpoint management, intelligent monitoring and unusual user activity making it a unified, secure, intelligent workspace for enterprises.
Tradeoff: In the enterprise software landscape, security compliance cannot be compromised and therefore building out these features would fall under the high effort-high impact category.
Feasibility
Based on my research and understanding of the users, I was fairly confident in my proposed solutions. However, I wanted to take it a step further and pitch the ideas to Shift’s senior management for validation. I cold-emailed and was fortunate enough to receive responses from the CEO and the Director of Marketing!
I went ahead and scheduled a meeting with Simon, the Director of Marketing at Shift. My in-depth comprehension of the users and their pain points impressed him. He also remarked that my suggestions are actually on the product roadmap!
P.s. Post our call, Simon kindly offered me a free Shift subscription!
Closing Thoughts
What I learned through the process was that defining the problem is the problem. Thus, as a product manager, precisely characterizing and comprehending user problems needs to be emphasized upon. The job is to find the solution to the right problem rather than trying to fit the solution to a problem.
