In a Digital Workspace, Workflows Are Everything | Interview with Jon Darbyshire, CEO of SmartSuite

Ryan Purvis 23:55:09
Hello and welcome to the digital workspace works Podcast. I'm Ryan Purvis, your host supported by producer Heather Bicknell. In this series, you'll hear stories and opinions from experts in the field story from the frontlines. The problems they face, how they solve them. The areas they're focused on from technology, people and processes to the approaches they took, they'll help you to get to grips with a digital workspace inner workings.

Heather Bicknell 23:55:38
Welcome, Jon Darbyshire to the digital workspace works podcast. Delighted to have you today.

Jon Darbyshire 23:55:44
Heather, it's a pleasure to be here looking forward to our discussion.

Heather Bicknell 23:55:47
Same here. So just to get started, could you tell us a little bit about yourself and about your company? smartsuite?

Jon Darbyshire 23:55:55
Sure, yeah, I'm originally from the Midwest, I now live in Southern California. I'm founder and CEO of a company called smartsuite. So we focus on business process automation. So think of smartsuite is a company that brings together both project management and process management into a single platform that allows organisations to really manage the work they do in their business.

Heather Bicknell 23:56:17
Very cool. And this is the question we like to ask all of our guests in this one. I imagine, given the nature of your company, you've thought about a lot, but what does the digital workspace mean to you?

Jon Darbyshire 23:56:29
Yeah, digital workspace to us is it that's really all about what smartsuite is, and what who we want to be is helping organisations automate the work that they do inside of their organisation. What that really means is that is to help bring processes to light in a way that they haven't been thought of in the past. And that you can automate some of the routine work that's just done manually each and every day, to help move work through workflows and queues in a way that makes the teams and the people more efficient and allows them to focus more on the outcomes that you're expecting and analysing the data or thinking about how to interact with customers, as compared to manually doing the entry and the work that needs to take place each day. So I think of it as business process automation, is the key to making that happen to kind of transform the way people work and think about work so that they can be more efficient in that process.

Heather Bicknell 23:57:24
Yeah, that makes complete sense is that something you've noticed increased demand for just with all the changes in the way we work?

Jon Darbyshire 23:57:34
For sure, I'll tell you a little bit about my background. So you understand maybe my perspective, but kind of the the first big position that I had in a company was I was a partner at Ernst and Young and I ran a consulting division. So we were focused around business process automation, and consulting services around that back to customers to help them be more efficient in what they did. So this concept has been around for quite some time. That's 25 years ago, I left Ernst and Young and started a company called Archer technologies that was in the governance Risk and Compliance space. We focused on helping organisations bring new technology to market and understand the regulatory requirements of doing so think of online banking. 29 of the top 30 largest banks in the US were customers of that company, we sold that in 2010. And retired for a bit of time, I've invested in maybe 400, startups, either directly or through some venture funds had the chance to work with lots of entrepreneurs with ideas. All the conversations that I've seen to have in that area are around the processes in the organisations that need to scale as the company grows. And how do you think about that? What products do you bring in? So the idea behind smartsuite was, I was a little bored being retired for a period of time, I'm a, you know, I love all things, no code and wanted to kind of get back into software. And I thought I want to solve that problem of helping organisations be more efficient in the way that they manage work. But I wanted to do it in a way that was presented at a price point that hasn't been seen before in the market with a price point of $10 per user per month for our our base plan, up to just $35 per user per month. In the past in the features that are typically in enterprise software products that help people manage work, you know, are hundreds of 1000s of dollars per year, and the mid market can't afford to pay for those so they don't have the funds. So we wanted to bring that type of capability, regardless of company size, and really let them bid market participate in kind of this revolution that's happening around business process optimization.

Heather Bicknell 23:59:32
That's great. Was there would you say an aha moment where you saw, you know, this, this is the spark of the business idea, and this is why I'm coming out of retirement, which to be honest, sounds pretty nice to me right now.

Jon Darbyshire 23:59:46
No, the first thing I had the idea for quite some time and that I've just, I would meet with so many people and have the same conversations over and over about, you know, should I be buying point solution should I be buying a package can do multiple things like how do these point solutions integrate? As I scale as an organisation over time and hire more people? You know, how do I do that? Well, the process is scale and I I thought, you know, I've had this conversation hundreds of times, I just want to solve it in a way that hasn't been solved before, to build a piece of software that has the building blocks to manage any process. So you don't have to have a separate product for sales, one for marketing, one for HR one for product software development. It's a platform that includes all those capabilities that are directly built in. So the aha moment was more around, hey, we can allow companies not to have to purchase these 678 different points solutions, they can have one solution that does it. That reduces the cost that they have when they onboard employees, they just have to onboard to a single product when they onboard employees, all the data and the work that's been done is in one location. So you don't have to think about you know, is this in their email is this in HubSpot, it was out in Salesforce that's there. It's all just self contained. So it makes the operations of a business, just more efficiency, by the nature of just having a single platform that you can use. But at the same time, we understand that companies love to use other products like Salesforce or HubSpot or bamboo, they might not want to move away. So we built it in a way that can integrate with those products very easily, and share the data back and forth if you do have one or two core platforms that you would like to continue to use.

Heather Bicknell 00:01:25
Great. And I think it's interesting serving all of those different departments, potentially something that came to mind, just as I was perusing your website, I'm like, I wonder, is there something here that could unlock some cross functional efficiency? You know, I'm in product marketing, I think about that all the time, having to work across marketing and product and sales. And it's, you know, a lot of that is just getting into the weeds of the process is that something you've heard at all from your customers enjoying that benefit?

Jon Darbyshire 00:01:56
Yeah, that's that's called in our in my world that we call that connected workflows, meaning that the workflows that you have across different teams and departments are connected in a way that you're sharing the right information to the right people, but it's also access to security. So you know that, who should be able to see it, who can edit versus just view and I just had discussions today with a client where they were interested in how we use our own product to manage our own company. And they were interested for me to say, to show them actually dive into our product. So I showed him like, here's our sales CRM, here's how we manage marketing. Here's how we manage product, QA, like how all the pieces fit together. And the first question was, can I go into an account? And can I see all the products and services that they purchased? Can I see the open maybe support tickets that they have with us? Can I see the feature requests that they have the training that they received? And I just did a single click and showed them? Absolutely, that's what connected workflows are all about. And I just reached into the marketing team, the product team, the software development team, but I'm actually looking at it from the sales team perspective of the CRM and that I just clicked into a customer. And I wanted to see all of that. Then the next question I asked was, well, in that customer, can I see the people inside of the customer that are actually using the product? Right? I said, Yes. So here's, they have eight people. And here they are. Now I can click into each one of those and see those same attributes of in this case, it was a software company, so they wanted to know, you know, do they have open support tickets? Do they have feature requests that we haven't implemented yet? That's there, can I see what level of training what industry they're in? So all that information is just shared across those workflows. And you could do the same thing in marketing, you could click in the marketing, look at marketing campaigns. And you could tie that back to accounts and customers and subscriptions maybe to see did they convert from a free to a paid plan that's there.

Heather Bicknell 00:03:46
That visibility cross is is priceless, honestly. And we call that where I'm from drinking our own champagne. Software companies like to talk about eating their own dog food with us. Not very nice, though, trying to shift the world to talk about drinking their own champagne instead. But I think that's so critical. Awesome. Well, let's, let's shift gears a little bit and talk about the future of workflow automation. Imagine this is a topic that's on your mind a lot. Where do you see things going in the next 5-10 years?

Jon Darbyshire 00:04:18
Yeah, I think what's happening kind of across the industry is that you're seeing products that are beginning to happen when what we call the no code space. And what that means is, it allows regular everyday people that understand processes in their company to come into a product and use drag and drop technology to kind of organise the information and the flow that fits the way that they want to work. Compared to in the past. Maybe you've, you've had developers that have created custom software, it's been quite expensive, taken a lot of time and every time you want to make a change, you have to go back to the developer, or you've purchased a point solution, meaning that maybe you've purchased a really great sales product, but it requires you to do sales and the way that they built the product and you don't have a lot of customization that's available inside of there. So no code basically just means I can use drag and drop to move information around and you're seeing that happen. across all different product categories, right now. So that's kind of the new wave that's happening. And they use the term citizen developer to mean, this is just a person that has knowledge of a process that can trigger it themselves without the need to actually write code like a coder did in the past. And there's two big trends that we see inside of no code platforms like smartsuite that are happening right now. The first is what is being the new word in this area is called automation. And basically, an automation is just what we used to call an integration with other products. But an automation now is very easy in that you can use drag and drop in set rules to just have one product integrate with another product that's there. So like in inside of smartsuite, we have an automation engine that has about 20 different products that you could integrate with in a matter of minutes just by setting up that connection that's there. But we also integrate with platforms like Zapier and make and play, which are integration hubs are connectors. And by integrating with them, you've now integrated with over 5000 other products kind of in the SAS software ecosystem that's there. So this whole concept of being able to share data between products has really changed in the last couple of years, in that it's just much easier for everyday people to be able to set those integrations up without the need to hire consultants or have developers on staff. Now the biggest trend that we're seeing right now is all about AI. And it's super fascinating that it seems like AI has been around for probably seven or eight years, people have talked about it in so many different ways. But in the last 90 days, it is moved like 100 Fold forward as far as people actually using AI in their business. And we're seeing it in two different ways in our own product. So we've integrated AI into our product, let's say that you're a marketing agency, and you're writing content for customers, maybe it's blog content, and you're saying it needs to be written with these longtail keywords, it needs to be SEO focused. And you're sharing that information through our product, which at GPT. And it's actually writing the blog post for you. Right, you could say I need a 1500 word blog post, it's focused on this area with this tone, this is the audience that I'm going after, in a matter of about 20 seconds, it can create that 1500 word article, we're finding that in a lot of cases, it's good to great meaning that it's as good as I could write. And in some cases, it's just exceptional in comparison to maybe how I could write that information and spend maybe four or five hours trying to get it just fine tuned with SEO, it's happening in minutes for someone to write. marketing agencies are like often running. We're also funding that product teams are using it to help write requirements for products and product descriptions and marketing content. For the website. It's really, really good at all three of those things that I just said, in the governance Risk and Compliance space consultants are using it to help write policies for companies. Let's say I needed a cybersecurity policy. That's there, I could just type in create cybersecurity policy for company in this industry, it will come back in again in a matter of about 20 seconds provide you with a pretty good starting point for a cybersecurity policy that maybe would have to hire a consultant or pay money for in the past to kind of get started. So the the ease of use at creating content is what we're seeing is kind of the number one use right now inside of all processes. And then the second use is being able to look inside of maybe a particular record that you have of information in a product like smartsuite. And you're asking it to maybe take four or five pages of content, maybe it's product requirements. And maybe you're saying I want to summarise that information into a paragraph, this or summarise this product feature in a way that anyone in the company can understand it? Or can you look at that information and create a checklist of all the actions that I need to take based on the requirements. And that in the last 90 days as went from like zero to 100. And that that hadn't been in our product specifically, people haven't been thinking about that. They've been writing all and all of that content manually themselves. And now that that's happening, there's they're trying to build it into every other workflow. They're just seeing how efficient it can be there capturing like, with Chet GPT, you can write things in what's called a prompt, and then you can save that prompt. So next time I go back to create the content, I have exactly the same prompt and information. And I just hit go and it creates the content for me.

Heather Bicknell 00:09:36
I think there's a nice synergy between the the no code piece and generative AI in terms of you know why? I think that we've seen this explosion is just the ease of use the ability to interface with it through natural language through text, not needing to know any of the magic behind the scenes or have any depth of technical knowledge at all. It's very accessible.

Jon Darbyshire 00:09:59
Let me give you one more use case that's popping up very quickly kind of across the industry, not just in smartsuite but in lots of products. And that making you have a CRM Do you have leads that are maybe coming from your website into the CRM, so you have information about a person, an email, maybe a company that they work with. And maybe you're like pulling some information from LinkedIn or somewhere else to kind of fill in some of those gaps, you can say I want to write an email back to this person to pitch them my product with these four or five points, but I want it to be customised to them based on their role. Maybe they're in a certain department at this particular company. And if there's something relevant in the news, like, let's include that at the beginning to say something about, hey, I understand something's happening at your company. And AI does a pretty good job of creating that content. But what's happening is that people are starting to feed it hundreds or 1000s of contacts a day, it's generating automatically all of those emails that are then creating email campaigns going back out to that large group. And in some cases, if that user replies back, you can use AI to answer the questions from the email and email the person back before you would have your first interaction with a person in your company, if they just had a question about the product or service that you had. That is, it's something that we've just seen in the last few weeks that's beginning to take off. But it's coming up in most of the conversations that we're having the it's just allowing sales and marketing teams to be more efficient, and how they have outreach back to leads that might be coming in.

Heather Bicknell 00:11:34
Yeah, I mean, the potential for use cases here is kind of wild. There's similar ones. On the customer support side, as well, I would say in a similar vein, and you see, you know, I think Microsoft, its Viva sales, intelligence, there's so much coming out right now. Everyone's sort of figuring out how to take advantage.

Jon Darbyshire 00:11:53
Yeah, we're actually looking into that ourselves just trying to we're prototyping, we use a product called intercom that allows us to have interactions with our customers, they now have an AI component to that, that could look at the questions coming from a customer and could do their best to answer that question. So what you do is you feed it lots of content from help articles and blog posts and product requirements so that it has as much knowledge as possible. And then it learns from each conversation that it has, as you tell it, if it did a good job answering that or not. We're not sure what we think about that, and or what our customers would think about just having an auto response. But we're curious just to see how it works and what the quality is for a period of time to know if in the future that might be a good fit. So if we're not available right now online, with a customer support specialists, then they could get an answer. And then we could ask them like, Hey, we're offline. But here is the answer to your question. And using our smart, sweet AI assistant that's there. If you don't, if you we didn't answer? Well, as soon as we're back, we'll reach back out.

Heather Bicknell 00:12:55
Yeah, that quality and accuracy is really at the heart of it, right? Because in one vein, it can give you much nicer experience than let's say, like an auto programme. Do you know, kind of canned LIS Yeah, the very the traditional bot experience, right? Where it's just like, just get me to a human like, this is fine. But like, most of the time, you just want to talk to someone. Right. But then if the AI hallucinates or, obviously, you want things to be factual, how, how have you seen sort of, you know, early adoption of those features in your products, you get a lot of questions around AI, governance and security. And I think there's such an appetite and an interest in this technology. But also, I've seen, especially in the enterprise side, a lot of hesitancy around it as well,

Jon Darbyshire 00:13:44
for sure. So in the in the SMB market, we've seen this this massive adoption very quickly. But they're not as worried about governance and security as maybe the large to enterprise customers that we have. In fact, we first rolled out a beta version of our API, we had a number of customers come back on the large enterprise side and say, We don't want that capability turned on by default for our companies. So we had to give them the ability to have it off and turn it on if they wanted to use it. And then they came back and said, We may only want it on for specific people or groups of people that are there. We don't know that we want to on for everybody in the s&p side, especially on on the marketing agencies that we were just talking about, like they can't get enough of it. And they're just finding all these new ways to be efficient. But they're not as concerned about governance, they just seem to be like they're adopting it faster. But you have to It's like anything, you have to be careful with the information that comes out. You can't just create a blog post and not read it. There could be a couple sentences in there that just don't make any sense based on the context that you have. But I have to say I've, I was one of the people that was sceptical at the beginning could actually write a blog post that's as good as what I would sit down and write. And after an afternoon of writing 15 blog posts on using chap GPT I just like it's so much better than what I can do it now. It's all about how do you ask it to write the information? What's the prompt and all the information that you Put it in the prompt. And we're actually doing training for customers on how to write prompts to get the best information back. And then how do you save those, so you can continue to use them over time. And I'll just mention briefly, I had a customer told us that this is probably the next new type of role that's going to start happening inside of companies. Are these prompt leaders that they sit down with people understand what they want to happen, and they help them actually configure and write a prompt that's going to give them the best content back in that case?

Heather Bicknell 00:15:40
Yeah, it's it's such a critical piece of it. And I might just, unfortunately, move us along, because I could probably talk about this area for forever. But we have so many great things that nobody wanted to discuss today as well. But totally agree, I think prompt engineering is sort of interesting to see how many roles may be developed around it. But just as like a knowledge worker skill set, absolutely something that everyone's probably going to need to learn to be fluent in in the next several years. So let's talk a little bit about employee engagement and culture and the impacts that you're seeing there. I was just reading a Gallup report this morning, talking about how employee engagement has actually been in decline since 2021, after pretty much a steady increase for the last decade. So we are starting to see a think pandemic After Effects and sort of questions around the returned office movement and all these things sort of like coming to a head. How do you coach customers on improving workplace culture and employee engagement? How do you think about that? From where you sit as a company leader?

Jon Darbyshire 00:16:49
Yeah, no, I appreciate the this question. I was looking forward to this part of the conversation specifically, in that, you know, when we thought about forming smartsuite, about three and a half years ago, one of the things that we thought about was how do we keep the people that do the work more engaged in doing the work, right? And then we thought, okay, so who are those people? Right? And who we feel are the people that do most of the work in the organisation are millennials and Gen Zers. Right, so people that are our age 21 to kind of 3536, kind of in that framework. So our thought process was, we want to build a UI inside of our product that's specific to that group of people, right, there's managers outside of that group that use products, but it's mainly that they're looking at reports and, and dashboards and looking at metrics, they're not in actually doing the work. So what we found when we sat down and started meeting with those groups of people, is the first thing is they kept coming back to is it has to be very collaborative in nature. Like I like to use Facebook, I used to like to use Twitter, Instagram, I'm used to having multiple devices, like those are all common things that we heard back from the group. But we also heard the fonts and the colours. And the way that information is organised on the page is very important to them, right? They want a product that feels organised and allows them to be very collaborative with the people that they want to work with. So what that meant to us is that I found a designer in Bulgaria that had a very different viewpoint on how to do things that would listen to what the people asked for, to kind of build the UI in a very colourful, interesting way that helps people stay engaged in the work that they were doing. But inside of each element of work, like let's say that you have a task, we call those records. And inside of a record, maybe I'm doing my work, but I want to have a single click and I want to collaborate with somebody else in the organisation, I don't want to use email, I don't want to use Slack. Something else, I want to do it right now. And I want to save that the context of that information to that particular task. So I can have a whole threaded conversation, I could come back to that task and see everything that happened. I also want to be able to see the profiles of all the people that I work with. So I want to see their little avatars, I want to click on that. I want to know are they in the office, not in the office, I want to know where they're located, what department they're in, like they, the millennials, specifically, were very interested to know what other people in the organisation were working on. And they wanted the chance to say like, Great job or give them a high five, when the new sale maybe was made on the product team and not feel isolated and just their job. That's very different than people that were 36 and older, where they weren't as as worried about the look and feel of the product and the collaboration. They just kind of did their work, right? It didn't matter. And I often say smartsuite is not your dad's software, it's your software meaning like, the older people didn't, we don't worry about the look and feel and the aesthetics as much as the younger people, especially the collaboration that's there. And then the last part that we heard from that group was that they really wanted to understand the vision, the mission, the vision, the goals, the initiatives of the overall company, because they felt like they needed to buy into that to do their job. And again, that's very different than the older group. So we have all that built in the smart suite in a way that the organisation can share those all the way down kind of the food chain to the lowest level of the organisation. So people feel connected to the vision and how the work they're doing is in support of the goals and initiatives of the company on a quarter by quarter basis. So I could go on for an hour on this topic. It's just so fascinating that the way millennials and Gen Z years want to work and interact with things are so much different than the generations before them.

Heather Bicknell 00:20:26
That is so interesting, I already know you kind of had an all in one style platform, but you're really dipping into, you know, I come from the employee engagement and play communication space. And a lot of what you just said, really resonates with the on on that side, as well. And I guess I would say, for the millennials out there, you know, I think the relationship between employers and employees has really changed and some of the value and drive that we get out of work is feeling like it makes a difference in the world. So it's not just you know, being a desk jockey, but feeling like it's making an impact. And it can be when you're out of that alignment, a frustrating place to be. So I love that you baked it in, as a way to to have that present. All the time.

Jon Darbyshire 00:21:16
I'm a big believer that great software can actually foster culture inside of a company, because it fosters the communications and the relationships that build the culture that's there, not just on your team, but across teams that are there. So we've, we spent a lot of time thinking about how to make the collaboration easy, and to see how what the pieces of work that teams other teams are working on, in a way that doesn't distract you from your job, but actually enhances your job. So you just feel like you're in the know, and you buy into the culture, and then you become part of the culture at the company.

Heather Bicknell 00:21:49
Yeah, I like that. And then I think the other piece that's so critical, as well, and to me, often an advantage I see from newer startups, as well as that embrace, embracing Modern UI, and not sort of discounting, look and feel that, you know, can kind of have, you know, as product age, of course, like that's always gonna become more and more of a challenge. But how have you found that in terms of modern UI helping with the citizen developer piece, as well?

Jon Darbyshire 00:22:22
Yeah, you know, most millennials and Gen Z years, again, they did not want to read help articles to understand how to do things, two things that they asked. The first one was, they want the pages to be intuitive enough that they can just go and do it, and figure it out. And that's what they're used to, with some of the platforms that they've grown up with. The second one is, if they do need help, they would rather have video than text, like, tell me how to do it, like, show me how to do it, and then I'll go in and actually do it. But I don't want to read four pages of help articles to get to that point, that's there. So we built smartsuite around those two things. And we spend a tremendous amount of time on each UI for every feature that we have, getting lots of feedback on that we make changes that are just a pixel here, a pixel there a small little colour of a line, the size of the font, that you use the clarity of the font, and we find that that it makes a big difference. And I like to sit down with people of all ages, and demo our product with them, where I have a camera on their face. And I can get to that point in the demo when I'm asking them questions about what they think. But what we really want to know is the facial expressions that are happening as they see something. And we can tell a change when somebody actually has more pleasant experience doing their work versus something that they don't like, because they don't always tell us that, but I could see it in their face with the facial expression. So I know a lot of companies don't focus on that. But we spend a lot of time on, like, we want people to enjoy work as much as you can enjoy work while you're there doing it each day. And part of it is the visual side, which we spend a lot of time on.

Heather Bicknell 00:23:59
Yeah. Now that makes so much sense. And I think I'm sure helps with adoption and stickiness as well. It's so critical. And I come from, you know, the IT side in the past as well. And there's so much chatter there around. Shadow IT and sort of this idea of employees are sometimes business units, if they don't like the technology you provide for them, don't worry, they'll procure their own. And it's not you know, the way you want them to be doing it. But like if you stand in their way, we will find a different solution. I was even seeing something the other day that was and I don't know how much I believe this, but like, you know, millennials and Gen Z is they're making decisions on their next employer based on whether they use Slack or teams and I'm like, I don't think anyone's probably that dramatic, but it matters a lot.

Jon Darbyshire 00:24:45
For sure, I believe all that actually I do feel that that especially the Gen Z is the newer one. They do make decisions based on on where they work, you know, whether it's from home or in the office and the aesthetics of that environment that they have the type of equipment that you give them is that a laptop, you know what type of laptop it is like those things are meaningful and Sometimes the type of laptop the size a laptop is, is the most important thing to that person that you're hiring at that point in their career.

Heather Bicknell 00:25:18
Yeah, I don't disagree, you know, the great Mac PC debate as well. Well, this has been an extremely insightful and interesting conversation. Just to wrap us up here today. If people want to learn more, connect with you learn more about smartsuite, what's the best way for them to do that?

Jon Darbyshire 00:25:37
Just go to smartsuite.com. You can learn all about our product on our on our website. But there's a free trial for 14 days of our product, no credit card required. We'd love you to just come in, give it a try. If you have any questions, go to the bottom right of our product, there's an icon you can click on it, chat with a member of our onboarding team at any time. Ask your questions at the end of 14 days, if you if you're not ready to make a purchase decision, you will move into a free plan for up to three people. So you can see if you find value in that before you would want to move forward. If you want to talk with me personally. Best way is typically through LinkedIn so you could connect with me and just send me a direct message.

Heather Bicknell 00:26:13
Perfect. Well, thanks again, John. This has been a great conversation.

Jon Darbyshire 00:26:17
All right. Thank you, Heather. It's been a pleasure.

Ryan Purvis 00:26:21
Thank you for listening to today's episode. Hey, the big news app producer editor. Thank you, Heather. For your hard work on this episode. Please subscribe to the series and rate us on iTunes or the Google Play Store. Follow us on Twitter at the DW W podcast. The show notes and transcripts will be available on the website www dot digital workspace works. Please also visit our website www dot digital workspace that works and subscribe to our newsletter. And lastly, if you found this episode useful, please share with your friends or colleagues.