Why Some Companies Fail With Technology, The Future Of Collaboration, & The Changing Nature of Talent

Nathan Rawlins is the Chief Marketing Officer of Lucid, a software company with around 1000 employees that designs online visual collaboration applications. Its products are utilized in over 180 countries by more than 30 million users worldwide. Lucid's online applications bring people together over the web from anywhere in the world to work together on a shared canvas.

Nathan joined Lucid in 2017 as the CMO to show the world the benefits of working visually. Prior to joining Lucid, Nathan led worldwide marketing activities for Puppet and helped scale Jive through an IPO as he directed product marketing and brand.

Lucid was named Best Led Companies in 2021 by Inc. Magazine and was named Best Workplace in Technology by Fortune for a second consecutive year.

I have known Nathan for many years. We were reminiscing about how software has changed communication and collaboration for people over the years. The shift has been to social ways of communication more so than collaboration. Communication has evolved pretty dramatically over the course of the last decade.

What is Lucid's leadership philosophy

Every company has core values and its own culture. One of the exciting things about Lucid is that early employees codified the importance of the company and said, we need what we are doing to work, we like working together, we like doing what we are doing. Let's figure out the essence of that success. And that turned into the values created at Lucid. Teamwork over ego is one of our core values. And I would imagine, if you were to talk to people at Lucid, you would hear it from virtually everyone because it's this core idea that we need to win as a company. Another value at Lucid is innovation. But the way that we apply innovation is vital. After I joined Lucent several years ago, I noticed this early on, a highly experimental culture with an acceptance for learning as we go along.

Interviewing at Lucid we look for those core values. People can come from very different backgrounds; they can have different approaches, they need to, we want that level of diversity. But it's essential that the people we hire adhere to the core values, value teamwork over ego, and value innovation and creativity. So the second area Lucid focuses on is creating a structured leadership training course. We have a 100, 200 and 300 level series of training every people manager completes to ensure that we understand everything from managing effectively and how to motivate teams.

Trends that are top of mind for Nathan

The type of collaboration, the way that we collaborate needs to shift to allow for a high level of complexity, dialogue and interconnection. Another trend we are seeing is more companies are shifting to agile ways of working not just within software development. Companies are pushing for more self directed smaller teams where they can work with more autonomy. And that's fantastic. It does present an interesting challenge. We've talked about silos for decades. But for most of that time, we've talked about it as if there are a handful of silos in a company. When teams become more agile, you can actually create 1000s of mini silos. The need for a system of record for what you're trying to build becomes vital so that as teams work together, they have the common blueprint for what they're trying to accomplish. As work is handed off from team to team, it can be more effective. So you bring those two things together, the fact that we're building very complex projects, and doing it in a way where we have very nimble agile teams, and it makes it so that we need to rethink the way we go about having these conversations around collaboration.

The future of work look

We certainly have talked to many companies that are shifting to completely virtual collaboration, in particular, because of the current environment. What we found is that many of them are saying, even if we get back together at some point at scale, what we have learned over the course of the last year and a half will cause us to collaborate differently when we're all in the same room.

The other shift is in the preference for the way that we work. Bringing a team together on a virtual board, where they can brainstorm what needs to be built. Developing software that has capabilities where you can break into virtual rooms, and have a sticky note exercise and come up with the ideas. One idea may be to build a mobile application. So instead of having an email chain about what needs to change, a team can jump into a diagramming application together and build out the flow for that customer support process. All the way through you have this new place where people gather on this virtual board, and they can work side by side, even if they aren't face to face.

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