Wrike Delivers a Cloud-Hosted Productivity Suite that Streamlines Communication Across the Enterprise

TL; DR: Wrike is a cloud-hosted work management software suite that allows users to collaborate easily and customize their digital workspaces. Workers can cut back on distractions and overcome barriers to team dialogue with more than 400 integrations encompassing nearly every form of communication. Wrike also partners with enterprises, including Google and Airbnb, to save their customers time and money. Wrike leads the charge to move companies away from siloed departments and into agile teams that stay connected and achieve larger goals.

In 2016, Airbnb launched an extension to its online vacation rental platform called Trip Experiences. It offered travelers unique access to local guides and places of interest near their destinations. At the time, Airbnb was expanding rapidly, and today, it is on the verge of an initial public offering.

When Airbnb launched its first 12 Trip Experience cities, it relied primarily on a spreadsheet to streamline workflow. But CEO Brian Chesky wanted to quadruple the number of cities participating in Trip Experiences and understood that the level of complexity would require more resources.

Creative Production Manager Hoon Kim was tasked with the enormous project of developing a system that could produce thousands of assets, including photos, videos, and digital and print posters. And spreadsheets wouldn’t cut it.

“It was constantly crashing. People ended up creating duplicates of the document to deal with their own small world of data, which quickly became outdated since they weren’t connected to the original document,” Hoon said. “There was a massive amount of confusion.”

Hoon found the solution in Wrike, a cloud-hosted work software suite that consolidates data and communications to boost workflow by getting everyone on the same page. Wrike allowed Airbnb to establish its presence in entirely new verticals and capitalize on larger markets than it had initially reached.

Wrike was founded in 2006 as a task management tool. At the time, many companies didn’t have a way to streamline the collaborative work between teams.

“They were using spreadsheets for tracking work, emails for communications, chat for discussions. That wasn’t efficient, and we saw a big gap there,” said Saranya Babu, Wrike Senior Vice President of Marketing.

The first issue Wrike solved was consolidating a variety of communication tools into a centralized platform.

“Say you are trying to focus on a particular task, but if you go to your email, you have 10 new emails. That means you get pulled in 10 different directions,” Saranya said. “We bring all of the information into one tool; then you don’t need to go outside of it and become distracted and pulled into a new task.”

Wrike found that by consolidating the digital workspace and integrating every form of communication into one dashboard, companies and employees could complete tasks faster and with fewer mistakes.

Since 2006, many competitors have jumped into the productivity field. But Wrike differentiates itself by allowing users to customize the workflows and workspaces they need to be productive. The best software in the world doesn’t change anything if it isn’t adopted. And Wrike found that the quickest way to adoption is to empower users to do things their own way.

“If you look at the speed at which things are happening today, the market is moving fast,” Saranya said. “If things are changing that fast, you need to have operational standardization. If you want to move the boat in one direction, everyone needs to row in the same direction, and everyone needs to want to row.”

That is where Wrike’s cloud-hosted customizability comes into play. Because Wrike gives organizations versatility, employees can use their own strategies to work through obstacles.

“Everything we do allows people to work their way,” Saranya said.

All team members need access to the critical information that determines how they progress, but what works for one person doesn’t work for the next person. Many cloud-based productivity suites offer a single complex solution that often requires a tremendous amount of training but doesn’t work for everyone. But Wrike users can develop an efficient, customized workspace that integrates seamlessly with the entire organization.

After empowering individuals, companies need to break down the barriers between departments. Larger companies may feel as though their different departments operate at cross-purposes. Without productive lines of communication, one part of the business may be cut off from the others.

“A lot of things that were already trends were accelerated by what’s happening today. It just became so much of a bigger problem,” Saranya said. “Ten years ago, organizations were moving from hierarchical structures to matrix structures. Teams had previously done work with similar roles that talked to managers who then discussed tasks with peers. In matrix structures, diverse teams work under project managers who help accelerate timelines and communications.”

Companies now realize that, to keep up with technology and customer expectations, they will have to do away with traditional structural inefficiencies to communicate much faster internally. That has changed how companies operate by encouraging them to move from siloed departments to agile teams. And that transition can result in increased productivity with Wrike’s cloud-hosted work management tools.

“If you look at how people work today, you look at the spend-to-product ratio. But it’s hard to compare the effort to the results and ensure that everyone is working on the highest value project,” Saranya said. “Now, you can look at where people are deployed and move employees to higher-value projects.”

With the right leadership and team dynamics, smaller teams can often diagnose inefficiencies. But with Wrike, everyone can be on the same page about priorities and tasks with the projects they excel in and the ones that need to get done.

The recent trend toward big data and analytics has influenced nearly every industry and every worker. For companies to keep pace in the modern world, they need to access the data that will help them find the right conclusions. Wrike helps them harness that data to change the way people work and accomplish tasks together.

“We saw a lot of importance being put on analytics and data. Last year we built our native business intelligence. You can pull all the data into Wrike, and the most recent is AI. We have access to millions of signals, and it’s difficult for any person to glean meaningful data from that much information. We’re tapping into them to predict when projects will be delayed or run into difficulties,” Saranya said.

Wrike is in a unique position to understand what works on a project and what doesn’t, and its latest AI can predict what timelines may end up delayed. Businesses live and die by their ability to anticipate correctly and know when they will fulfill orders. Wrike gives both large and small companies cloud-based access to the data that connects every part of the organization, streamlines productivity, and delivers higher returns.

At the center of every successful business is a team. And communication is too complex to leave to chance within an organization. Wrike helps users control their digital work environment and remove barriers through its cloud-hosted solution to unleash their potential.