Introducing Dashworks

Finding and researching information is vital in every workflow of any company. We’re knowledge workers and our day revolves around documents, emails, messages, videos, transcripts, charts, and issues.

As companies scale from a single team to a “team of teams,”, it becomes impossible to keep track of all this information — where to look for things, if things are even documented, or who works on what.

How is it still possible that finding information within our own companies can be so frustrating when finding anything else on the internet is so easy and fast?

An absolute unit of chaos

We shouldn’t have to spend hours sifting through emails, Slacks, documents, reports, and issues just to answer a question or to help onboard a new hire.

HR and IT departments shouldn’t have to answer the same questions around important company policies and docs over and over — this information should be readily available to everyone in the company.

Our sales teams shouldn’t have to dig, knee-deep, in our CRMs, internal reports, emails, and docs to answer clients’ questions and close deals.

Support teams shouldn’t have to spend up to 30% of their time handling tickets just looking for information scattered across knowledge bases, engineering tickets, and Slacks; the customer experience we’re delivering shouldn’t have to suffer.

Product teams shouldn’t have to scramble to keep tabs on customer feedback across communication channels like sales, support, and user research, increasing time to feature-market fit.

Engineering teams shouldn’t be spending hours context-switching across apps to hunt information in pull requests, wikis, issues, and design docs, thus reducing shipping velocity.

We’ve worked at tech companies ranging in size from 10–100k employees and have experienced these pains firsthand. Things have only worsened with the shift to remote work as we can no longer rely on shoulder taps and general “osmosis” to stay in the know. It’s time we rethink how we work and collaborate.

The Planet of the Apps

One major contributor to these problems is the explosion of cloud-based applications in the last decade. Software really did eat the world — every team needs to use best-in-breed tools or build their own using no/low-code platforms to stay productive and competitive as it scales. On average, including shadow IT apps, a medium-sized tech company uses 200+ software tools. With that many tools and information silos, subsequently knowledge fractures are unavoidable.

Another challenge is information overload and noise. There can be hundreds of scratchpad notes, obsolete docs, and dozens of versions of roadmaps, policies, and documentation floating around inside a company. How is anyone expected to find the right answer or the canonical version — a needle in the haystack?

And lastly, what about the opportunity cost of all of this know-how that’s never documented and never searchable? Tribal knowledge is expensive and fleeting — where your team goes, it follows, especially with high turnover rates typically found in tech.

We use too many apps, we have too much information, and we’re at the mercy of tribal knowledge, all of which make information essentially inaccessible. So how do we solve these challenges and actually unlock our company’s knowledge and collective intelligence?

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Dashworks: An intelligent home for teams

To solve these challenges, a solution needs to be:

1. Integrated: Deeply connected across your stack — letting you find information buried across wikis, emails, events, comments, issues, tickets — everything in one place.
2. Intelligent: Helps you find what you’re looking for, even if you don’t know the exact terms to search. Results are personalized and specific so you can trust the information presented.
3. Seamless: Easily accessible, easy to adopt, easy to deploy, with the right incentives to teach and learn, and there when you need it — your company’s collective know-how at your fingertips.
4. Secure: Built with the highest security and privacy standards to safeguard your organization’s most important information.

We’re designing this solution with Dashworks — an intelligent home for your team to get a 360° view of the organization and its work within it. Find company-wide information such as onboarding docs or knowledge specific to your team, whether it be engineering docs, customer info, design resources, or anything else you need to get things done. Stay up-to-date with important company announcements and learn more about your team members and their work. Create tight feedback loops and org-wide alignment, and accelerate your decision-making velocity.

This is just the start, with a lot more to come. We’re a team of AI engineers from Stanford, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, and are fortunate to be backed by leading investors. Dashworks is already used at major tech companies and fast-growing startups alike.

If you are interested in joining early and influencing the direction of the product, sign up on our website, follow us on Twitter, or contact us at team@dashworks.ai.

Originally posted on Medium.