In September, Brad Rencher, CEO of BambooHR, needed to meet with his leadership team to discuss the future of the company, but he wasn’t sure how to do that remotely. “I was worried,” he says. “We were about to do our three-year strategy session online for the first time, and the concern was ‘How are we going to replicate the energy of meeting in person?’”
BambooHR is a human resources software company based in Lindon, Utah, that helps other companies improve how they hire employees, manage payroll, and run their back-end operations. Like most businesses in the era of Covid-19, Rencher and his 600-person team had been working virtually for the previous seven months. And while they found that videoconferences worked well for short meetings, they weren’t able to replicate the energy and productivity of in-person brainstorming sessions. So when it came time for Rencher’s long-term planning session—a four-hour affair in which 12 executives would sketch out the next three years of the company—he was nervous. Was there a better way to replicate the success of their in-person ideation virtually?
Luckily, BambooHR had been working in Lucidchart—an intelligent-diagramming application used by 25 million people worldwide and 99 percent of Fortune 500 companies—and was able to try out Lucid’s latest product, Lucidspark, an online whiteboard application. With Lucidspark, the BambooHR team was able to share ideas through sticky notes, diagrams, and images, and then have those items categorized through data analysis. Even without any tutorials, the company began using it in one of its most important meetings of the year—and saw a vast improvement, even over some in-person meetings.
“As a CEO, you worry that people are going to be sitting on a video call with blank faces and blank screens,” says Rencher. “But Lucidspark made the meeting more fun and engaging. Within seconds I was using new features—like adding sticky notes with ideas on them—and seeing results.” The meeting, Rencher says, was far more productive than he could have imagined—opening up new possibilities for brainstorming virtually.
Around the world, companies are grappling with a once-in-a-generation shift in office dynamics. According to a survey this year by the research firm Gartner, nearly three out of four leaders in the finance world say they plan to move some of their workforce to a full-time remote schedule even after the pandemic. And yet CEOs are becoming increasingly frustrated with one aspect of remote work: collaborating virtually. According to a recent story by NPR, numerous business leaders—from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella to American Airlines CEO Doug Parker—are frustrated with the shortcomings of video business meetings. The main problem? As JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon says, there’s no “creative combustion.”
Until now, no platform was able to re-create the energy and effectiveness of in-person brainstorming sessions. That’s what motivated Lucid to create Lucidspark, a web-based platform that strengthens online collaboration while also revolutionizing the in-person experience.
“When remote work exploded with Covid, we noticed how hard it was to re-create the level of creativity and innovation that happens when you get people in a room who feed off each other,” says Karl Sun, CEO of Lucid. “And our customers were saying the same thing. So we decided to create a product to do it.”
Earlier this year, Sun and his team began building Lucidspark, using their decade of experience in collaboration software to launch the new platform in October. Lucidspark’s main feature is a “canvas” that enables collaborators to add notes, draw freehand, and drag and drop shapes, documents, and images onto the screen. The canvas is unlimited in size, meaning that several people can work on a document at the same time—and do so in their own area of the page, away from others. Then, when they’re ready to share their work with the team, they can “call” people over and walk them through what they’ve produced. Others can then add their own notes and insights to build out those ideas further, creating a dynamic brainstorming session that offers both group and personal workspaces.
Because the Lucid team was itself working virtually while creating Lucidspark, some of the proprietary features they invented were a direct result of their own remote problem-solving revelations. During one digital brainstorming session, for example, Lucid employees had difficulty keeping track of whose notes were whose. So the team came up with a feature called Color Collaborators, which designates a color for each user—whether they’re using sticky notes, tracking with a cursor, or freehand drawing—enabling everyone to easily see one another’s ideas and even sort them later by topic or order of importance.
Lucid was also able to lean on its worldwide customer base to help design the best platform possible. One prominent feature in Lucidspark, Voting, came via feedback from a longtime customer that worked with interns in Lucidchart. The company was building a new office and wanted to poll its interns about what was important to millennials in a physical workplace environment.
“They needed a way to get all the people they were polling into the same virtual room to vote on the ideas that came up during the brainstorm session,” says Marin Rowe, senior product marketing manager at Lucid. “We had a way to do this as a workaround in Lucidchart, but we knew there was a better approach.” Lucid engineers quickly added the voting feature to Lucidspark, and it has since become a favorite among early adopters of the application.
Other unique features include adding emoji reactions to ideas, tagging notes (and categorizing them with a “Sort and Gather” analysis function), and enabling internal chat among team members during meetings. The messaging app Slack can even be integrated with Lucidspark, and companies will be able to use the application inside Zoom later this year.
For Rencher and his team at BambooHR, Lucidspark turned out to be a game changer for their planning session. Rencher particularly liked Color Collaborators, which enabled the team to “see where each other’s heads were at during the meeting.” And the entire team used the timer feature to keep brainstorming sessions on track. “We’re a passionate group,” he says. “We like to talk a lot, and the timer helped us align because you see it ticking down and know it’s time to move on—really enhancing our productivity.”
And because Lucidspark is compatible with Lucidchart, Rencher and his team can easily transfer their ideas between the two applications, creating a visual collaboration suite to come up with ideas and then track and analyze all their workflow projects.
“Lucidspark is so good that even when we’re back in the office, the team would prefer to use this application rather than the physical whiteboard,” Rencher says. “In one four-hour session, we got a clear glimpse of what the future of work looks like.”
This story was produced by WIRED Brand Lab for Lucid.
