brain-dump that's rarely reread or edited or even updated
What’s the baseline of productivity? What’s the peak for productivity? How do we define productivity for work?
Most of the marketed productivity tools are simply monitoring tools to keep an eye on workers and reduce the anxiety of their indirect managers. Instead of helping people achieve their tasks quicker, most tools are simply a layer of added management processes that come between a user and their task.
In most cases, productivity does not directly convert to business revenue. For example, does an increased number of lines written in code increase revenue? Does the rate of the number of lines of code written increase the rate of growing revenue?
Most productivity is a pseudo-science, sold by MBAs to other MBAs. (I hold nothing against MBAs.)
Productivity comes into play when the output of the worker is directly bound to sales revenue. For example, the liters of milk produced by a cow and the milk consumed by customers. A more productive cow can help the owner get more revenue.
If one were to imagine building a “modern productivity tool” for the dairy business, it would contain a lot of pseudo-science parameters - for example, how many hours the cow has slept, how many times one had to squeeze to get optimal milk output, etc. Most of these parameters would have a correlation to productivity but no real impact on improving it.
People don’t want to pay for a productivity tool unless it delivers some value, some direct ROI. To help people raise their productivity level, the tool has to first be configured per person, personalized, and from there, probably help the user gain skills.
If such tools can then relay proper information to other productivity systems, there might be a universal productivity system that does not come between the user and the work.
Cross-team communication can be hostile, as the teams are focused on delivering on their own KPIs, which might not align with the team they are dependent on.
For example, CS vs. product. CS wants a stable product, whereas product wants to “break things fast.” The KPIs clash.
Every team has its own processes, documentation, and silos of information.
To align the teams, there needs to be transparency in the system that can help build trust between the teams.
Top managers should have tools to simulate team KPIs and see the long-term impact that this would have on their organization. This could help the teams to be aligned, help the company reach its goals, and keep the processes in check: the process should not lose their meaning and should keep up with the times.
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Productivity tools would be the wave in a down-turn market. When companies are cutting all costs, people would start looking for alternatives that are cheap, offer a lot of basic features, and combine products together.
Bundled SaaS is a good choice.
Brain-dump:
Product implementation using existing products and platforms, such that all the platforms can be integrated seamlessly, with your logic in the loop.