Cloud services on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform
Do office work on M365, Google Workspace, LibreOffice
Meet virtually on Teams, Slack, Zoom
Ticketing using Jira, Zendesk
Project management on Jira, Asana, Trello, Monday.com
Knowledge management on Confluence, Notion
Visualize and collaborate on Miro, Mural, FigJam
Designing on Photoshop, Illustrator, Figma, Canva, Affinity
3. Objectives
Know what the free world uses for work
Identify how efficient and simple processes can be
See the opportunity costs and trade-offs for not using them
Notice when processes just don't make sense, e.g. designers iterate on design concepts with business owners over powerpoint/pdf, when everyone could just hop onto Figma
4. My Observations
Using modern productivity tools involves changing your workflows and accepting the risks (e.g. risks from storing your data in the cloud and having your data potentially used to improve AI products)
Employee productivity can increase even with poor tooling - people can produce more work by working more hours or doing things manually
Organizations can just give employees better tools to produce quality work faster
Users need to articulate the business benefits from using tools
IT policy guardrails need to move with the times, not adopting industry staples can incur opportunity costs to expenditure on manpower, productivity, speed of delivery
Employees can get frustrated when they need to use multiple apps, e.g. Teams for meeting bosses, Slack for chats with developers, having to find documents across different platforms
However, don't ask employees to use software when it blatantly doesn't solve any problem, like forcing people to spend time logging tasks over Jira instead of doing real work