Where’s the best Thai in town? Should I order the Moussaka or the Païdakia? What’s the address and how late are they open?
Seattle-based Urbanspoon features a website and smartphone applications designed “to help customers find great food and dining experiences,” says CEO Keela Robison. But the key ingredient – the secret sauce – says the executive, is "collaboration.”
Collaborating internally – and externally
The ability to collaborate more intimately with an ever more expansive array of individuals and groups is becoming a core driver of competitive advantage. Tooling Up For Collaboration, a just released report from Forbes Insights sponsored by join.me, an online meeting application from LogMeIn, provides examples of the ways organizations are improving collaboration in today’s contexts.
Urbanspoon faces two core collaborative challenges. First, its business model depends on its users to provide information on and reviews of restaurants. Users tell the company about new and existing venues, “write reviews, tell us the hours of operation, find the best dishes – all of that,” says Robison. So the company must work to not only make such interaction intuitive and as effort-free as possible, it also needs to express appreciation. Essentially, the users must find value in sharing information; in collaboration.
Less unique to Urbanspoon is the need to address more internally-focused collaborative challenges. For starters, of approximately 50 full time employees, ten or so are either highly mobile or work from home. As Robison explains, “our Android developer works out of L.A. and several of our content developers work from home.” This is great for the workers, says Robison, “as they have more flexibility in terms of location and schedules.” And it’s also great for the company, enabling access to a wider talent pool.
But this also means that the company has to up its game in terms of virtual collaboration. Overall, says Robison, the company takes steps to ensure that both on-site and remote workers are engaged, including using an array of tools that promote collaboration.
Coffee by the wall
Collaboration begins each morning with a “daily standup” where all team members gather before a “wall” that visually displays the work at hand. As Robison explains, “in Agile, the project management approach we use, every work item is written up on a card.” This provides a visual representation of the work that’s underway and how it relates to other initiatives or teams – making it easier to see where collaboration is needed. As for virtual workers, those not in the room, “we have a digital version of the wall for others who need to see it.”
These daily meetings are conducted standing up because, as Robison explains, the goal isn’t a detailed discussion. Rather, this is a focused and efficient exercise intended to help people “see” what progress has been made, what roadblocks or enablers are in evidence, what they need to do and who or what plays a role. So each day, ambiguities are resolved, teams are re-oriented and reconfigured, priorities are refreshed – and collaboration becomes more focused and energized.
From there, the company employs a range of collaboration-enabling tools. One of the most helpful is video chat, where workers can “talk” to colleagues and team members throughout the day to get “instant answers” or “feedback” rather than relying on email, which according to Robison “is not as effective” for certain interactions. Workers are also quick to use one-on-one visual tools such as Google Hangouts or Skype. Again, such tools enable close interaction for not only those on-site, but also for virtual teammates.
As for document development, Urbanspoon is a big fan of cloud-based products or in this case, specifically, Google Drive. Drive is proving “a tremendous tool”, says the executive, as multiple users can simultaneous share and edit documents without running into the issues of version control.
Collaboration and innovation
Companies value innovation. And at Urbanspoon, innovation is often fueled through collaboration. The company sets aside one day every other week where employees are encouraged to work on “whatever projects inspire them,” says CEO Robison. And without instruction or direction of any kind, says Robison, the company is finding that such activities wind up being highly collaborative.
For example, someone in the company’s development team had learned “that marketing was spending a great deal of time looking for photos” of specific kinds of foods. And so, on one of these so-called “Dev Days”, the developer “built a tool that would search for a dish or a cuisine and then, based on whatever ratings there were from the user community, rank each photo.”
This new application is proving highly effective for the marketing team. And the fact that a developer picked up on and cared about this need – and then was given the time to address matters – can be attributed to a culture of collaboration.
More techie or foodie?
One issue for many companies in terms of implementing collaborative technologies is the need to coordinate with the in-house IT department. But this is much less of an issue for Urbanspoon because, as Robison explains, “this is a high-tech workplace where almost everyone here is a tech-savvy software developer.” Still, the company has a part-time IT person “whose goal is to make sure we have the right tools, make sure they work and to make the development process more reliable and automated.” But in general, “most of our people are self-sufficient,” says the executive.
Which begs this question of the CEO herself: which came first, the techie or the foodie? And the truth is, says Robison, “I was brought up as a techie. My parents were both in software development – so I started programming with Basic when I was only 8 or 9.” But unquestionably, says Robison, “I am now, officially, a foodie. You can’t collaborate with the incredible people we have around here doing the work we do and not become excited about food and dining.”
