In March, Karl Sun and his team at software maker Lucid suddenly faced the same challenge every other business around the world was struggling with: How could he and his 600 employees on three continents continue to collaborate during the coronavirus outbreak?
“When COVID hit, we knew we’d be working remotely,” Sun says. “But the challenge was to find that same level of creativity and innovation that comes from being in a room together.”
Most employers did what they could to adapt. But Sun, as the CEO of the company behind Lucidchart—an intelligent-diagramming application used by 25 million people worldwide, and 99 percent of Fortune 500 companies—knew he could do something about this challenge. “In the face of the pandemic, we decided to create a new product that enables people to execute their ideas together in real time,” he says. “The result was Lucidspark.”
Launching in October, Lucidspark is a virtual whiteboard that facilitates collaborative brainstorming in several key ways. It offers shared templates that employees can work on together in real time. It also lets employees share ideas through notes, diagrams, and images, through timed strategy sessions, and with a data-analysis feature that examines work patterns and categorizes those items automatically. The application is like a standard whiteboard—albeit one that supports multiple people making notes at the same time, then makes sense of the visual data that is inputted through a supercharged data processor. In many ways, it’s the first true innovation in how businesses generate ideas in decades.
“For strategy sessions, most companies have been gathering in boardrooms and basically doing the same thing since the 1950s,” says Nathan Rawlins, Lucid’s chief marketing officer. “The irony is that sitting in front of all of us is a computer that can help us meet and brainstorm so much better—and now we’re starting to harness it.”
Lucidspark couldn’t arrive at a better time.
COVID-19 has fueled an unprecedented migration into remote work, and many of the resulting changes are here to stay. According to a recent report by research firm Gartner, 48 percent of employees will work remotely at least part-time even after the pandemic has passed. “As organizations shift to more remote work operations,” the report states, they should “explore the critical competencies employees will need to collaborate digitally.”
In other words, the companies whose employees collaborate best will succeed.
“An organization designed for speed will see powerful outcomes, including greater customer responsiveness, enhanced capabilities, and better performance,” states a June report by McKinsey & Company. “Fortune will favor the bold—and the speedy.”
Creating a Better Way to Collaborate
For Sun, Lucidspark is the latest innovation in a career spent ahead of the curve. He got his start at Google, working as the company’s first patent lawyer when it had only 550 employees. He then transitioned to the business side, helping expand the company into several new markets, including China, where he got his first taste of remote collaboration.
After leaving Google and returning to the United States, Sun moved to Salt Lake City, where he met Ben Dilts, a software developer working for a company that specialized in managing health care data. Frustrated by workflow inefficiencies caused by poor internal communication, Dilts built an early version of Lucidchart that eased employee collaboration. When Sun met Dilts—and saw what he’d created—he knew Lucidchart could solve a crucial need in business and immediately partnered with him on the startup.
“At Google, we were at the forefront of thinking about web-based collaboration,” says Sun. “But it wasn’t until I saw what Ben had built that I realized the possibilities of both text and visual collaboration—being able to have complicated graphical representations while working with others in real time.”
After launching Lucidchart, Sun and Dilts—now the company chief technology officer—quickly incorporated a data-analysis tool into it, allowing a range of companies from Whole Foods to Uber to easily manage and assess complicated functions like online marketing and budgeting.
Then COVID hit, and people needed a more effective tool for idea collaboration. The team quickly pulled together the best whiteboard features from Lucidchart and expanded on them for Lucidspark, creating an application perfectly suited to the post-COVID workplace.
Lucidspark Unlocks Inspiration
Through the many disruptions caused by the pandemic, an important insight emerged. Since Lucid was forced to design a virtual-collaboration application while the team collaborated virtually, they were able to spot opportunities for expanding the platform at every step. Take for example Lucidspark’s color-coded note system. During a brainstorming session, Lucid employees using notes on a digital whiteboard became confused about which notes were whose. A proverbial light bulb lit up, and the team soon created a feature called Color Collaborators, which color-codes notes according to user, enabling everyone to keep track of one another’s ideas and even sort them later by topic or order of importance.
“Imagine one day when we’re back in the office sitting around the table,” says Rawlins. “Everyone can feed off each other’s energy and add ideas at the same time instead of waiting their turn to post a sticky note or having a single person write everything down.”
Lucidspark offers several groundbreaking collaboration features available nowhere else. These include a simple voting system team members can use to select their favorite ideas in a quick, roll-call-like way; a note panel in which collaborators add PDFs, images, or spreadsheets to bring context to notes or workflow charts; and a tool that automatically sorts ideas based on categories, enabling companies to break down larger groups into teams. As a result, ideas in a single category—quality assurance, for example—can be sifted into an easy-to-read list.
Ultimately, Lucidspark is the latest in a suite of visual collaboration applications from Lucid—all designed to help companies collaborate, get inspired, and then act for the future, no matter what it brings.
“I long for the day when we can be together again in the office,” Sun says. “But it’s going to be rare that everyone’s in the same room. Just like Lucidchart ten years ago, Lucidspark is something that satisfies a huge need—and will shape the workplace for years to come.”
This story was produced by WIRED Brand Lab for Lucid.
