Emily Westbrooks, Author at Blog Wrike

News 5 min read

New dashboards: Next-gen analytics & reporting available now

Wrike’s new dashboard updates include item grouping, mobile accessibility, public links, and more.

News 3 min read

What’s new in Wrike: February 2024

Discover the latest updates to Wrike features, from refreshed use case templates to a new calendar widget.

Marketing 7 min read

6 key skills marketers should add to their resumes in 2024

There’s no way to sugarcoat some of the top workplace trends of 2023: lower budgets and smaller staff numbers. Tech companies laid off over 100,000 workers over the course of 2023 — and the workers who remained spent much of the year scrambling to cover the gaps left when their colleagues were let go. We were truly in our ‘do more with less’ era: the work had to get accomplished, but the resources were slim. [caption id="attachment_493501" align="alignnone" width="8688"]Photo by M. Monk on Unsplash[/caption] While 2024 hasn’t completely stabilized (Microsoft and Amazon both announced large layoffs in January), many workers have recovered from the shock of the collective losses of 2023 and have begun to look toward the future. For marketers especially, there is a collective need to move beyond the ‘Do more with less’ era and into a more sustainable landscape. That’s why 2024 will likely be a year dedicated to upskilling for many marketers — or at least it should be! Try Wrike for free Why you should continue to pursue new skills There are a few very compelling reasons to learn new skills, especially in a tumultuous job market. Whether you feel your current position may be in jeopardy or not, having new skills can help you protect yourself in the future as well as expand your current horizons and improve job satisfaction. One reason to upskill is that it will make you more valuable as a current employee, potentially helping you avoid layoffs in the future. Employers might look more favorably on someone who is able to offer a broader range of skills than someone who has a more limited skill set. Upskilling could also allow you to move laterally within your company to other roles at a time when the scope for promotions might be on hold. Another reason to pursue upskilling is to ensure that if you are affected by a layoff in the future, you should be able to maximize your job search opportunities with more skills under your belt. CNBC reported that when employees were laid off in 2023, a number of those workers ended up being hired at smaller companies or in adjacent industries: “Some laid-off employees immediately found new jobs at smaller software firms and internet companies or continued their careers outside of tech, pivoting to consulting, health care, finance and other industries eager to recruit top talent who might have otherwise stayed at larger tech companies.” Over a third of laid-off tech workers found positions in software development, internet, and IT firms. Joining a smaller firm often means that you will have broader responsibilities than at a large company. In the hiring process for one of these roles, having a wider range of skills to offer can give you a competitive edge. Finally, upskilling will likely increase your job satisfaction. A study undertaken by Gallup and Amazon found that “nearly three-in-four workers (71%) who have participated in upskilling agree or strongly agree that it has enhanced their satisfaction with work.” If you can increase your current and future employability as well as your job satisfaction at the same time, that’s a win-win situation. Areas marketers should upskill in 2024 Upskilling or even reskilling opportunities are often dependent on your current role and experience, as well as your employer’s flexibility and openness to the process, which may involve using working hours. With those caveats in mind, certain categories of marketing skills will continue to be valuable in the coming years and will most likely benefit marketers who seek out those skills. Here are a few key marketing skills marketers should add to their resumes in 2024: Data analysis and reporting: Reporting and data analysis go hand in hand. Data analysis allows you to better understand the numbers behind what’s working and what’s not, and reporting can help you show your managers and executives how the work your team is undertaking is affecting the company’s bottom line. This course will give you the lowdown on how to analyze key metrics for your marketing campaigns. Social media: Social media is here to stay and many marketing departments that have undergone layoffs have had to say goodbye to their social media staff. Learning new strategies in the social media marketing department can allow your organization to continue to have a presence during a period of slower growth. HubSpot offers a free social media marketing course that would fit the bill in this area. Project management: Most marketers function as project managers as part of their roles, but most don’t have formal project management training. The Project Management Institute offers a selection of free e-learning opportunities that will help you gain a better understanding of how the principles of project management can inform your marketing campaigns, event planning, and more. A/B testing: Figuring out exactly what marketing activities, campaigns, or language works best is critical to effectively using budgets and resources. A/B testing allows you to do just that, drilling down into the effectiveness of particular elements with your audience so you can do more of what’s effective. A course in the basics of A/B testing like this one would give you a sense of how to start designing the most effective A/B testing experiments. Generative AI: Understanding how to use generative AI for your marketing role, no matter what that role is, will continue to be imperative over the coming year. Whether you’re using ChatGPT to draft email cadences to nurture leads or brainstorming keywords, the new AI technology can and should help make your marketing job easier and less time-consuming. This ChatGPT for Beginners course would be a smart place to start. Copywriting: As a copywriter, I might live to regret suggesting all marketers upskill their copywriting but, truth be told, it’s a darn useful skill to have. If you can draft more effective emails to potential leads without the help of your organization’s copywriters (if they have them at all), you’ll be one step ahead of your colleagues. Similarly, if you are applying for a position at a company that doesn’t have copywriters, having strong writing skills can only benefit you in the hiring process. This course in High Impact Business Writing would help you polish your writing skills. Why mastering Wrike can help bolster your 2024 goals In the spirit of continuous learning, Wrike offers a range of courses that will help you improve your Wrike skills, ensuring you’re able to use each and every feature that can impact your team’s success. (Our marketing team recently brushed up on our skills and we can attest it’s a game changer!) While Wrike doesn’t offer general marketing courses, so many of our platform’s features directly enable marketers to use the skills we outlined above. Interested in increasing your analytics and reporting skills in 2024? Wrike’s advanced analytics feature allows you to analyze data and create reports with a few clicks. Trying to improve your copywriting skills this year? Use our integration with Grammarly, which offers full functionality in all tasks and ensures your Wrike work is typo-free. Once you’ve created the foundation for a new campaign using ChatGPT, bring it into Wrike to manage it from start to finish. If you’re itching to get started using Wrike to support new skills, a Wrike free two-week trial is the perfect introduction. Try Wrike for free

Project Management 5 min read

Championing Change: Mike Fank on cutting implementation time by 83%

We’re back with another installment of our Championing Change series, where we learn how real Wrike customers are using our platform in their daily work to reach their goals. Getting Wrike tips and tricks directly from customers is one of the best ways to get the most out of our platform. This time, we’re hearing from Mike Fank, Operational Excellence, Quality, and Safety Manager at Wisconsin Metal Parts (WMP). In operation for over 30 years, WMP is a one-stop shop for metal production. As Mike put it, “We make everything.” The company manufactures the metal parts in bike racks, medical devices, HVAC systems, orthodontics — and just about everything in between. “If it’s made of metal, we’ll gladly work on it,” he said. Recently, Mike became our latest Wrike Black Belt holder, marking his work toward becoming a true Wrike champion. Today, Mike gives us insight into how the company continues to strive for improvement, increase efficiency, and embrace change using Wrike. Using Wrike to implement a continual improvement process “Continual improvement is core to what we do at WMP,” Mike explained. To reach its continuous improvement goals, the company created an employee improvement submission system to “track how many ideas are submitted and how many are implemented”. Starting with one small piece, WMP has grown its continual improvement process using Wrike as the foundation. “Wrike helped automate the approval and routing of ideas. After our initial use case was adopted, we continued to grow what can be put in Wrike,” Mike added. But WMP didn’t just use Wrike to effectively collate employee-submitted ideas, it also integrated its corrective action process by building a custom template in Wrike that ensures each step is completed. Then it added required reviews and approvals at key steps, so management could regularly monitor each submission’s progress. Try Wrike for free In the process of implementing this system, WMP landed on one of our favorite bonuses of using Wrike: the elimination of spreadsheets and emails. As a manufacturing company, WMP can’t keep every element in Wrike but the key initiatives are there, according to Mike. And that alone has allowed the company to drastically cut down on status update emails and cumbersome spreadsheets for its continual improvement program. Anticipating change management issues When we hear about our customers introducing entirely new processes, we know that adjustment can be tricky. Change can be hard! That’s why we’re particularly interested in spreading the word when we hear our customers tout the successful introduction of new Wrike features. Mike explained that WMP’s strategy for change management was to get initial buy-in for building its continual improvement program using Wrike, build said program, and then follow up with those who needed extra assistance. “The key has been follow-ups and one-on-one training for the people who are either skeptical or didn’t understand,” Mike said. The icing on the cake? Being able to show that the program works. “We’ve also been able to show the dramatic improvement Wrike has had on implementing ideas.” As adjustments have been needed to tweak the continual improvement system, Mike said the process has been to “get the team together to understand the problems we’re facing with the current system, and then pilot a revised system in Wrike”. He added that it doesn’t take long for those adjustments to take hold: “So far, when people start using it, they immediately see the improvement.” Being a Wrike go-getter helps implementation While a lot of what Wrike can do is intuitive, there’s so much more the platform can provide when you look a little deeper, take a tutorial, or attend our webinars. Mike really dove in head first, aiming to make sure WMP was getting the absolute maximum from Wrike. “When first launching Wrike, I consumed everything I could. I read everything I could find, asked questions on the How To forum in the Help Center, and looked at all the other use cases,” he said. “I wanted to learn all the things Wrike could do to better help WMP implement it effectively.” And Mike’s diligence on the front end has paid off, both in a smooth Wrike rollout and impressive improvements in efficiency. Leveraging Wrike to augment manufacturing technology Manufacturing organizations have priorities that can be a bit different from other Wrike customers, such as marketing agencies or IT companies. But WMP is a prime example of a manufacturing company using Wrike effectively. Mike explained that WMP began by using Wrike for key initiatives while keeping scheduling, planning, and reporting on physical processes in its ERP system. However, WMP is striving to ensure all possible work moves into Wrike eventually. Mike admitted: “Not all our work is in Wrike. I know the saying is, ‘If it’s not in Wrike, it doesn’t exist’ — we’re not there.” With such effective change management strategies, however, it looks like WMP will be soon. Wrike features boost WMP’s efficiency Thanks to WMP’s employee submission system, the company has been able to cut its backlog by more than half, from 300+ items to 128. Even more impressive? The company was also able to cut its implementation time from more than 30 days to just over five. We just love hearing stories of Wrike significantly saving our customers time and energy. If you’ve been on the fence about introducing Wrike’s work management platform to your company, let Wisconsin Metal Parts serve as an example: change really is worth it. Why not try Wrike for free for two weeks and get a taste of how your processes could improve and evolve with Wrike? Try Wrike for free

News 5 min read

Streamline Your Creative and Digital Asset Workflows With Wrike

We’ve recently enhanced our offering for creative and digital asset workflows that we’re sure will level up processes for creative teams. We can’t wait to share these updates with you, so read on to learn about what’s new at Wrike for creatives.

Productivity 5 min read

Do More With Less: How To Save Time at Work

Start 2024 with a new strategy to save time at work. Check out Wrike’s helpful tips, from removing distractions to automating repeatable tasks.

Project Management 7 min read

Wrike Collaborate Recap: A Fireside Chat With Kasey Schmidt From Visa Acceptance Solutions

When it’s Wrike Collaborate season, our team gets excited to nerd out about our product announcements and hands-on training. But what we really love are the sessions that allow our customers to share how they use Wrike to achieve impressive results. This year, we had the pleasure of welcoming Kasey Schmidt, Marketing Technology Lead for Visa Acceptance Solutions, who spoke with Wrike’s Global Customer Experience Lead, Jessica Wooding, about her team’s experience adopting the Wrike platform — and launching a completely new brand with Wrike’s help. I’m not exaggerating when I tell you that the entire conversation is a must-watch from start to finish. Kasey’s insight on bringing Wrike into her team offers so many nuggets that listeners can implement in their own organizations, from how to slow-roll a tech change for maximum success, to the nitty-gritty details of how they use request forms to free up their creative team for more high-value work. The great news is that you can watch the entire conversation between Kasey and Jessica (as well as all the other sessions from Wrike Collaborate 2023!) on demand now, for free. Watch session Here’s a sneak preview of their conversation: Jessica: Is there something in the past year that you’ve been able to accomplish, despite all odds, that you’re particularly proud of? Kasey: Yes, we were able to launch a brand in the past year, which was huge. That’s no small feat. I think that speaks to the work that was done with our marketing team and how incredibly diligent they were in launching that brand within a very small timeline. So it’s very satisfying to look back at that work and understand that it went from announcement to launch in just a matter of weeks. We could see the work that’s been developed in a website and a brand identity guide and creative and general strategy to move forward with the growth of that brand. Jessica: Would you say that Wrike was a part of that success in launching the brand? Kasey: Wrike was a huge part of that success. We were really running with Wrike at that point, and it was to see Wrike in action, in our effort to build an entire brand and digital assets and a website and information architecture for that website and all of the creative that’s associated with the launch of that brand, and all of the events that might be associated. Having our team comfortable working in Wrike and understanding the platform to a higher degree and knowing what they needed to do within the platform — to ensure that they had the views set up correctly, that they were requesting creative correctly, and that they could really track how this project was progressing — all of that was paramount to our success. Jessica: How would you say that Wrike is really helping to support you and Visa on this journey? Kasey: Wrike provides an element of visibility that we didn’t have before as an organization. In any big Fortune 500, you’ll see teams on different systems, and teams working across a variety of project management tools. It’s hard to get somebody to log in to five or more platforms on a daily basis just to understand what’s going on with a project. We’ve seen that having all of those teams come into Wrike with one single view of our project management has been so helpful in clarifying where we’re at in certain workflows. And it’s really enabling people to work better and become less frustrated as they’re working on specific projects. Jessica: That’s beautiful. Now, you mentioned that there are multiple teams at Visa who are using Wrike. What are some of those teams that are using it and is it cross-functional or are they all in one department? Kasey: The way that we rolled out Wrike, I’ve been really impressed with our team and just how diligent we’ve been in ensuring that we’re taking a crawl-walk-run approach. We really did start slow and we made sure that our core teams were in there. Our creative team specifically was our first use case, then we slowly brought in our email teams, our events teams, our campaigns teams, and our content and creative strategy teams, and even some agency partners. We’ve actually expanded outward now to include additional marketing teams at Visa or other teams as well, not just marketing, which has been really cool, too. But with that comes a larger visibility as we’re seeing what’s going on across the organization. And I think that’s so helpful, especially as we start to realize that we can all operate in a matrix and we can’t just live in our silos. We’ve learned that it’s really critical to ensure you understand what’s going on across your organization and you maintain that level of communication. Jessica: Think back to life before Wrike — what was it like collaborating on those processes before you guys were using Wrike? Kasey: Oh my gosh, it just took us so long. That’s really the key takeaway. We used a few different project management tools and it took us a really long time to come to a consensus on what was going on. From a product management standpoint, when you’re asking a user to sift through information to find exactly what they’re looking for, it’s never going to create a positive experience. Naturally, we’re always thinking externally to our customers and considering how we can optimize their experience in the customer journey. But every now and again, it’s really important to step back and think, OK, what can we do for our internal team to ensure that they’re productive and maintaining the level of efficiency that ensures that they’re happy, healthy employees? We saw that as a huge opportunity, so we focused on choosing really good technology that met our use cases and was there to help us create a system and a flow in which everyone was comfortable in the user interface and we all were working in the same place. *** You’ll have to head over to the Wrike Collaborate 2023 on-demand page to watch the rest of the interview. While you’re there, make sure you watch our product updates as well! Watch session

Collaboration 7 min read

Wrike Collaborate Recap: How Our Customers Drive Efficiency

Here’s a recap of the customer panel from Wrike Collaborate 2023, which focused on streamlining processes, evaluating technology stacks, and consolidating tools.

Leadership 5 min read

Top 5 Highlights From Collaborate 2023

Collaborate 2023 was a landmark event, reshaping the future of collaborative work and project management. This year’s gathering was a true knowledge hub — offering deep insights into the latest trends, tools, and methodologies that are shaping the modern workplace. When you consider that 77% of business leaders now prioritize efficiency, and 52% of organizations believe they won’t survive a recession without efficiency measures, it’s no surprise that efficiency was a central focus at Collaborate 2023. Our speakers and Wrike experts paved the road to efficiency supported by impactful research, game-changing product updates, and hands-on Wrike tips you can put into action right away. As we reflect on this year’s event, one thing is clear: Wrike is not just a platform but a movement toward more innovative, efficient, and collaborative workspaces. Join us in this movement and redefine your organization’s collaborative endeavors with Wrike. Try Wrike for free Here are the top five highlights from this year’s event: 1. Welcome keynote: Driving modern work efficiencies Just in time for 2024 planning, Wrike Interim CEO Thomas Scott shared the latest insights on modern work challenges and the opportunities arising from those challenges. He covered this and more with Product Marketing Manager Molly Mixon, as they kicked off the day with a conversation on Wrike’s forward-looking vision and the role of AI and human resources in the modern workplace. 2. Efficiency keynote: Transformative trends of 2023 Wrike CMO Esther Flammer and President and CRO Brian Nourani highlighted the winning work management strategies that top-tier companies, such as Walmart Canada and Siemens Smart Infrastructure, are harnessing. These customer experiences offered tangible inspiration for teams looking to optimize processes using Wrike. We’re confident these insights and success stories will help you see significant time savings and a productivity surge at both a team and organizational level. 3. Customer-centric discussions: Unveiling impactful journeys A range of customer-focused discussions at Collaborate highlighted the transformative journeys of various organizations using Wrike. Kasey Schmidt, Marketing Technology Lead at Visa Acceptance Solutions, walked attendees through her team’s adoption of Wrike, including the major accomplishment of launching a new Visa brand in a short timeframe by using Wrike for project management. 4. Wrike’s product roadmap: Upcoming features and innovations Our product roadmap session was a highlight of the event, showcasing the upcoming features and innovations coming to the Wrike platform. Key developments include Wrike Datahub, designed to eliminate data silos, Intelligent Resource Management that will drive smart resourcing decisions, Next-Gen Analytics for real-time data visualization, and the AI-driven Wrike copilot for work management. These announcements created quite a buzz, and we’re thrilled to report that the new capabilities will be rolled out over the coming months. 5. Breakout tracks and sessions: A comprehensive understanding of Wrike’s capabilities The breakout sessions provided a deep dive into Wrike’s most impactful features and case studies, offering attendees expertise on features they will now take back to their teams for even greater results. In Workflow Automation: Your Shortcut to Productivity, Alina Kucherenko, Wrike Product Manager for Automation, and Ryan Candela, Wrike Senior Solutions Consultant, offered a comprehensive discussion and demo on Wrike’s automation features — showing off the efficiency users can achieve with only a few clicks. Tomorrow’s training sessions will allow attendees even more hands-on opportunities to deepen their knowledge of Wrike’s features. Join us on the road to efficiency If you missed Collaborate 2023, you can still get in on the efficiency action! All sessions from Collaborate 2023 are now available on demand, so you can catch up when you have time. Watch now Collaborate 2023 marked a significant leap for collaborative work and project management. Are you ready to take the leap into greater efficiency, too? Start your free Wrike trial and help your team level up for efficiency in 2024 and beyond.

News 10 min read

Wrike Paves the Way for Efficiency With New Intelligent Solutions for Work

At Wrike’s sixth annual Collaborate event today, we took the opportunity to release our latest suite of updates to our Work Intelligence® solution for the future of work. In conversation with Product Marketing Manager Molly Mixon, our Vice President of Product, Alexey Korotich, shared a selection of the most innovative advancements for the Wrike platform. We’re excited to share these innovations with you, including Wrike’s copilot for work management, datahub, next-gen analytics, and user attributes. These new capabilities will enable teams to do their most impactful and efficient work, giving them better visibility and alignment on workflows and the ability to deliver measurable business outcomes. Let’s hear from Alexey about the incredible product innovations announced at Collaborate today. Question: We have more work than ever and more tools than ever to accomplish that work, but many teams are still struggling to actually work efficiently. Why do you think that is? A: Despite all the tools that we have to manage work and collaborate with our teams, it’s still harder than it should be. We have to juggle between different applications, multiple spreadsheets, and disconnected workflows. Technology consolidation now plays a vital role in reducing noise and distractions employees face in their workspace. We’ve come a long way to make Wrike an intuitive, versatile, and scalable platform that can provide a single source of truth — where different applications, workflows, and data come together. You can experience this with one of the most recent innovations we delivered to the market: Wrike Lightspeed. It’s a whole new user experience coupled with powerful, no-code workflow automation and an infinitely scalable workspace. It’s the platform of choice for companies that are serious about efficiency and are looking to consolidate their tech stack. Question: One of the biggest traits of AI is that it gets smarter the more you use it, which means millions of Wrike users will be able to work smarter than ever because AI is embedded right in the platform. Tell us exactly how our customers will be able to work smarter with Wrike’s intelligence? A: Many of our customers tell us that lots of their data lives in spreadsheets or other databases that are siloed and not connected to the work that is managed in Wrike. This leads to inefficiencies and disconnected workflows. Wrike's datahub is a game-changer. It revolutionizes how you manage the intersection of workflows and data. You can focus on making data-informed decisions instead of copying and pasting information from one system to another. Our datahub allows users to manage and connect data directly to our platform. Additionally, Wrike can interpret that data, and derive insights and intelligence, helping you take action and make better decisions. With Wrike's datahub, there will be no more juggling between projects in Wrike and data in spreadsheets, unlocking many new possibilities for the Wrike platform. The datahub serves as a data repository and allows us to track and connect all kinds of data — such as physical assets, inventory, digital files, client lists, purchase requests, and anything else that you need to do your work. So instead of pulling the information you need from dispersed tools, like spreadsheets, you have it close to your workflow and can make informed decisions without context switching. Question: Imagine a world where you could intelligently match the right people to the right work based on specific requirements. Sounds like a dream, right? A: Not anymore. Our new capability brings this dream to reality: Wrike’s user attributes. Project managers need to ensure they have the right people ready to do work, on time and on budget. This becomes particularly complex when managing large, diverse teams residing in different locations. These companies have a wide range of skills and experience to consider. By leveraging our new user attributes, you can set up and track detailed information about any Wrike user and leverage this data to make better planning and resourcing decisions. With this new capability, our customers can track employee professional skills, languages, locations, organizational relationships, hierarchies, and many other things. You can assign attributes to specific users and leverage Wrike’s resource management tools to find the right people for the right job, no matter how specialized the work might be. You’ll also be able to use skills management and resource management capabilities to understand where you have skill gaps or capacity constraints for talent planning. You can track organizational relationships, hierarchies, and equipment your teams use, and even set up automation. For example, you could @mention someone’s manager to escalate task assignments when that person is on vacation. Question: We’ve all walked into meetings feeling prepared, only to be asked about data points we don’t have at hand. Does Wrike have a way to easily access that information? A: We do now. Today we’re launching Wrike's next-gen analytics, which will dramatically decrease the time to insights across all workflows, teams, and data. Our next-gen analytics features are built to be easy to use and are available for any Wrike user. These features allow you to build customizable dashboards and get the insights you need, truly democratizing data-driven decisions. We built these capabilities based on a deep understanding of what our users are looking to do and incorporated dozens of shortcuts that help you get insights in seconds. Our dashboards are also uniquely designed to be versatile and serve all types of users, from managers, individuals, and all the way to executives across the org. No more Sunday night scramble of trying to get insights and slides together across a bunch of different data sources and spreadsheets. These next-gen analytics provide easy visibility across diverse data points and views from different departments and projects in one place, without all of the blood, sweat, and tears. Another thing you’ll love is how effortlessly the data flows into your dashboards, capturing all the task and project details in real time. As a result, you’ll have a 10,000-foot view of all your projects, whether you’re tracking status, effort, or ROI. Question: Organizations have all this data sitting in their various systems, but it has become harder to make sense of all of it. Can you tell us about Wrike’s vision for solving this problem? A: Yes, we are proud to announce Wrike’s copilot for work management. This new AI assistant will be able to digest massive amounts of data in seconds. It will converse with you in human language, surface insights instantly, and automate what used to be time-consuming and manual. And it will help you make informed decisions in record time. It’s kind of like having a personal assistant or information butler right in your Wrike account! Someone to help you find quick answers to all your burning questions, keep you organized and on track, and help you brainstorm new ideas. The hardest part of any task is overcoming those mental blocks and starting from scratch, so using Wrike’s copilot for work management for those big daunting activities is like getting to leapfrog past the hard stuff so you can put all your brainpower toward making your work exceptional. The latest iteration of Wrike’s copilot for work management, which I’m very excited about, includes AI-powered automation suggestions. One of the most effective ways to enhance efficiency is through automating repetitive work. At Wrike, we’ve been empowering you to achieve this for years using our automation engine. However, here’s the challenge — When everyone is swamped with daily tasks and urgent fire drills, it seems impossible to allocate additional time to process improvements. This is where our automation suggestions become really useful. Our intelligent features support our customers every step of the way. Whether you’re working on a global project or a day-to-day deliverable, you can leverage Wrike’s copilot for work management to surface the insights you need and ultimately make the right decisions. Question: In the current discourse on AI, in addition to all the good it can do, we hear concerns about the quality, accuracy, and implicit biases in AI-generated responses, as well as concerns that AI can potentially replace humans in the future. What’s your viewpoint on all of these concerns? A: I hear the same concerns, and they’re all valid. AI is a truly groundbreaking technology that continues to impact more and more spheres of our personal and work lives. However, Wrike’s AI philosophy is to always leverage it responsibly, and not to replace, but to assist the people behind the controls. AI helps you analyze and connect a significant amount of data and provides critical insights that help you make better decisions. But the decisions themselves are always made by humans. We also go the extra mile to make sure AI doesn’t put our customer’s data at risk. The way our AI infrastructure is built prevents customer data from being used for training third-party AI models. This means you can safely bring together publicly available and internal data with Wrike’s copilot for work management. We understand how important it is for some organizations to have a choice of which AI models to use. That is why the underlying architecture of Wrike’s copilot for work management is going to support custom Large Language Models along with their different hosting methods. And on top of that, we will also enable account admins to control which features employees will be allowed to use. Question: When can Wrike users start using these new innovations? A: Wrike's next-gen analytics are available in Chart view already, and you can currently enable the new dashboard view in Wrike Labs. Automation suggestions will be available this quarter. Wrike's datahub will be available in the first quarter of 2024. Skills management will be available in the first quarter of next year as well, and resource management will be coming later in 2024. Generative AI within Wrike’s copilot for work management can already be enabled in Wrike Labs, with automation suggestions coming online this quarter, and other features coming in 2024. Now that you’ve read all about our latest platform innovations, get more hands-on experience with Wrike. Start a free trial today. If you’re a current Wrike user and you’re looking to dive deeper into how you and your team can leverage these new updates, reach out to your account manager or our support team today. We’ll be updating the Wrike blog regularly with more updates from Collaborate 2023, including insights from our speakers, customer success stories, and more. Try Wrike for free

News 7 min read

Get to Know Brian Nourani: New Wrike President and Chief Revenue Officer

Earlier this year, Wrike caught a boomerang. No, not the wooden kind, the type where a much-loved employee comes back after taking another role. Brian Nourani previously served as Senior Vice President, Global Sales at Wrike where he grew the business in North America, EMEA, and APAC. This included building our global enterprise business from its inception and participating in two successful exits in 2021 and 2022. Recently, Brian rejoined Wrike as our President and Chief Revenue Officer, and we’re excited to have him back. Brian has over 13 years of senior sales leadership experience providing strategic and operational guidance for revenue generation. In addition to his time as CRO at Khoros, Brian served as VP of Sales at Tealium and held regional sales roles at Oracle. He returns with a deep understanding of the Wrike business and the enterprise selling motion, both in the areas of expansion and customer acquisition. We knew a Q&A would be the perfect informal format to help our customers and the general public get to know Brian and learn about his experience, his goals, and what makes him tick. Q: Let’s hear why you’re here! A: I’m thrilled to be back at Wrike at a time when the company is looking to expand its business to more verticals. I couldn’t pass up the chance to join a high-energy team in a competitive space and help drive Wrike’s go-to-market strategy and meet the growing market demand for work management software. We’re going to make this an incredibly successful next chapter for the organization and our customers. Q: Tell us about three critical career moves you’ve made. A: Making the move from fintech to tech, which gave me the opportunity to join a great company like Oracle, helping them open their new hub in Los Angeles. I had the opportunity to work with several executives and learn from highly talented individuals through my time at Oracle, specifically seeing their transformation from on-premise to cloud. Next would be my career change, moving to Wrike in 2019 after the Vista Equity Partners acquisition, building the global enterprise business, partnering with countless Fortune 500 customers and seeing two successful exits. Third, would be re-entering Wrike in 2023 as President and CRO. Q: What brought you back to Wrike? A: The new ownership through Symphony Technology Group, the vision, and new leadership through Tom Scott were all very exciting to me. Coming back to Wrike gives me the opportunity to work with so many great people, including customers I built relationships with in the past. I’m excited to take the reins leading our go-to-market organization and influence real change across the business. And I would be remiss not to say, my fellow Wrikers and the culture of innovation and camaraderie at Wrike played a big part in my return. Previously, I had the opportunity to work in the San Diego office with so many great people. Then COVID hit, and we transitioned to remote work and worked through so many challenges. It brought all of us closer together and helped build strong, lasting relationships. I also enjoy visiting Wrikers in other offices. We had a company kickoff in 2020 right before the pandemic, and I got to meet our international teams in Galway, Ireland, and then our AMS employees in San Diego. That event was a blast, and something I will always remember. Q: As Wrike’s new CRO, what are you most excited about? A: The demand has never been greater for a versatile, collaborative work management platform like ours. Wrike will continue to accelerate innovation that’s focused on solving dynamic workplace challenges and meeting the needs of the modern workforce. I am excited to work closely with Symphony Technology Group, my fellow ELT members, and the full team at Wrike to continue to deliver value to our customers and employees globally. Q: What are some of the most impactful changes you’ve made since returning to Wrike? A: Building out a new “pod” structure gives our customer-facing teams the ability to work more collaboratively and serve our customers in a more efficient way. We’re already developing and implementing company-specific sales methodologies, territory and team structures, and new quotas and commission plans, as well as more sophisticated pipeline management and reporting. All of these changes are designed to improve the customer experience. Q: What are areas for potential growth for Wrike? A: I would like to see Wrike continue to lead the way in the collaborative work management space as the most innovative solution in the market — standing at the forefront of artificial intelligence. I believe AI empowers teams to streamline their processes, eliminating time-consuming manual tasks. This enables team members to shift their focus on to more strategic and creative aspects of their work, promoting higher levels of engagement. As a company, we have a great opportunity to be a leader in our space, actively helping our customers streamline work processes for maximum efficiency, empowering teams across all departments to collaborate, manage projects, drive strategic initiatives, and achieve goals. A few rapid-fire favorites: Favorite book? Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t, by Jim Collins. I love this book because you will learn what it takes to be a top leader, why building the right team is so critical, and why “stop doing” is as important as what you should do. Favorite quote? “Leaders get out in front and stay there by raising the standards by which they judge themselves — and by which they are willing to be judged.” Frederick W Smith, CEO of Fedex Favorite country? England London, England is so culturally rich and such a diverse city, with centuries of history, not to mention amazing tea! There is so much to see and do in London, from the markets, to the food and architecture — it’s impossible not to love! Favorite Wrike feature? Request forms and automation. Brian will be delivering a keynote at our sixth annual virtual Collaborate event in November. He’ll be sharing impactful customer success stories you won’t want to miss. Save your spot today! Register for Collaborate

Wrike Tips 5 min read

Championing Change: Casey Shew on the Secret to Perfecting Processes

Welcome back to another episode of Championing Change, our blog series designed to give you an inside look into the project management processes of real Wrike customers. The goal of this series is to highlight the ways Wrike users are leaning on specific Wrike features to increase adoption, improve efficiency, enable transparency and visibility, and move their organizations closer to their business objectives. That’s a wordy way of saying we’re nosy, and we love learning how other people use Wrike — it’s one of the best ways to pick up new Wrike tips and tricks. We hope this series opens your eyes to new ways you can use Wrike to improve your own processes or make your life that bit simpler. If you missed the inaugural edition, you can catch up here with Jennifer Mariotti, Global Head of Creative and Design at media company Circana. This week, we sat down with Casey Shew, who serves as Online Learning Solutions Architect and Project Leader, as well as Technical Solutions Lead, at eCornell. eCornell is Cornell University’s external education arm, offering online professional and executive development to students around the world. eCornell has over 100 professional certificate programs in a variety of disciplines, including project management, marketing, finance and business, and leadership. Casey has a complex role that involves mastering processes for eCornell. He spends his days identifying and implementing novel technologies and techniques within learning programs, collaborating with course development and program delivery groups to enhance efficiency, recommending creative solutions and plans for using new tools, and helping create reusable templates in the company’s project management system. In his quest to improve efficiency at eCornell, Casey has become a natural proponent of a critical platform, Wrike, which he uses to design and implement effective processes across the campus. Try Wrike for free Migrating to Wrike was “a breath of fresh air” eCornell previously used Jira for project management, but migrated the course development team to Wrike to align better with their processes. “Given that this team’s project management processes were more aligned with traditional Waterfall project management methodologies than Agile methodologies, by and large migrating to Wrike was like a breath of fresh air for their use case,” Casey explained. He also credited the smooth transition to having several admins onboarded into Wrike first, giving them a head start on adapting processes having already familiarized themselves with the platform. “There’s almost always skepticism when a new piece of software is introduced to solve a difficult problem — and rightly so! Software is often a shiny new toy that can be used as a distraction from complex challenges.” Casey said that within the admin team, it helped to ensure that several people were “versed in taking a business analyst approach to adapting processes to software.” He explained that Wrike’s capabilities are typically able to adapt and absorb a team’s workflows, but “the roadblock is often less about the capabilities of the software and more about the difficulty of understanding and translating processes into the software effectively and, most importantly, holistically.” From his experience, he learned to ensure that teams take a thorough approach to setting up projects. “Do not skip the requirements gathering stage of bringing a new process or team into Wrike — this is where you can set the project up for success.” Features that increase visibility Every Wrike user has favorite or most-used features. Personally, I’d be lost without my dashboard telling me what’s my most urgent task every day. Well, eCornell is no different. Casey specifically called out the tools that allow individual users to manage their tasks at scale more efficiently, such as dashboards, reports, and calendars. “These tools enable us to set up views that centralize and organize tasks from a variety of projects into one place, for easy visibility and triage,” Casey said. “We manage many projects at once so these tools Wrike provides are critical in managing at scale across projects.” eCornell’s teams also rely on Wrike to help them cut down on time spent in meetings or updating stakeholders by including critical information about a project in fields with shared visibility. “Task descriptions, comments, and custom fields definitely reduce the need to reiterate that information as frequently as would be needed otherwise,” Casey explained. This visibility also reduces the risk of duplicative work while building a broader shared understanding among teams. Using Wrike’s additional resources While Casey has incredible knowledge of how Wrike can help the wide variety of teams at eCornell, he knows where to head when he’s looking for more information. “I leverage the help center regularly both to educate myself and provide educational resources for others on features we are utilizing,” he said. When an issue arises, he heads straight to the top — of our customer service, that is. “The request submission process is also very smooth and I appreciate how quickly I get responses to issues that might arise,” he explained. Casey also pops onto the Wrike website regularly to stay abreast of any new features or use cases being released or highlighted. “I always check the release notes each week for relevant features that may benefit the various teams I work with that use Wrike,” he said. “I’ve been very pleased to see the enhancements coming to the native automation engine in the recent months as well, and look forward to seeing that engine becoming more and more powerful in the coming years.” And we look forward to delivering more powerful features, from AI to workflow management and beyond, in the coming years. If you’re interested in bringing Wrike to your team, start a free two-week trial and take a few of Casey’s tips on board to promote efficient processes and improve your change management process for wider adoption. Try Wrike for free

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Emily Westbrooks