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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
Collaborate 2023: Wrike Lightspeed Sessions You Need to See
The year ahead is pointing to fresh challenges in work efficiency and our new work management platform, Wrike Lightspeed, can unlock peak productivity. To help you get even more out of Wrike, we created Collaborate, our conference for modern work efficiency, to help improve your insight into modern work management challenges and learn how individuals, teams, and organizations like yours leverage Wrike to increase efficiency. At Collaborate 2023, our incredible lineup of speakers focused on helping you learn how to tackle challenges and thrive in a tough economy. Here’s a peek into the Wrike Lightspeed-focused sessions at Collaborate. Try Wrike for free 1. Meet Wrike Lightspeed: Your New Work Experience — Beau Roberts and Andrey Moskvin Overview Beau Roberts, Design System Architect, and Andrey Moskvin, Senior PMM for Platform Marketing, both from Wrike, teamed up to share the latest and greatest from Wrike Lightspeed. The session included the motivation behind the change, the new Wrike Lightspeed design, key highlights of the latest release, reimagined Wrike views and navigation, AI updates, and a long-awaited feature unveiled! It was a very exciting session! Wrike Lightspeed aims to improve the initial experience for small teams, while also benefiting all users. It focuses on personalization to tailor Wrike to your workflow, saving time to make essential details easily accessible, and brightening workdays to modernize the interface. You do not want to miss this session to be up to date on all things Wrike Lightspeed! Key takeaways 99% of our users are now enabled with the modern and intuitive Wrike Lightspeed design Maximize work efficiency with our modern, joyful, and frictionless workspace Draft project plans, generate event briefs, or simply digest long conversations right in the new Item view Delegate daily routines to Wrike’s intelligent platform and reclaim time for more meaningful work Bonus announcement: Dark Mode is coming to your Wrike workspace in the next few weeks! Watch now 2. Maximizing Adoption Using the New Wrike Lightspeed — Amanda Stephens and Jim Richmond Overview In this enlightening conversation, Jim Richmond, a Solutions Consultant at Wrike, interviewed Amanda Stephens, VP of Operations at seoplus+, about how the adoption of Wrike Lightspeed has evolved the digital marketing agency further than it ever thought possible. The discussion revolved around the before, during, and after stages of seoplus+ adopting Wrike Lightspeed. Manual systems and a lack of features led seoplus+ to research a new work management platform. Wrike came out as the top choice. The agency took several steps to carefully launch Wrike, including appointing ambassadors, a beta test, training, and continual feedback. You don’t want to miss this deep dive into how Wrike changed the game for seoplus+! Key takeaways Wrike’s blueprints, request forms, commenting abilities, and intuitive UI solved pain points for seoplus+ Key metrics: 13% increase in employee NPS score 98% client retention 26% revenue growth after launching Wrike How Wrike can drive employee satisfaction, client retention, and revenue growth for rapidly scaling agencies like seoplus+ Watch now Welcoming you all to Collaborate Our favorite part of Collaborate 2023 was seeing all our attendees engaging with the platform and the sessions. We can’t wait to see you at our next work management conference — in the meantime, you’re welcome to watch Collaborate 2023 back with our on-demand sessions. Whether you were there in real time and want to rewatch something or you couldn’t make the live event, head here for on-demand access to Collaborate. See you next year!