Journey into Tech
Hi, welcome to our Interview Series. Please tell us a little bit about your role and responsibilities at Wrike.
I am Wrike’s Vice President of Partnerships, Business & Corporate Development, where I lead global partner sales, partner ecosystem, strategic partner programs, and corporate development. At Wrike, we’re working on building the largest partner ecosystem in the collaborative work management space. Our goal is to create an ecosystem with a seamless and integrated workflow where users can easily connect with their favorite tools and apps to drive work efficiency.
CIOs are increasingly looking at work management platforms to manage their hybrid workforce. Could you please tell us how Wrike has emerged as the go-to solution for a hybrid environment?
Today’s digital workplace can be complex and messy. According to our recent Dark Matter of Work report, we found that knowledge workers are using up to 14 applications per day and handling an average of 295 messages a day just to get work done. This can lead to time wasted on work that isn’t accounted for, including duplicate work, unproductive meetings and information tracking. And with today’s hybrid and remote setups, team members aren’t always able to easily communicate project needs or next steps face-to-face with their colleagues, making the problem even more complex.
Wrike is a collaborative work management platform that aims to solve this problem by making it as easy as possible for organizations to manage their work in one place. By using Wrike, teams are able to document and communicate updates within a single source of truth, eliminating any bottlenecks that come from having to toggle between multiple apps like Slack, email or spreadsheets to share updates.
Wrike also enables better visibility across workflows, giving managers and business leaders a better look into progress. The platform is built to tackle many business challenges that companies face in a hybrid work environment by making it easier for teams to collaborate, prioritize and automate work – and do it all with an easy-to-use, intuitive interface that can be customized to team-specific needs. We help teams get back on the fast-track to productivity without a steep learning curve to getting set up.
Wrike helps both front office and back office teams be productive with over 400+ integrations and features that enable all-employee workflows like tracking OKRs, employee service management, and document collaboration. In addition, Wrike scales across departments with specific workflows like proofing/approvals; marketing resource management (marketing); resource and capacity management (professional services); strategic planning, execution, and project portfolio management (PMO); M&A due diligence and financial close (Finance); and employee onboarding and performance management (HR).
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You recently partnered with Hubspot for workflow automation across departments. What is the foundation of this partnership? How would it help users redefine hybrid workplace experience?
We’re excited about our partnership with HubSpot and the ability to further integrate Wrike with popular CRM tools. Now that Wrike has been added to the HubSpot App Marketplace, users across marketing, sales and service teams can benefit by gaining full visibility into cross-department workflows and can synchronize HubSpot deals and tickets with Wrike in real-time. This integration expedites work by allowing teams to see updates in both platforms when they happen, enabling marketing and sales teams to close deals faster and stay better connected across departments throughout various touchpoints in the customer journey.
This presents a unique opportunity for marketing teams to work more strategically across their organizations by breaking down departmental silos and collaborating more closely with their counterparts in sales. Through our integration with HubSpot, marketing and product teams will both have a better view into project workflows beyond what their own teams are working on. This can help provide them with a better understanding of how their own work can help sales teams meet their targets and uncover and create revenue-generating opportunities across the business.
Our recent partnerships with Hubspot and Miro are both key parts of Wrike’s integration strategy as we work to build a future of work ecosystem where users can easily connect their favourite tools and applications to streamline workflows and accelerate productivity, no matter where they work.
How do you use AI and machine learning capabilities at Wrike?
Wrike implements Work Intelligence technology throughout our products to enhance productivity and automate work. Our work intelligence technology helps with decision making, personalizing prioritization lists, and providing real-time predictions of at-risk projects and suggested remediations.
Last year we revamped our Wrike Lightspeed platform with new AI and automation capabilities that enable faster work by 45% and make it easier for users to manage diverse types of work. Wrike Lightspeed implements work intelligence driven by AI and machine learning to allow users to quickly convert meeting notes, documents, tables, or checklists into sub-items by highlighting relevant text. Its automation capabilities also make it easier for Wrike and external users to collaborate and view updates in Wrike without being on the platform.
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Your advice to every HR organization looking to bring in Wrike platform for workflow management?
Our recent research found that the complexities of today’s digital workplace are costing organizations in ways they might not expect. Unclear assignments, meetings without purpose, app overload and duplicating efforts significantly contribute to employee burnout. Additionally, companies are at risk of losing up to $52 million a year when factoring in missed deadlines and canceled projects.
Collaborative work management solutions like Wrike can help tackle these problems by making work more efficient. Wrike powers teams to work from a single source of truth, helping them save time and money by streamlining how they work, communicate and collaborate and enabling teams to focus on the most impactful projects. Wrike is also the only workflow automation platform that integrates deeply with 400+ applications and automates repetitive tasks so that employees that focus on high value work. Especially during times of economic uncertainty when business leaders are more focused on productivity output than ever, solutions like Wrike can help teams better manage their workflows and execute on projects faster.
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Your favorite customer case study that you would like to share with our readers:
We recently published a case study highlighting our partnership with inDrive, a global mobility and urban services platform, and one of the world’s fastest growing ride-hailing services. inDrive has deployed Wrike company-wide across 47 countries and 2,700 employees, spanning marketing, creative, finance and operations teams. This has allowed them to reduce meetings and emails – up to 3x-, scale work across the business, forecast resources accurately, and eliminate duplicate or redundant work.
Thank you, Archie! That was fun and hope to see you back on HR Tech Series soon.
[To participate in our interview series, please write to us at sghosh@martechseries.com
Archie Sharma is a technology executive with over 15 years of experience leading and executing across SaaS, CWM, CRM, digital advertising, multi-sided marketplaces, and technology businesses. He currently oversees partner, ecosystem, and business development at Wrike. Prior to Wrike, Sharma led corporate strategy & development at OpenX and before that, led business transformation initiatives at Ingram Micro. Sharma holds two US patents and is a published author in Business Insider, AdExchanger and BBC Capital.
Wrike is the most powerful work management platform. Built for teams and organizations looking to collaborate, create, and exceed every day, Wrike brings everyone and all work into a single place to remove complexity, increase productivity, and free people up to focus on their most purposeful work. With unmatched power, versatility, and intuitiveness, Wrike is the only work management solution an organization will ever need to scale, optimize, and move fast in a competitive world. More than 20,000 happy customers power their future and come together in Wrike, including Estée Lauder, Hootsuite, Nielsen, Ogilvy, Siemens, and Tiffany & Co.