The arc of collaboration 📈
Each week, I deconstruct ideas on product, growth, and building the future.
Hello friends,
Welcome to the first edition of Elliott Poppel’s Newsletter, a little place where I’ll deconstruct big ideas on product, growth, and building the future. In today’s issue, we’ll explore the future of teamwork and a “meta” layer for collaboration.
If you’re not interested in my semi-weekly, somewhat-insightful, generally-useful thoughts, scroll to the bottom of this email and click unsubscribe. For everyone else, I look forward to reconnecting.
Separated at birth
Tools like Slack and Dropbox were designed as global communication channels.
Create doc (Dropbox)
Send to colleague (Slack)
Edit (Dropbox)
Message back (Slack)
This style of collaboration is antiquated because it requires extra work and context-switching.
Specialized tools
Tools like Github, Figma, and Google Docs are specialized apps with collaboration built-in.
Create design (Figma)
Request feedback (Figma)
Make edits (Figma)
Add design to proposal (Google Doc)
There are fewer reasons to send an updated file, or make changes and send feedback.
“Meta” collaboration
While specialized apps address functional workflows, there's room for a meta-layer of coordination apps.
cross-app @mentions
cross-app /shortcuts
cross-app #hastags
That’s where tools like General Collaboration come in.
Compounding coordination
As humans work together more effectively, their ability to collaborate improves:
more specialized tools
better functionality
greater efficiency
With the right connective tissue, this pattern results in higher productivity.
If you liked this newsletter, you’ll love Kevin Kwok’s 2019 essay.
Thank you for reading,
Elliott
👋 Hi, I’m Elliott, founder of General Collaboration, a Chrome Extension that interconnects apps like Notion, Google Docs, and Jira so you can @mention anything from anywhere and see all your @mentions in one place.