The demands for collaboration driven productivity and efficiency are encouraging more and more companies to invest in platforms that promise to enable the most effective collaboration. The market is already crowded and the biggest players are well established. Microsoft Teams, Cisco Spark and Slack already control a good share of the market although this is not preventing new players targeting them and the remaining space.
Doist are a company focused on the remote user market and aim to improve productivity and reduce stress for end users. In June 2017 they launched their own communication application, Twist. We spoke to Head of Twist, João Valente, to find out more about Twist and how they hope it can offer something new to the collaboration market, as well as a new perspective on the collaborative workplace as a whole.
"Twist's mission is to help remote-friendly teams cultivate a more organized, transparent, and balanced workplace."
Although many of the existing collaboration applications seem to overlap each other in terms of goals and functions, Twist approach this from a different angle. One of the fundamental purposes of collaboration platforms should be to enable more simplistic communication between end users and boost their productivity and efficiency. Twist argue that the more established players have set about achieving this from the wrong direction.
"We’re up against heavy-weight opponents like email– a decades old, totally ubiquitous, and totally dysfunctional, work method, and the 24/7, always-on culture perpetuated by popular group-chat apps like Slack. Doist is making bold assumptions about team communication and we’re confident that Twist is the ideal solution for modern, remote-friendly teams."
Twist has been designed by Doist to be the antithesis of the chaos and clutter found in chat tools and email chains. They maintain that real time messaging for teams is not the best way of enabling efficiency and boosting end user productivity. The less time spent in Twist, the better.
Doist want teams to focus on deep work and then disconnect to enjoy a more healthy work-life balance. They aim to enable this using a number of more innovative design features. The core of Twist is based around thread-first communication and threaded conversations to ensure that whole conversations full of ideas, issues, answers, and decisions stay focused around that topic.
