How Record by Default Culture is Helping Archive to Collaborate Effectively and Build a Better Product

Archive helps e-commerce brands to build and harness the latent excitement and output of in-house communities. With their recent seed round, the team is all set to pioneer community marketing for e-commerce brands.

Record by Default

Though the company was founded in March of 2021, the team already launched two products and scaled its headcount to 30. Being a fast-growing remote startup, Archive understands it’s important for teams to share knowledge and collaborate frequently to build a transparent culture and better product.

With Zoom becoming the default way for teams to connect with each other and customers anywhere, they faced a problem that we all face: Zoom Amnesia.

After sitting through dozens of meetings every week, everyone’s left with sparse notes—that fails to capture the context and foggy memories.

The team decided to record and share Zoom meetings—both internal (within the company) and external (user-facing) using Grain. To put it another way, they embraced the “record-by-default” culture.

“I rewatch Grain recordings to get a better sense of what we discussed.”

- Sergey Jani, Product Designer, Archive.ai.

This led to two key changes:

• Better communication and collaboration between and within teams.
• Customer-centric product with a validated roadmap.
  

After catching up with their team, we learned how anyone can enable their teams to collaborate effectively and build a product users love.

Let’s dive in!

Team Collaboration, Faster and Better

Using Grain to preserve the spoken knowledge—discussion, insights, and ideas from Zoom—helped Archive to make video meetings accessible and shareable. To put it another way, Grain made team collaboration easier and faster.

Instantly Accessible

The entire team uses Grain to record and share their meetings in a shared workspace. When someone searches using a keyword, Grain surfaces relevant moments from conversations happening across all the teams.

As the meetings are transcribed automatically in a preferred language, they are more “accessible” to the needs of employees from a variety of backgrounds and learning styles. Archive’s distributed team has members with different first languages than English. If necessary, they simply rewatch the Grain recording or skim through the transcript to get clarity and align with the rest of the team.

Inherently Shareable

Grain media—be it Highlights, Stories, or Recordings—are effortlessly shareable. This encourages their teams to clip and share insights from their one-on-ones and team meetings.

One-on-Ones

Archive team records one-on-one meetings to ensure they can clip and share relevant decisions or insights with others. While keeping the recordings private, they were able to share what needs to be shared using Grain.

As Sergey Jani, Product Designer at Archive puts it, “Some thoughts and ideas on one-on-one meetings are shareable, and having Grain helps us to make a highlight and post it on a relevant Slack channel”.

Here’s an example where Grain enabled Sergey to pass the insight to his team:

‍Team Meetings

Team meetings are necessary to kick off a new project, align everyone around the goals and priorities. But different time zones prevent everyone from attending the meeting.

So, Archive started creating meeting “reports” that document the discussions, decisions, and action items. Rather than writing everything down in text, they simply leverage Grain highlights.

Once the meeting’s over, Grain highlights are embedded in the report capturing the discussions and decisions. Those who couldn’t join the meetings can use the report to get up to speed.

Sergey explains how he creates reports for bi-weekly product review meetings 👇

Customer-centric Product

Having a new product in the market makes it necessary to learn from users. Archive uses Grain to leverage the voice of the customer to build feedback loops for their product team.

Onboarding Reports

Archive’s product team onboards every user through a Zoom call and records it using Grain to capture and share the insights with the team. More specifically, they leverage Threads to create “Onboarding reports” that capture everything the team needs to build a great product.

Here’s how.

• Sergey from the product team, onboards users and records the meeting using Grain.

• During the meeting, he mostly focuses on the conversations and ensures he’s asking the right questions and extracting the insights. And, right after the meeting, he creates Grain highlights capturing the key moments and feedback.

• When it’s time, he uses the highlights from the meeting to put together the report.

Basically, every onboarding call is converted into a report and each report has defined sections including:

• Feature requests
• Onboarding process
• Bugs and product issues
• Questions
• Feedback
  

While the report is shared with the whole team, it helps product engineers and designers to understand what customers need and what to build next. In other words, Archive uses Grain to align its product team around the voice of the customer.

Product Roadmap Prioritization

It’s not easy to understand the impact of an upcoming product feature or improvement. More often than not, product teams are compelled to work on roadmap prioritization without any qualitative or quantitative data.

In Archive’s case, product teams leverage the voice of the customer data from Grain. If the team needs to validate a hypothesis/insight, a quick search on Grain can lead to users talking about the problem and why they’d like your product to solve it.

Building a Collective Brain

Archive understands that decisions and insights shared over Zoom are too valuable to be ephemeral. With Grain, the team not only solved their problems but also laid the groundwork to create a transparent culture.

Adopt Grain to help your team record and build a shared video workspace that acts as a second collective brain, indexing, and preserving all the conversations from Zoom.