We’ve spoken before about how the rate of change is only accelerating — a year of lockdowns, working from home, and rapid acceptance and embrace of digital collaboration tools has radically changed the world of work forever. Many of these changes are hugely positive for our lives, giving us more time with families, less time commuting, and less air travel for meetings that can now be accomplished through a quick video call. They have collectively turbocharged an already hyperactive transformation cycle, pressurizing companies globally to rethink collaboration, budgets, policies, offices, tools, and almost every other aspect of their operation. They have sharpened the need to innovate for survival around very specifically focal areas (e.g. making up lost revenue, adapting to virtual service delivery) rather than innovation for the sake of it.
Being a fast-moving, agile startup is part of our DNA. It’s even written into our Cultural Values — the second “E” in SENSEI is for Entrepreneurial and the recognition that we’ll be in startup mode for the rest of our life (see our Careers page for more on our values and our open roles). Enshrining that constant evolution into our values keeps us aligned as a company, especially a rapidly growing one, and ensures that all current and future Senseis approach our business with the spirit of relentless innovation in mind. We adopted it from the very beginning of our Sensei Labs journey inside of Klick, inspired by the twenty years of celebrating hacker roots and constant evolution documented in our New York Times bestselling book, The Decoded Company.
It’s been a privilege to bring that belief and its well-honed toolset to our partners and customers. We’re very fortunate to work with some of the world’s largest service providers and companies on some of their most critical transformations, procurement optimizations, and M&A transactions, giving us a front row seat on the need to adopt a ‘constant evolution’ mindset at scale.
Moving to that way of thinking means letting go of outdated project management methodologies and adopting enterprise work orchestration (see our blog series on the 5 Top Problems with Traditional Project Management). The surging demand for digital collaboration tools, consumerization of the enterprise experience, and low-code, intelligent automation are key elements of this change.
Leading a modern collaboration means playing the role of conductor in an orchestra-sized jam session, welcoming agility and collaboration, and fostering creativity and innovation. We engineered Sensei Labs from the beginning as an ecosystem with our Senseis at the core empowering our partners to enable their clients and customers to collaborate with their networks. This structure creates open communication channels between the circles and feeds a cycle of innovation that intentionally blurs both the lines between internal and external and the ones up and down the org chart.
Good ideas can come from anywhere, sometimes as seeds that need to be germinated and sometimes as fully formed plants that can quickly take root. Our ecosystem encourages both, taking inspiration from our partners and customers back to our Product team as seeds as well as embracing the complete plants that sometimes appear in new business models or opportunities. We benefit from a rapidly evolving product that stays close to product/market fit. Our partners get to develop new service offerings and revenue channels, and their customers deliver critical projects faster and with much less risk.
Underlying this ecosystem is Conductor, the rock-solid, award-winning foundation that supports everything above it. Our role as Sensei Labs is to be the technology enabler, offering the world’s best enterprise work orchestration tools, partnering with the leading global consulting and services firms to deliver better outcomes for their customers and clients. Having that clarity of purpose gives us the freedom to innovate with the kinds of extremely useful constraints that provide scaffolding to create on.
We’re deeply committed to that role, working to redefine the future of enterprise work and to build the tools that will enable enterprises to innovate at tomorrow’s rate of change. Accelerated by our recent Series A round, and facilitated through ongoing collaborative dialog with our partners and customers through our quarterly executive Customer Success briefings and our new ongoing Conductor Innovation webinar series, we welcome opportunities to include even more voices in our ecosystem. Together we’ll advance our innovation initiatives and thrive, building resiliency in our new post-COVID reality.
Jay thinks he might be the luckiest guy in the world because he got to co-found Sensei Labs and spend his days working hard to invent the Future of Work alongside this amazing crew. He’s focused on technology, design, and the art of leadership. In addition to writing here, Jay co-wrote the New York Times Bestseller THE DECODED COMPANY: Know Your Talent Better Than You Know Your Customers (Portfolio/Penguin), cooked up the O’Reilly Facebook Cookbook, and contributed to the Harvard Business Review. He frequently speaks to teams and companies about the Future of Work, including at TEDx, NASA, Harvard Business School, Google, and Twitter’s World Headquarters.
