Joining a Team in Produce8

Since you’re here, we’re guessing someone on your team invited you to Produce8.

Welcome, it’s nice to meet you!

You may have already heard a thing or two about the app and how it’s supposed to help your remote or hybrid team work better together. Maybe that someone on your team even told you Produce8 will open up your digital work environment and make all the hard work you and your team members are doing clearly visible to everyone on your team.

This is all true, and really, it’s just the beginning—but maybe you aren’t convinced yet. You already use a lot of apps throughout your work day, so what’s different about this one?

We get it. So let’s dig into the what, why and how of it to make sure this is something you can really get behind. After all, transparency is kind of our thing.

If you still have questions at the end of all this, you can always reach out to us. We’re passionate about what we’re doing here, so we’d love to chat more.

What is Produce8?

First thing’s first, you want to understand what Produce8 is exactly.

We were inspired to develop the app because we were hearing, again and again, from remote and hybrid team leaders that their digital work environments lacked transparency. No one had clear insight into what anyone else was doing. And we knew they were right because we were living it too!

When you’re a digital worker, it’s tough to show your productivity and work output, and it’s equally difficult to see that of everyone else on your team.

You end up feeling pain points like these:

• Distraction and time wasted—Continual messaging, project tracking, status updating, and calls with your team just to create some clarity, but at the expense of deep work.
• Process and progress confusion—conflicting work patterns with varying degrees of efficiency and effectiveness, all leading to unpredictable work outcomes.
• Anxiety around work—what work is getting done? Who’s doing the work? Are goals being met? Is progress being made? And does anyone know how hard I’m working?

Produce8 is a team performance app with visibility at its core.

It’s a way to share all the work data from the individual members of your team to one central location and create an open and transparent work environment. And it does all of this automatically so you can stop disrupting your flow and stop wasting so much of your precious time.

There are monitoring tools meant for managers to watch what their teams do—this isn’t one of them. In Produce8, everyone in a team sees everyone’s data that the team agreed was important to share.

But what does this really accomplish, and why should you share your data?

Why should I share my work data with my team?

Here’s the why for Produce8.

If we want to work better together in digital team environments, then each member of the team—from the top down—needs to be able to see everything that’s going on in that team.

To get that level of visibility and clarity, we need to be willing to share our work days with one another in real-time so we can all make real-time decisions and take real-time actions to get real $#!* done.

Produce8:

• recognizes all the apps and platforms your team uses daily
• shares the actions and interactions of each team member from those data sources to a central team timeline, and
• makes the work getting done across your team visible to everyone on your team.

Working in this way enables us, as individuals, to structure our productivity in ways that work for us. When we can see exactly what those around us are doing, we don’t have to ask and we don’t have to wait for an update. We can just get on with it.

We can also learn from one another’s successful work habits and fine-tune our processes to improve efficiency. It’s about doing the work that needs to be done, but in less time.

And ultimately, Produce8 is about reducing the need for so many updates—the pings, the updates and the status calls—so we can all focus more on creating our best work output.

How do I get set up on a team in Produce8?

You’ve read through the what and why of it. So if you’re ready to get started , here are the four simple steps for how to make it happen.

1. Accept the email invitation to join your team on Produce8.

2. Identify yourself. Navigate to ‘My App Connections’ and download a web browser plugin (either Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge).

3. Log in to the browser extension.

4. Start checking out the data.

Produce8 will now start sharing your work data from all the apps your team has subscribed to within the app for you and your team to see.

Now let's get into some tips for how you can start getting the most out of you and your team's work data.

How can I get the most out of Produce8?

This is actually pretty simple. Once you’re all set up on your team in Produce8, just carry on with your day.

You can suggest new app subscriptions for your team if you find some are missing from your team data sources. This will help round out the accuracy of your collective data.

Otherwise, once you really get working with Produce8 running in the background, here are a few great ways you can begin to leverage the app:

• Evaluate you and your team’s app usage: Who’s using which apps during the workday, and how much is each app being used? In Produce8, it’s easy for you to see exactly where and when you and your teammates are getting work done. How does your app usage compare to that of your teammates?
• Check out your teammates’ workflows. Everyone on your team has a slightly different work process. But are some teammates seeing more success than others? Dive into each others’ activity streams and start to figure out which actions and interactions create more efficiency and output so you can all share in the success.
• Find better ways to collaborate. Dispersed and digital-first teamwork can come with a lot of pings, dings and distractions, as we know. Opening up the digital work environment helps you understand when your teammates tend to be involved in deep work during their day—so leave ‘em alone—and when they might be more open to a little collaboration.

A few more questions answered

Here are the most common questions we get asked by users about Produce8, along with the honest-to-goodness answers.

• Will my manager (and anyone above them) be able to see everything I’m doing in a day?

If you aren't part of the team, you won't see the team's data. And even then, members of the team only see the actions and events from data sources your team decides to subscribe to. Usually this means the apps and platforms where you and your team members actually get work done.

You’ll be able to see exactly which data sources your team subscribes to, and if your team isn’t subscribed, Produce8 won’t share.

• How is this different from employee monitoring tools?

Monitoring tools track everything you do online for the benefit of a manager or owner. By contrast, Produce8 only shares data on the actions and interactions you and your teammates perform in your team’s work apps—and this data is visible to everyone on the team.

Produce8 isn’t about tracking and micromanaging. It’s about sharing and collaborating so individuals and teams can collectively be more efficient and effective.

• Can I keep an eye on other parts of my work day outside of my team?

Sure! If you wanted to, you could set up a personal ‘team’ and follow whatever data sources you like. And the data shared in your personal team would be inaccessible to anyone but you (unless of course you invited someone to join).

You could include any apps you use in a day to get a full understanding of your daily online patterns, and perhaps see exactly where you tend to get distracted and lose momentum.

Have other questions you don’t see answers for here? Again, just ask us !

Let us know what you think

The future of work keeps evolving, and if we’re going to continue building Produce8 in a way that really delivers value to teams like yours, then we need your feedback.

Have ideas about features or functionality that would make the app more useful for you and your team? We wanna hear ‘em.

Have comments or constructive criticism about the features and functionality we currently have? We wanna hear those too!