Josh Lee is the Co-Founder and CEO of Swit, a Project Work Management platform. Selected as the winner of Startup Grind Global Conference 2020 among more than 4,000 applications and ranked No. 1 project management software in the Usability index among 140 competitions at G2 marketplace in 2022.
Recognized by CIO Review as Top 4 Remote Work Tech Solution together with Slack, Asana, and Monday in 2020 and officially recommended by the Google Workspace marketplace as Editor’s choice in 2021.
M.R. : Why is collaboration space saturated and how does Swit differentiate its offering?
Josh : Every team has different workflows and their own preferences for tooling. So each department even in the same organization can choose different tools that belong to the same software category. For example, IT teams want Jira for project work management while non-IT teams like HR, Marketing, or Sales prefer Asana or Monday separately for the same purpose.
This freedom of choosing tools ended up creating departmental boundaries, making it hard for multiple teams to collaborate for shared goals in a project. The more projects anyone gets involved with, the more silos they will suffer from, juggling through too many point solutions while losing context. Under this fragmented work environment, checking task dependencies with other teams in multiple projects feels unattainable. Companies are struggling against disconnected systems. We’re now in a crisis of tool overload. Streamlining workflows across teams is impossible without stitching these disconnected systems back.
So, we built Swit to provide a collaboration framework for cross-team projects by offering just the right amount of every common denominator of collaboration essentials from chat to task in one place. It’s designed for Employee Connection across departments so we can create a more connected employee experience in company-wide, cross-functional projects.
M.R.: How have strategies for digital transformation changed before and after the pandemic?
Josh : Throughout the pandemic, it’s become much harder to connect as teams. People are feeling more disconnected from each other, working in different places in different time zones. There are too many digital tools, and a notification-based chat only has failed to serve as a hub for 3rd party apps integration without distractions. Digital fatigue is now at an all-time high, leading directly to distrust, disengagement, inefficiency, and low productivity. Work synchronization should not depend too much on video call-based sync meetings. There’s just no question that we are digitally drained. In addition, new generations are looking for a unified work hub that enables asynchronous communication with efficiency and trackable collaboration with transparency to bring a more human, remote sense of belonging.
The world is changing and all previous Digital Transformation strategies will not work in this new world. We need a digital twin for the company completely redesigned from the ground up as a true-to-life space that connects our work across systems and brings people back closer together.
Companies will not succeed in digital & cultural transformation by focusing on employee management but companies will succeed only by focusing on employee connection. Standing still in the comfort zone built pre-pandemic is not an option to survive and, needless to say, to thrive. Swit was born to connect people and work across departments and systems so that even large organizations can drive that connection beyond barriers and evolve their employee experience strategy more sustainably.
M.R.: How do you adjust Swit’s GTM strategy during this economic downturn?
Josh : We truly understand one good product is not good enough for scalability because one size does NOT fit all. This market is already hugely saturated with too many single-function point solutions. So we offer SaaS Integration Platform together so our clients can configure and customize the product to their needs, create user-defined bots, build and publish 3rd party app integrations, and automate all the necessary functions all by themselves.
Salesforce said, the Future of SaaS is SIP, and we’ve just brought the Future to Now. This configurable product and customizable platform offering has been optimized to help our users better be able to stay connected across teams and across tools. Internally, we call this PPLG – Product & Platform-Led Growth. We built the “product” to be industry-neutral with common denominators of every team’s daily workflows while the “platform” empowers our clients to meet their industry-specific needs by themselves.
Fortunately, Swit is recession-proof because it’s an essential software that companies use consistently regardless of market fluctuations. Rather, Collaborative Work Management is the fastest growing category during the endemic.
Even though we’ve been offering one work hub that consolidates chat and tasks in one place for 4 years since launch, we’ll also release single-function tiers in July, 2023 with much more affordable pricing plans, add 11 languages and their local currencies to target global markets.
M.R. is the Co-Founder of Sandhill.com