I Thought We Needed a New Name. We Needed a New Product. Making Work Work, CEO Series Vol. 15

This started as a rebranding exercise. It ended with us blowing up the entire product.

For months, we'd been talking about what to do with TeamShare, one of Workbar's products for companies with distributed and hybrid teams. The product made sense to me but no one on my team could sell it. My original diagnosis was pretty simple: we needed to rebrand the product. The name no longer felt relevant and one or two characteristics of the product were confusing. There were shared coworking days. Pooled passes. Meeting room coins. A limit on how many employees could use one of the pooled passes. We kept working on ways to make it simpler. Better language. Better positioning. A better name.

And then at some point I realized: Maybe the reason it was so hard to explain wasn't that it needed a rebrand. Maybe it was the actual product. That sent us in a completely different direction. Another important realization:

Sometimes the product is right. The timing is wrong.

This whole process taught me something I probably should have learned sooner: you can be completely sold on a product and still have the wrong product for that moment in time. I believed in TeamShare. I could see how it could transform the way companies managed their people and their real estate, giving employees more choice while giving companies a much more flexible way to think about where and how their teams worked.

The problem was, I was ahead of the customer. I could see where work was going. But our customers weren't necessarily ready to buy it that way yet. And for a while, I thought the answer was better positioning. A better name. A clearer explanation. Eventually I realized the product itself had to evolve. That's a hard thing to admit when you're the person who believes in it most. But being convinced you're right isn't the same thing as having product-market fit. That may be the bigger lesson for me.

Don't fall so in love with your product that you stop listening to the market.

I think that's where big companies get stuck. They build something, operationalize it, create systems around it, and then become invested in defending what they built. Smaller companies don't have that luxury. And I increasingly think that's an advantage. You have to stay nimble enough to say: the idea is still right, but the product needs to change. TeamShare isn't the product I originally envisioned. It's better because of it.

I already had product fatigue because TeamShare did not actually start as TeamShare. Right after COVID, we introduced it as Workplace Mobility. The thinking made sense at the time. Work had suddenly become mobile. Teams weren't necessarily working together in one office anymore. People needed places to work near home and places where they could come together when it made sense.

Workplace Mobility was supposed to give companies that freedom. But the name didn't describe how people actually used the product. So it became TeamShare. That was better because the core concept was sharing. A company didn't have to buy every employee an individual coworking membership. It could purchase a pool of access and share it across the team.

That was a meaningful innovation at the time. But hybrid work kept evolving. Our product hadn't evolved enough with it. We were still trying to put flexibility in a box. The more we pulled apart TeamShare, the more I kept coming back to something we say all the time at Workbar:

People aren't one-size-fits-all and their workspace shouldn't be either.

Yet here we were trying to create a standardized package for teams. Take two companies with 40 employees.

Company A might have five people who want to work from Workbar three or four days a week. Another 15 might come in occasionally and only use the Workbar closest to home. Their leadership team needs a meeting room every Wednesday. Once a month, they want to get 30 people together in Boston.

Company B might also have 40 employees. But maybe almost everyone works well from home. They need coworking sporadically, a team suite twice a month and a larger space once a quarter.

Same number of employees. Completely different workplace needs. Why would we sell them the same product? That was the moment the conversation stopped being about rebranding TeamShare. We needed to rethink the entire thing.

Start with the team. Not the product.

Instead of deciding what should be included in a "team membership," we flipped the question around. What does your team actually need? Maybe it's coworking access across Greater Boston. Maybe it's meeting rooms. Maybe it's a dedicated team table every Tuesday. Maybe it's a team suite when everyone needs to work together. Maybe it's conference and event space for larger gatherings. Maybe it's some combination of all of those things.

So that's what we're building now: a fully customizable team coworking solution where companies can choose the mix of resources that matches how their people actually work. That sounds obvious. It wasn't. Because the traditional workplace has trained all of us to start somewhere else.

Workplace strategy has always started with the container.

How many employees do you have? Multiply by 150 square feet and voilà, that’s your office size. And obviously the office has to be in downtown Boston. Then we sign a lease, build the thing, and spend the next several years trying to get people to use it.

Even a lot of "flexible" workplace products still start with the container. Here's the office. Here's what comes with it. Here's how many people can use it. Choose the package that fits best. But what if none of them fit?

There is no average employee.

One person needs to get out of the house five days a week. Another has a beautiful home office and doesn't need us unless they're meeting coworkers. Someone needs absolute silence. Someone else gets energy from being around people. One employee lives in Arlington. Another lives in Needham. Another lives in Salem. And even one person can need completely different things depending on what they're doing that day.

That's the entire reason we designed Workbar around different neighborhoods for different kinds of work in the first place. The Study for focus. The Commons for collaboration. The Café for connection. The Switchboard for calls.

We already accepted that work isn't one activity. The logical next step was accepting that a company's workplace shouldn't be one product either.

Maybe customization is the workplace strategy.

For decades, companies had very little reason to customize workplace access at the individual level. Everyone went to the office. The office was the product. Hybrid work changed that. Now companies have the opportunity to think about workspace more like infrastructure: something employees can access differently depending on what they're doing, where they live and when being together actually adds value.

That could mean coworking on Monday. Home on Tuesday. A team table on Wednesday. A client meeting in a conference room on Thursday. And no commute at all on Friday. Another employee on the exact same team could have a completely different week. That's not a problem to solve. That's the point.

We started this process thinking TeamShare needed a better name. Instead, it forced us to question the assumptions underneath the product. And I'm glad it did. Because replacing a rigid five-day office with a rigid hybrid-work package isn't actually flexible.

I’m excited that we’re finally introducing the right product, at the right time, to fit everyone’s needs.