W27 - Next-Generation Collaboration Tools

Last week I finally tried Learning City 2.0, a brand-new version that supports real-time collaboration. Real-time comments make meeting formats like silent review far easier to execute. Document following frees you from the awkwardness of viewing a projected document while also looking at the original file. In the new version, opening a document means you can edit immediately without manual saving, and you no longer need to worry about conflicts during simultaneous edits.

A shift in philosophy brings dramatic functional changes. We completed the move to online documents in the past; now we’ve caught up with the wave of next-generation collaboration tools driven by digital transformation.

I believe the next generation of collaboration tools will have two defining characteristics.

The first is a human-centered approach with integrated systems and tools. For example, the integrations between systems we commonly use — such as Evernote, Learning City, Zoom, Ones, and OKR platforms — are clearly trying to stitch things together. A better experience, though, would feel like a single unified toolset that fully covers goal management, communication, scheduling, and execution collaboration. I reada PM from Feishu’s perspective on how tools shape organizationsand must say it’s a persuasive pitch.

The second characteristic is content structuring. In the digital era, content has long gone beyond plain text — interaction media can be voice, video, or proprietary data structures in a system. Structuring content means turning it into machine-understandable, analyzable, and searchable data. If you watched this year’s Google I/O, you’d feel this trend even more strongly. For example: when a new requirement arrives, what’s its relationship to OKRs, where is the spec document, who are the upstream and downstream collaborators, what are the schedule, swimlane, and account details, and what are the post-launch results — all delivery-related information should be fully understood by the system and presented where it’s needed, enabling information to move from proprietary silos to the public domain.