There have been times when it felt like this year was exceptionally long. Well, technically it was 366 days — leap year, remember? While we have lots of reasons to be glad to see 2020 go, we can also take pride in our perseverance and strength. So, a tip of the hat to you.
We’ve been lucky enough to have some of the most amazing partners and customers, and couldn’t have accomplished all we’ve done this year without your support. We want to thank everyone who has been a part of the extended Wrike family, and wish you a healthy and prosperous 2021.
But before we call 2020 over, we want to take a moment to highlight some of its most noteworthy milestones and achievements.
A trip down a very bumpy memory lane
Who could have predicted that 2020, a year that came roaring in, could have so quickly ground to a halt due to the COVID-19 pandemic? While we turned internally to figure out how to take our 1,000+ employees to completely remote work, we realized that we were in a unique position to use our platform and our experience in collaborative work management as a means of supporting customers through similar transitions.
Having a good plan alleviates a lot of stress when dealing with the unexpected, so we created resources to help teams start planning. We built the Business Continuity Plan Template to offer a roadmap to those working to maintain operations during times of change. Our team also designed the Remote Work Template to help keep work moving forward with tools and best practices for smarter remote collaboration.
As effects of the pandemic surfaced and necessary aid efforts began, we launched Wrike Relief — a program that offers work management software at no cost to non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and relief organizations in the aftermath of regional or global disasters.
Sometimes, you just need to talk through it. Our way to start a dialogue was “Coffee with Wrike,” a series of short webinars in which we invited guests to take a virtual coffee break with us while we shared tips, tricks, and best practices for working remotely.
Looking ahead, and feeling optimistic
None of us were sure what the fallout would be due to the pandemic, but we focused on being proactive to put ourselves in the best possible position to go through it. We’ve been fortunate that in spite of the uncertainty, we experienced a year that feels incredibly promising for Wrike’s future.
Interest in the work management technology space increased in 2020, with Asana and Snowflake both going public and Adobe acquiring Workfront. The market is growing, and in addition to this, we partnered with some of the biggest clients in our history this year. We’re lucky enough to now count Walmart Canada, Siemens, Nielsen, Snowflake, and Nickelodeon among some of our newest customers.
This is one of the most exciting and dynamic phases in our company’s history, and we’re positioning the Wrike product and brand to enter the next phase of growth.
The best part about growth: New Wrikers!
To meet the demand in the marketplace and ensure that Wrike continues to evolve and remain an industry leader, we made a few exciting additions to our executive staff this year.
- Chad Bennett, Chief Human Resources Officer: Bennett leads the company across all global human resources functions, including talent acquisition and development to support the further expansion of the business. His focus is on employee experience to ensure engagement and secure Wrike as a leading global employer.
- Carol Lee, Chief Financial Officer: Lee oversees accounting, financial planning and analysis, and legal, and is chartered to help the company achieve hypergrowth. She joined Wrike from GoodData, a global leader in embedded analytics and intelligence. While there, Lee helped the SaaS company achieve sustainable profitability while continuing to drive customer happiness and product innovations.
- Scott Ryan, Chief Revenue Officer: Ryan leads all aspects of the company's revenue growth strategy globally. He has more than 20 years of experience in enterprise software sales and cross-functional leadership with a successful track record of building high-performance teams, penetrating challenging new markets, and exceeding revenue objectives.
And the changes kept rolling
There are times when reinvention is necessary for growth. Our reinvention came this year with Wrike Reimagined, a transformation in both our product and brand.
At Wrike, our objective has always been to build a platform configurable and powerful enough to handle any situation. We eventually ran into an all too common issue, however, as things started to get a bit complex. To address the evolving needs of our users, we applied your feedback to rethink the user experience.
The New Wrike Experience combines the functionality you want with the ease of use you need to be more productive and enjoy your time spent in Wrike even more. We addressed information overload while accommodating the need for better discoverability. We also made Wrike more configurable for a personalized experience that scales as you add more users and teams — and as business grows.
Our new brand
While Wrike Reimagined brought a new user experience and enhanced functionality, we needed to transform our brand to match our evolution as a company. Our new brand identity brings our new mission and corporate vision to life.
The new visual identity uses both rich illustrations and photography, along with a delightful combination of eye-catching colors, shapes, and patterns to infuse our brand’s personality into the user experience. Our refined brand voice and tone convey our human side, positivity, team focus, pragmatism, and expertise.
Thinking about what’s truly important to us and our users, we also refined our vision and mission statements to reflect our new identity as a company:
Vision:
A world where every person, team, and organization achieves their best.
Mission:
To help you do the best work of your life by reducing chaos and complexity through visibility, contextual collaboration, and automation.
Collaborate 2020 was an event to remember
While many thought events would be impossible in 2020, many also quickly adapted to virtual events, including us at Wrike. We’ve participated in and hosted more than 50 events this year! Perhaps the most exciting and the one we worked the hardest to pull off was our yearly conference, Collaborate 2020.
This year’s Collaborate was historic for Wrike in different ways. One, it was a completely virtual event that ran continuously for 48 hours in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. That in itself is a feat, and we’re so proud of our Wrikers and grateful to every attendee. Not knowing what attendance would be like, we were beyond thrilled to see that it increased by 250% from last year, with 5,500 attendees! We sincerely thank each person who made this event a possibility and such a huge success.
Part of what made Collaborate special this year was that we got to announce so many great enhancements in Wrike. In addition to the New Wrike Experience, we unveiled the following new product functionality at Collaborate 2020:
- Wrike for Marketers Performance: A first-of-its-kind solution that enables CMOs and digital marketing leaders to accelerate campaign delivery and optimize results. With Integrated Insights, you now have 360-degree visibility into cross-channel campaign performance right within workflows from 50 popular digital tools across advertising, social media, and marketing automation. Offered as part of Wrike for Marketers, Wrike’s HTML proofing feature allows teams to collaboratively review and approve digital assets, including website pages, email, and landing page assets across marketing automation systems, CMS, and most cloud-based martech applications.
- Wrike Work Intelligence: A cutting-edge artificial intelligence and machine learning technology trained on Wrike’s robust work graph across 1M+ projects, processes, and activities. Our built-in technology then identifies signals and patterns based on hundreds of factors related to work progress, organization history, and work complexity so that enterprise and hypergrowth organizations can accelerate results. Key features include Smart Replies, Project Risk Prediction, Voice Commands, Task Prioritization, and Document Processing.
- Automation Engine: An intuitive engine that eliminates repetitive tasks, reduces operational busywork, and supports team collaboration. It works in tandem with Wrike Integrate in that account administrators can now build automation rules using triggers and actions to create custom reminders and notifications, move and organize work, update work status and assignments, initiate approval workflows, and take action based on project risk levels.
- Wrike’s Solution for PMO: A custom configuration that’s disrupting the PPM market by providing a pragmatic approach to plan and forecast for quicker iterations and re-calibration of strategy. Wrike offers a tight alignment for execution, progress, and delivery in real time, so PMOs can optimize with confidence and realign work to deliver planned results.
- Wrike for Professional Services: Budget Management: A comprehensive budgeting solution for professional services teams. With Wrike’s new Budget Management, hourly rates define the cost for every resource by job role or individual employee, which can be defined as a standard and then changed for each project or a specific resource on a project. Also, budget tracking enables the platform to centralize all the required pieces to connect project financials and planned margins with actual project progress and time tracking.
- Locked Spaces: A new type of Space in Wrike that prevents any information sharing with other Spaces. It offers restricted access for confidential communication like executive-level collaboration or a working Space for a customer. Nobody can see a locked Space or get access to its projects, tasks, and files until they become an approved member of that Space. Users who aren’t members of a locked Space won’t even know it exists or see and interact with users in that particular Space.
But that wasn’t it for Wrike announcements
We’re extremely proud of our team for rolling out such amazing updates to our product that will help users do their best work. Aside from what we announced at Collaborate 2020, we released some other exciting initiatives:
- Wrike Certifications: The new Customer Certification program is scalable training that Wrike administrators can leverage to get their team familiar with Wrike. The course format includes a combination of viewing e-learning modules, completing courses, and passing a final assessment with a minimum score of 80%. The same team that built our award-winning Discover courses created these certifications, so rest assured they’re high quality and valuable.
- Integration with Zoom: With the new Zapp, Zoom meeting participants can coordinate on Wrike tasks in real time during meetings without having to screen share or switch applications. Wrike Zapp helps users capture action items and assign task owners during or after meetings. Also, Zoom users can set due dates, attach files, add comments, search projects and tasks within Wrike, and send follow-up action items to all meeting attendees with ease.
- New Integrations with Adobe: This year, we announced two new integrations with Adobe to accelerate the customer experience. The first is the Wrike plug-in for Adobe XD, which allows designers to connect to Wrike functionality without leaving XD. The second integration combines Wrike’s power with Adobe Experience Manager, so teams can easily push and pull digital assets between the two platforms.
Our most sincere thanks: Awards and recognition in 2020
Our team has put in an immense amount of work this year to make Wrike the most versatile collaborative work management platform. We’re honored to see our efforts acknowledged by leading organizations, and we’re proud of everyone who helped Wrike receive these awards and recognitions in 2020:
- Leader in Forrester Wave for CWM for third consecutive time
- Leader in IDC MarketScape for Worldwide Cloud Project and Portfolio
- Management 2019–2020 Vendor Assessment
- Leader in IDC MarketScape for Worldwide Work Management and Project and Portfolio Management 2020
- Constellation ShortList for Work Coordination Platforms in Q1 2020
- Deloitte Fast 500 for sixth year in a row
- Gold for Prestigious Brandon Hall Group Excellence Award for Best Customer Training Program
- Top-Rated Award for Project Management by TrustRadius
- Top 50 in Remote Tools/Project Management Products by Best Software Tools
- 2020 Tech Cares by TrustRadius
- Bronze Award for “Most Valuable Corporate Response” to COVID-19 by The IBA Stevie Awards for 2020
- Diversity in Tech Awards 2020 in the Health and Wellness category
Work hard, play hard — even when it’s virtual!
Even in a virtual working environment, you have to find ways to recharge and laugh with your coworkers. This year, we came together to create some memorable events that brought joy in a year when we really needed it. Here are some moments from a few of these events, including Christmas parties, drag bingo, pet happy hour, and a painting class!
Here’s to 2021
It’s a wrap on 2020! While looking back on this year feels like a heavier task than it has in years past, it brings some great perspective. We’ve accomplished more than we thought possible, and despite separation have been able to grow as a team and as individuals.
Here’s to what 2021 brings you, and at Wrike, we’ll continue with our mission: helping you do the best work of your life.
