 Live from Seattle, Washington, it's theCUBE, covering Smart Sheet Engage 2019. Brought to you by Smart Sheet. Hello, everyone. We are wrapping up one day of coverage at Smart Sheet Engage here in Seattle. I'm Rebecca Knight, been co-hosting all day with Jeff Rick. It's been a pleasure sitting next to you all day. Yes, it's been a while since we hosted together. It has, it has, and it has just been so much fun. Yes. And it's a great show. And you've never been to Seattle before, so that looks good. First time in the Emerald City. Exactly. So you've covered this space, Rebecca, in your non-cube life for a very long time. Yes. So first off, kind of general impressions of New Way to Work. We hear about it at every show we go to, talks about New Way to Work. So, kind of your global perspective a little bit, and then kind of some takeaways from some of the conversations today. Well, we know that the situation is pretty bleak right now, that there are, the statistics are horrible, just in terms of the number of employees that are really checked out, totally disengaged, would love to quit, but they need the health insurance. And so we're already sort of starting from a pretty low place, we're in terms of people's engagement at work. And I think a lot of the things that drive people nuts about their work, of course it's a bad boss and not a great parking spot and everything, but it's the little things that get in your way of doing your job. And it's the things that just drive you nuts about some sort of process that takes forever. And oh, I have to keep doing this. And I just already sent you that email, and how can you're looking at this other version? And it's all those impediments that really drive people crazy, and that make people stressed out and unhappy in their jobs. So I do think that if you are a company like Smartsheet and you have, you realize this, and you can slowly chip away at those impediments and the aggravations that people feel, I think that's not a bad business model. I think they're onto something there. I think you know where those sometimes is just additive, right? This is just another thing we talked about to one of the interviews, and when I'm at work I have three big monitors, each one split into two screens I've got, mail open, calendar open, Salesforce open, Slack open, Asana open, YouTube, Twitter, there's probably a couple, and then if I have to like look something up. And you know there's this kind of constant confusion as to what is the screen that's open when you work? And it used to just be email, which is not a good solution at all. So I think if they can become the place that people do their work, right? And we talked about all the integrations, like is it integrate with Slack? So maybe the people that work primarily on Slack are primarily there, and maybe the people in some other department are primarily on Smartsheet, and somebody else is primarily on another tool. But it just seems still like keep adding tools and we're not necessarily taking a lot of them away. Well that will be the job for Anna Griffin, who is the first ever CMO of this company who just started in April. And she's got her work cut out for her because you're right, there are a lot of screens. That does not describe my work day, but I know it describes a lot of people's work day. But that will be what she needs to figure out is how to be your number one, your go-to, the one that you rely on to get your job done. The part that I took away from her interview was really, she talked a lot about engagement and you just talked about engagement and empowerment. Not only getting the obstacles out of the way, but making me feel like what I do matters. Matters to me, matters to my boss, matters to my clients and matters. And then I think that does finally drive to innovation, which is the holy grail that everyone talks about, but it's really not that easy to execute. Everyone wants more innovation, yeah, of course. And then the last thing was she talked about why part of the reason why she came here is leadership. And I think we really can't have this conversation around engagement without talking about leadership because it's such a critical piece to the puzzle for everyone to rally around a mission. So this is the execution details, but you also need some type of a mission that you can feel good about as well as feeling that you can contribute to. Absolutely, and I think that what you were just talking about with the ownership piece, and so these are these employees, as we said, they're removing the impediments to their job, but then they're also able to then focus on higher level tasks, assignments, thinking, strategy. They're able to use their brains for what they were hired for. Not thinking about certain tasks and other files that are old versions. And so if they can do those things, and then as you said, feel like they matter, feel like the work they matter is to their boss. However, you are right in that if you got a bad boss, all bets are off. It works still going to stink and there's nothing you can do about it. The other piece that came up, which I thought was interesting, is really about prioritization and what are you optimizing for? And my favorite part of Clayton Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma is the conversation about that you must prioritize. You cannot engineer for everything equally. And you have to force up that prioritization. I think what's interesting here about Smartsheet is for all the talk about digital transformation, most people talk about the products and services that they sell. They talk about the engagement with their customers. They don't talk about transforming the life of their employees and the way their employees get stuff done and the way the employees actually engage with the company through the applications. And I thought that was a really interesting and insightful take, especially in the day where everything is a service. And again, your people walk out the door every night and you hope they come back the next day. So I think spinning the digital transformation story into more of an employee enablement and engagement story is pretty powerful. I could not agree more because that is the critical piece. If you have a bunch of people coming to work every day who hate their jobs, they're not going to be giving your customers the experience that you want their customers to have. So it really does start with happy workers. And I think that, I think Smartsheet really gets that. So that's what I am struck by today. It's just those other ones that we're going to have to bring along. I think Dion made a good point and said, some people don't want to be engaged workers. Some people don't want to do next level thinking. They like the route and the routine, gives them comfort, they come to work, they do the route and the routine and they go home. So it's going to be interesting time for those people. It's going to be interesting times for people to not necessarily have expertise in a broad range of categories, formerly siloed categories like product marketing, product management, finance, sales, biz dev, production, but you at least have to have, you know, kind of an inch deep, a mile wide. Yeah, mile wide, exactly. Right, so that you can engage with those teams so you put together a SWAT team, if you will, to accomplish the task. And that's what I'm curious to see, some of the 451 research to how he was pointing to kind of a restructuring of the silos of teams and organizations within a company. That we don't hear much about how that's going to restructure on kind of a dev ops, fast assembly, fast, complete, you know, kind of a symbol and disassemble around projects which is what dev ops is. We'll see how that impacts organizational structure. And I think that could be very cool and very different, particularly with different, I mean, we know that diverse groups make better decisions than lone geniuses. And so if we have a bunch of people who have different perspectives, different levels of expertise, and even if it's not expertise, it's just sort of a general knowledge about a lot of different things. We know that if we can get those people working together on a task, it's got a lot of potential. So I think you're right, I think you're right. The last thing that I think's really interesting here is the acknowledgement of team beyond even the company walls. So you've got your core team, you know, cross departmental collaboration, and then over and over here today, collaboration outside the walls to external teams. And it was Mark talking about putting on these big events. I mean, there's so many external stakeholders and placeholders and vendors involved in this humongous dance that becomes our enjoyment of a Final Four event. I think that's a really insightful kind of take that you have to have the ability to engage, collaborate with a large group or an extended group for any particular project. And that really changes the way you think about what the application is, how you share information. And that they all have to feel ownership in the process too. Yes, very important. All right, Rebecca, well. This was so much fun. Jeff, I had a great time working with you and we had a great team. We had Andrew and Jay and Brendan and Taylor. We welcome Taylor to the show. So it was great. I can't wait to come back and do it again. It'll be big next time. All right, thanks again. That is wrapping up our coverage of Engage 2019. I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff Frick. Thanks a lot for watching.