Workflows vs. workspaces
A framework for B2B SaaS collaboration
TL;DR
B2B SaaS products enable collaboration across business activities. These activities exist on the spectrum of workflow vs. workspace. Understanding the attributes of this spectrum helps one to make sense of both existing and new product categories.
The collaboration spectrum
As I wrote in Framework: B2B SaaS value props,
SaaS helps businesses to create value by enabling them to do two things:
Do existing activities more productively by enabling more outputs (or the same) with the same (or fewer) inputs
Do new activities that would be impossible or cost prohibitive if done by humans
Every business activity has a what and a why.
What. What activity are you doing? What activities tend to fall into a subcategory of analyze, plan, or execute.
Why. Why are you doing it? The why is how the activity supports the mission of the business — directional alignment. Alignment happens at the individual, team, and collaboratively across functions.
In this article I go deeper into collaboration. Business collaboration activities exist on a spectrum of workflows to workspaces.
Workflows defining principles
Workflows are defined and sequential. A set of homogeneous, objective activities that can be performed repeatedly to achieve outcomes.
Think of workflows as shipping lanes. You need to configure it to achieve the right outcome, and then it’s all about throughput.
An IT provisioning system is a great example of this. Configure your workflows to enable selection, approvals, and fulfillment. And then let the process run… over and over again.
Workspaces defining principles
Workspaces are undefined and free-form. The activities that take place in workspaces are heterogeneous and subjective.
This is where your creative collaboration happens. A work canvas is a great example of this. A place where tasks, documents, and communication can happen in an unstructured, collaborative way.
Implications
Defining collaboration tools on a spectrum helps one to understand some value prop trends in the B2B SaaS world:
Robotic process automation (RPA) - workflows to the extreme performed by computers. The ultimate throughput deliverer for objective, homogeneous activities
No-code - this is a newer category of B2B SaaS that lets you combine both workflows and workspaces. It gives “citizen developers” the ability to take a free-form collaboration approach to building their own workflow tools to solve niche business problems
Data - There are multiple billion-dollar application businesses across the collaboration spectrum. What do they all have in common? They require data to deliver value. This illustrates how important and big the market for the data layer is
Cost of collaboration - different collaboration activities cost different amounts. Pure workflow collaboration are more efficient and less expensive. Pure workspace collaboration is less efficient and more expensive
UX - while consumer grade UX is now a table stake for any enterprise SaaS app, I’d argue it’s more critical if you’re building a workspace. You need a UX that is conducive to creative work. That is a much higher bar than UX that is conducive to process work, and getting it wrong makes that work even more expensive