With over 300 employees working across different countries, Kumu encountered the usual challenges of any successful tech scale-up: growing pains of slowing processes, inefficient workflows, and fragmenting communication.

To stay agile and innovative to continue creating the best social media experience for Filipinos, Kumu needed an internal tool that allowed their stellar employees to operate at a high level, without letting the inefficiencies of growth get in the way.

Challenges

• Slowing Processes: As the workforce grew, so did communication overhead. Employees constantly nudged each other, tracked progress, sent reports, and performed redundant tasks.

  
  

• Inefficient Workflows: Distributed teams created approval processes from scratch, leading to de-centralized and fragmented workflows. Employees struggled to keep track of multiple processes without a unified view.

  
  

• Fragmenting Communication: Cross-country collaboration became crucial, but language barriers occasionally hindered effective communication and understanding among team members.
  
  

Solutions

Overcoming Barriers and Borders

Kumu's engineering team is distributed across multiple countries, creating unique challenges. Filipino teams gather customer requirements and pain points, while the engineering team focuses on designing and building the product. To create a truly joyful customer experience, all teams, regardless of their location, need to understand each other, grasp the nuances of ideas, and comprehend the specifics of suggestions. It's like trying to orchestrate a symphony with musicians in different cities.

With Lark, Kumu's employees were empowered to communicate clearly during every interaction. Lark's embedded translation features in chat, video conferencing, and documents acted like a universal translator, ensuring everyone spoke the same language, metaphorically and literally. This allowed the team to:

• Ideate Clearly: Team members could explain context on video calls effortlessly, ensuring everyone was on the same page, much like a well-conducted orchestra.

  
  

• Communicate Complex Ideas: Product and engineering teams could convey complicated processes using diagrams and flowcharts, which were easily translated into multiple languages, making sure every note was perfectly in tune.

  
  

• Discuss Diverse Issues: From merge requests among technical teams to progress discussions among operational teams, Lark's chat function facilitated seamless communication, turning chaos into harmony.

Having translations embedded across various features ensured that each Kumu employee could understand and be understood with clarity, breaking down language barriers and fostering effective collaboration.

Streamlined Workflows: From Three Apps to One

Kumu's tech team initially relied on a combination of Jira, Slack, and Asana to manage release features, release notes, and track DevOps tickets. This fragmented approach was time-consuming and often led to inefficiencies. Product managers managed a repository of features and releases on 1 app while managing the progress of new feature releases with engineers on another. On top of that, they had to constantly update business owners on a third app. Apart from the time spent simply switching apps, product managers often had to repeat context and information across the apps.

By consolidating these functions into Lark, Kumu streamlined their workflows significantly. Lark’s all-in-one platform allowed the team to manage everything in one place, enhancing productivity and reducing the time spent switching between apps. This integration made the release process smoother and more cohesive, benefiting both the product and engineering teams. Leveraging the integrated nature of Lark, the tech team saves, on average, at least 2 hours every day.

Smoother Onboarding and Harmonised Teams with Lark Approvals

With distributed teams came distributed processes. This extended to applying and receiving approvals as well. From requesting IT resources such as laptops to getting approvals for payments, employees at Kumu routinely sought and waited for approvals. However, each team used different workflows using a combination of Google Forms and Google Sheets. There was no central place to track approvals, including the quantity and speed of processing.

Not having all approvals in one place meant that an employee, over the course of their employment, hunted for the right form by messaging colleagues, tracked its submission spread over several Google Sheets or risk delays.

An approval for an office supply or to publish an article might seem trivial, in the grand scheme of operations. But nearly every one of Kumu's 300 employees require approvals for various activities. Receiving approvals on time is critical for ensuring employees are unblocked from executing, that processes run smoothly, and in general operations do not stagnate.

With Lark Approvals, Kumu overcame these challenges by creating a centralized platform for tracking all approvals and their respective statuses. Requestors received automated notifications when an approval was granted. The IT team was able to maintain a real-time dashboard of inventory to keep a pulse on usage and asset status. This unified approach improved transparency and efficiency, allowing departments to streamline their processes effectively. On average, time taken to process approvals improved from 1 week to 2 days.

Eliminating "Work About Work" with Automations
In a fast-growing tech company like Kumu, HR plays a critical role in people strategy and change management. Before Lark, HR struggled with the usual combination of documents, comments, and multiple rounds of texting to get things done. Comments on documents often got lost in crowded email inboxes, forcing HR to rely heavily on chat for immediate responses.

Rose Ann, Chief of Staff, candidly described the situation: "It was a lot."

Lark's all-in-one solution transformed this chaotic workflow. With documents and chat integrated into a single superapp, every interaction became seamless. Tagging a person within a document or leaving a comment automatically notified them on chat. Additionally, tasks could be created directly from within the app, ensuring nothing slipped through the cracks.

Conclusion

Lark’s comprehensive suite of features empowered Kumu to overcome barriers and streamline workflows across the organization. By integrating translations, consolidating apps, and automating processes, Kumu enhanced productivity and fostered clear communication, ensuring that every employee, regardless of location, could contribute effectively to creating joyful customer experiences.