Unu Motors is building a new, affordable electric scooter. Their “smart” scooters offer integrated navigation, shareable digital keys, portable batteries, remote control, theft protection, and plenty of space for your stuff. Ahmed Sattar is a Product Manager at Unu Motors. He works across departments with engineers and other product stakeholders.
Too much fragmented time
Like many Product Management teams, Ahmed and his teammates had too many meetings and too little work time. At Unu Motors, managers have one-on-ones with their direct reports weekly or monthly. Engineering and Product and Sales meet regularly. There’s a weekly company-wide meeting. Then there are daily standups. And of course, one-off meetings for specific projects.
With all of these meetings, the Product Management team often ended up with a completely staggered schedule, with just 30 minutes in between meetings to get heads-down work done. They needed a way to carve out time to get their work done without cutting back on the volume of meetings.
“It shows how a meeting changed and improved people’s lives. And it offers suggestions for what things you can turn on or reschedule to make people’s lives better.”
<span class="quote-author-name">Ahmed Sattar</span>
How meeting moves benefit people's lives
Ahmed and his team tried Clockwise and immediately noticed the difference. When Clockwise reschedules their meetings to open up more Focus Time, “You can see it benefitting a lot of people,” Ahmed said.
Clockwise has since spread from the Product Management team to more of the company, entirely by word of mouth. “More than half of the company is using it now.” This is especially true of people who have the most meetings, including management teams and Business Marketing.
Clockwise optimizes calendars at Unu Motors in the background. “You just check your schedule and you’ve got a chunk of time to work,” Ahmed said. “I don’t care when the original meeting was, as long as I know where to be and when, I’m good. It does its thing and then it disappears into the background. The more it disappears the more magical it is.”
And anyone on the team can look to Clockwise Analytics to see the results. It “shows how a meeting changed and improved people’s lives,” Ahmed said. And it offers “suggestions for what things you can turn on or reschedule to make people’s lives better.”
The team also enjoys Clockwise's Week in Review email. It summarizes your week and makes recommendations on how to maximize your week ahead. “I love the email that comes in and says all of the different things that were shuffled around, conflicts resolved, saved time,” Ahmed said.
And Clockwise’s customizability helps each person at Unu Motors use Clockwise in a way that works for them. “All the settings are amazing,” Ahmed said. “It’s really fine-tuned as far as how you can set it up for yourself.”
While the Product team was already vaguely aware of the importance of Focus Time, adopting Clockwise made it a lot more pervasive. “People were like, ‘Oh, Focus Time is a thing.’” But they weren’t scheduling it on their calendars or protecting it. “We see it scheduled a lot more often now,” Ahmed said.
It’s also changed norms around how the team schedules meetings. “Now people are more likely to opt for scheduling meetings to help yourself and the people you’re meeting have more concentration time,” Ahmed said.
But Ahmed really noticed the impact of Clockwise in a conversation with Unu’s COO, Mathieu Caudal.
Two or so days after he’d introduced Clockwise to the company, Ahmed was in the kitchen and ran into Mathieu. Ahmed told Mathieu that he looked more refreshed than usual.
“Yeah, I was able to get a good night’s sleep,” Mathieu told Ahmed.
Ahmed asked Mathieu how he was able to sleep so well. “I had a really good block of Focus Time yesterday,” Mathieu said.
Ahmed started to tell Mathieu about Clockwise, but Mathieu interrupted him before he could say the name.
“Clockwise, right?”
“Yeah!,” Ahmed said. Mathieu was already using it.
