Megan Murphy, Stephanie Bowker and Mark Allen, cofounders of Ourspace
Founded in 2022 by three tech veterans, Megan Murphy (former VP of Product at Hotjar), Stephanie Bowker (former VP of Marketing at Spendesk), and Mark Allen (former Sr Engineering Manager at Glovo), who bonded over their shared challenges to proactively restructure and align their teams at scale, Ourspace is a purpose-built software created specifically for tech leaders to equip them to make smarter team design decisions by bringing together people, projects, and priorities into one contextual place.
Team design is a critical part of a manager’s role in which they decide who works on which initiatives and how teams effectively collaborate. These decisions have a significant impact not only on an organization’s capacity to reach its goals but on each individual’s general engagement and longer-term career trajectory.
Digital transformation and the future of work
In 2022, the spend on digital transformation is expected to reach $1.8 trillion, and this number is expected to grow to $2.8 trillion USD by 2025. Statista reports that this number encompasses spending to transform business processes and services from non-digital to digital, including tools for communication and collaboration and technological devices.
A recent McKinsey’s report found that about 20-25% of the workforce in advanced economies could work from home between three and five days a week, which “represents four to five times more remote work than before the pandemic and could prompt a large change in the geography of work, as individuals and companies shift out of large cities into suburbs and small cities”. According to the report, negotiations, critical business decisions, brainstorming sessions, providing sensitive feedback, and onboarding new employees are examples of activities that may lose some effectiveness when done remotely.
Silicon Valley Bank reported last year that 83% of employers have experienced positive outcomes with a work-from-home model, while San Francisco witnessed a 35% increase in migration away from the city as workers returned home or looked for new (cheaper) ones. 43% of the businesses the World Economic Forum surveyed in 2020, at the start of the pandemic, indicated that they are set to reduce their workforce due to technology integration. By 2025, it is estimated the time spent on current tasks at work by humans and machines will be equal.
The 8th edition of the Women in the Workplace report released last week by Lean In and McKinsey has revealed that women leaders are switching jobs at the highest rate we’ve ever seen—and at a higher rate than men in leadership, and are demanding more opportunity, more flexibility, and a greater commitment to diversity and inclusion. To put the scale of the problem in perspective: for every woman at the director level who gets promoted, two women directors are choosing to leave their company. According to the report, remote and hybrid work are game changers for women: only 1 in 10 women wants to work mostly on-site—and it’s not just about flexibility. When women work remotely, they experience fewer microaggressions and greater psychological safety, and this is especially true for women of color and women with disabilities.
Ourspace is a purpose-built software created specifically for tech leaders to equip them to make ... [+]
Managing people and product development
"Tech leaders today face a big problem: they have talented people on their teams, but how they should be distributed and how to keep them engaged and aligned is currently a manual, biased and costly decision process," shares cofounder and CEO of Ourspace Megan Murphy. Prior to cofounding Ourspace, Murphy was the VP of Product at Hotjar, where she led the product, design, and data disciplines behind the company’s 1 million B2B SaaS accounts, and before that, she held the first Head of Product post at N26, as well as Product Leadership roles at Skyscanner and two early-stage startups.
Ourspace is on a mission to build teams to fulfill their missions, and Murphy explains how she and her team believe the best way to do that is to provide leaders with “more context, better collaboration, and a people-centric approach to team design”.
In her conversations with more than 60 tech leaders, the 'OMG managing my people/product/tech stack puzzle is a nightmare' prevailed. She explains how CPOs, Heads of Engineering, and Growth leaders from startups to scaleups currently tape together at least three different sources of documentation which are usually out-of-date and out-of-sync with the HR team. “This gives leaders the option of either foregoing data-backed team decisions or spending hours every week to maintain this essential data."
Long-term Ourspace is looking to serve all organizations where work happens in teams, while short-term the focus is on multi-disciplinary teams in tech companies who work in a dynamic environment (with shorter tenure, hyper-scale, new product strategy, etc). “Typically, the need becomes very evident above 200 employees,” explains Stephanie Bowker, cofounder of Ourspace, who has a strong track record in building brands, especially in her former role as VP of Marketing at Spendesk, where she helped scale the company from $1 million to $50 million and built a community with more than 10,000 members.
A very important feature of the platform is that everyone in the company has access as an end-user to see the changes reflected in Ourspace as a “source of truth”, shares Bowker, to see who owns what and how to best collaborate between teams. "Ultimately, we're not just looking to help leaders fill seats but to empower them to strategically, intentionally, and inclusively build teams that reflect the diverse people they serve," adds Bowker.
Ourspace could be used as a team design tool based on individual attributes (e.g. skills, seniority, ... [+]
For example, Ourspace could be used as a team design tool based on individual attributes (e.g. skills, seniority, tenure, domain experience), for team restructuring due to product or strategy pivots, as a vacancy cover tool for paternity leave, sabbaticals, and vacations, or for the accountability and team goals for peer alignment.
"We're building our product to reflect our values and the values of our customers," shares Mark Allen, cofounder and CTO, "with transparency and collaboration built in as defaults." Previously, Allen led the B2B engineering organization at Glovo, which built and managed the technology used by hundreds of thousands of Glovo delivery and logistics partners to process millions of orders each day, and prior to Glovo, he was an Engineering Manager at a travel metasearch company Skyscanner.
All three of the cofounders agreed that it doesn’t make sense, to say the least, that some of the most expensive talents in many tech companies out there spend hours upon hours gluing together disparate artifacts to determine how to backfill a single resignation. “Instead, we think leaders should be investing their time in more strategic work that moves the business and their teams forward,” adds Allen.
The company’s latest funding round, $2.5 million in pre-seed funding, was led by Connect Ventures with participation by Seedcamp, as well as angel investors including the founders of Maze, Grabya, and Skew by Coinbase, to accelerate product development and customer discovery.
"Product-market fit is important but equally important is people-problem fit. We know how important teams are to the success of a company, and we've seen examples where companies have failed because they didn't manage to find the right people-problem fit. Ourspace is not only tackling the problem with the right product, but they have the right people tackling the solution," shares Felix Martinez, Investor at Seedcamp, with me in an email.
“We believe that in today’s software-led world, we need to do better. We need to raise the bar in how we design the teams building software that shapes our future and we believe that a purpose-built product to design teams isn’t just more efficient than stitching together various documents,” conclude all three cofounders sharing their hope how Ourspace will equip leaders to better walk the talk in putting their people first.
