At Spoke we aspired to build a remote-first team from the first day. With team members in 6 different countries, we bring the team together twice per year to co-work and get to know each other.

Do you need to pivot but haven’t realized yet? That was us last year. As product managers and founders, it’s crucial to recognize when things aren’t on the right path.

We’re excited to announce our pre-seed funding round together with the open beta launch of our App for Slack! We’re grateful to be on this journey together with our amazing investors and early beta users.

This post explains how we tackle data privacy at Spoke and how we make sure to not disclose any PII data in our databases or to any third party apps. One of the ways we ensure this is by leveraging Presidio – a data protection and de-identification SDK by Microsoft.

This a quick introduction and guide to RabbitMQ, a powerful open-source message broker for event-driven systems, allowing components to send and receive messages reliably and asynchronously.

The main challenge of this blog post was to figure out how to make our internal data annotation process for ranking updates more efficient and less mundane, by potentially moving away from a relatively complicated set-up with Google Forms, and creating a more efficient and beautiful flow with Airtable.

At Spoke we believe in the ethical use of technologies and aim to build meaningful processes aligned with our core values. Therefore, we incorporated a Responsible AI checklist in our code contribution flow – similar to as we have checks for adding unit tests and other engineering best practices.

This is an introduction to the evaluation measures which can be used to ensure that NLP models perform well at ranking the textual data they receive. This importance ranking, of the textual inputs our models process, is one of the building blocks Spoke uses in order to generate valuable summaries for our users.

Advice on how to maximize productivity is seemingly endless – from avoiding multitasking and kicking that coffee addiction, to optimizing your sleep pattern. What works for one person isn’t a fit for everyone. Looking for ways to ramp up your productivity? We’re no gurus, but at least we can share what’s working for each of us!

Collaborative work can foster a sense of engagement that brings teams into alignment and helps to develop more effective communication. And it makes sense to have input from different perspectives when working on complex tasks, right? Teamwork is essential, especially when delivering cross-functional projects. But how can you tell when your team is collaborating too much?

We spend over half of our working hours searching for and sharing information: responding to messages, chasing progress updates, and keeping stakeholders in the loop. In the right situation, overcommunicating can streamline information sharing in the workplace and encourage team alignment – giving us the context we need to work effectively.

2021 was a big year for artificial intelligence and paved the way for further innovation in 2022. Things are moving fast, but sometimes it can be hard to discern what’s valuable amidst all the hype, so we brought together our favourite people from the field, to share their highlights from 2021 and predictions for the coming year... Spoiler alert: we’re pretty excited about what AI has to offer in 2022!

Internal communication is essential for an organization to function. From strategy meetings and company-wide updates, to Slack messages or a coffee-break chat. As companies make the shift towards distributed working, many experience issues with alignment and internal communication. Knowing when to choose synchronous vs asynchronous communication is central to communicating successfully and keeping people in the loop.