How Revolut uses Claap to conduct async weekly business reviews

Meet the Team That's Crushing Communication Challenges with Claap

‍Picture this: a globally distributed team with members across America and Europe, struggling to keep up with the challenges of different time zones and a constant flood of meetings. They knew they needed a change, something to help them stay connected and informed without slowing them down. Enter Claap, their new secret weapon to tackle communication issues head-on.

‍The Problem: Too Many Meetings, Not Enough Time

‍Working across multiple time zones meant that they had to deal with limited opportunities for real-time communication. This resulted in endless recurring meetings, leaving everyone feeling overwhelmed and bogged down. They needed a solution that allowed them to share important updates, while still fostering collaboration and engagement.The Solution: Claap to the RescueClaap stepped in as their go-to communication tool, helping them ruthlessly cut down 15-20% of their recurring meetings. They started sharing important updates like KPIs, talent changes, and roadmap updates through Claap, allowing everyone to access the information when it suited them best. Team members could even watch the updates at double speed if they wanted to save time.

‍The Benefits: Efficiency, Flexibility, and Accountability

‍By implementing Claap, they saw a significant improvement in efficiency, both for the people giving the updates and those receiving them. The platform also provided traceability and accountability, with the option to leave comments and links.

‍Diverse Use Cases: Demos, Design Reviews, and More

‍Claap proved to be incredibly versatile for this team. They started using it for various purposes, such as demos, design reviews, and even customer presentations. By sharing demos through Claap, team members could watch them at their convenience and stay up to date on specific products they were interested in.

‍The Outcome: 20% Meetings chopped off. In-Person Collaboration Not Compromised

‍The cherry on top? Claap didn't hinder their in-person collaboration. It became an invaluable add-on that seamlessly integrated into their workflow. Their team started using "claap" as a verb, showcasing the impact Claap had on their day-to-day work.In the end, Claap helped this team overcome their communication hurdles and opened up new ways to collaborate and stay informed. They transformed their struggles into a powerful, empowering story of success.

‍

Focus: running efficient business reviews

Running weekly business reviews is probably one of the most important rituals to implement as a team leader. Weekly team updates, weekly kpi reviews, weekly product updates, etc… It helps you stay on top on the most important projects and objectives, identify where your team is facing roadblocks and create more alignment between stakeholders.

However as companies grow, these sacred ritual becomes less efficient. You can easily end up spending your entire Monday in back-to-back business reviews. Team engagement drops lowering the quality of discussions.

This was the exact issue James Gibson, General Manager Revolut Business, and Pierre Cahuzac, Head of Product Revolut Business, had when they contacted us to improve their business review process.

Every Monday, we’re running weekly business reviews. Every team leads and product owner of the department have to share a quick analysis of their KPI and an update of their roadmap. Everyone has to participate in this meeting for at least 1 hour. This meeting is really costly and it’s pretty hard to organize as many people are not in the same time zone.

After our call, they decided to adopt a new model. Instead of doing a weekly team meeting followed by a 1-1 meeting, they decided to move the first meeting async while keeping the 1-1 meetings in sync.

A few months after our initial call, we sat down and they explained the new workflow they implemented.

Every Monday, they create a new topic where all team leads and product owners have to share their updates.

“I love the fact that Claap forces you to be sharp. You can almost timebox your recording to make it around 5 minutes. So in the end, what people share is much more digestible and easy to watch.”

Every week, Pierre creates a new topic for their business review and post the link to Slack and in the calendar event. Team leads & product owners post their recording in the corresponding topic and members are automatically notified.

Then James and Pierre can easily watch the videos in their own time, playback at double speed, and rewind videos if necessary. “The ability to playback in double speed is a true game-changer” James told us.

Anyone that has questions can leave comments and ask for clarification. “This is really efficient when you want to deep dive on a specific topic. You can use comments as a powerful way to highlight your questions and use that for your 1-1 review later. It even helps us skip them if we realize there is nothing to discuss.” said Pierre.

Beyond time-saved in meetings, they realized this format made this process even more effective as James emailed us later on.

Advice to get started

When considering switching to this approach, there are a few tips that we’ve learned along the way that worked very well for team adoption.

• Make sure the format is very clear: it might be intimidating to record ourselves for the first time. It’s easier to do it if we keep a similar format that everyone can adopt as a template.
• Keep some sync time: sync time is precious to discuss the most complex issues. Use async business reviews to better prepare them. You can start by keeping the initial meeting in the beginning to answer questions. So that async video is used at first only to share updates. Then the 2nd step can be to ask questions directly in the claap, but still answer them in the meeting. Step 3 can be to do everything async - and then only keeping 1/1 syncs if needed.
• Have a clear repeatable process: to make sure your team don’t forget about it, create an event in your calendar where you can post the topic link.
• Encourage teammates to contribute: as you can easily watch who has seen your recording, recorders appreciate when they receive comments & feedback. Claap is always a great way to encourage cross-team collaboration so you can share key info to people that are not directly on your team.

If you’re looking for more best practices on async video collaboration, check out our playbooks here.

‍