We sat down with Stephanie to chat about how she stays on top of her day-to-day while effectively managing a team. Check out the recap of our conversation, below!
** Stephanie is using the old version of Shift (v7). Check out the new version of Shift (v9), here. **
As a Director of Customer Success at PhotoDay, Stephanie is a leader in establishing long-term business relationships with customers and PhotoDay community members. Naturally, in a leadership position, Stephanie finds that her day-to-day is constantly changing with new exciting projects as she remains at the forefront of a rapidly growing Customer Success team.
When she's not leading her team or advocating for clients, you can find Stephanie experimenting with a new recipe in the kitchen or traveling.
Discovering Shift
As Stephanie grew into her management role, she found herself in a field that required her to ramp up very quickly while building out new procedures that would set her and her team up for success. With all these procedures and existing systems scattered across tabs in her native browser, Stephanie experienced the common pain point of not knowing which tab was which and wasting precious time trying to access the web-based tools she needed at any given time. Since she did not have a centralized source in place, her days were long and she couldn't context-switch at a moment's notice; according to her, it felt quite unprofessional.
“I figured there must be a way to have everything open in one place and I was willing to pay whatever it cost to get it."
After discovering Shift in 2019 through a professional recommendation, Stephanie knew that she had found the tool she needed to visually compartmentalize all her other tools open in one place, allowing her to escape the chaos of Chrome tabs.
Getting the Most Out Of Shift
When we asked Stephanie how Shift helps her complete her day-to-day tasks, she highlighted that the biggest benefit she's derived is that the platform helps her stay focused. With 2 email accounts, Slack, Instagram, Google Meet, Zoom, several company social accounts, plus much more, Stephanie was finding (pre-Shift) that there was too much noise coming in at once. Through Shift's "Mute Notifications" feature, she has the power to easily toggle a blanket notification suppression when she needs to drill down and focus on the task at hand.
Further, if she only wants to hear from specific tools (i.e. Slack or her work email), Shift gives her the ability to adjust her notification preferences per email account and application such that she only receives notifications from certain tools (more on our advice on Notification Management, here).
"Working in Shift helps me action pressing things that might otherwise have gone unnoticed until the end of the day."
Lastly, Stephanie recommends taking advantage of the power of Shift in areas of personal life. For events or projects that require an element of planning (which, let's be honest, is all events and projects), Stephanie finds that Workspaces are a great way to separate work from personal without sacrificing organization. She's currently using a Workspace in Shift to manage the remodeling of her house.
Shift vs. A Regular Browser
Unlike a regular browser that inherently lacks the functionality to develop smarter browsing habits, centralized workflows help people work smarter and more efficiently. According to Stephanie, she started using Shift because she wanted her life back. As someone who sets ambitious professional goals, she needed a system in place to help her achieve those goals. For her, that system is Shift.
“A regular browser didn't give me the visual components and productivity I needed to do things quickly."
In closing, being familiar with the intricacies of product development and feedback implementation, Stephanie was appreciative of the forward-thinking and upfront communication she's received from Shift; seeing how the company takes feedback and uses it to engineer and then deploy improvements and additional features.
Connect with Stephanie on LinkedIn, here.
What's next?
Ready to try Shift for yourself? Download now!
Find quick tips and best practices in our Getting Started section here.
Read about other Shift Case Studies here.