We sat down with Taylor to chat about how he and his team stay organized while working with multiple clients. Check out the recap of our conversation, below!
** Taylor is using the old version of Shift (v7). Check out the new version of Shift (v9), here. **
Taylor is the founder and CEO of Eden Data, a cybersecurity firm offering various services such as Data Protection, Security, Virtual CISOs (Chief Information Security Officer), Security Assessment Questionnaires, and Audit Lifecycle Management. On a mission to "break the outdated mold of traditional cybersecurity consulting", Eden Data's services are geared towards start-ups, and Taylor and his team work with various clients located across the globe.
Outside of running his business and researching cybersecurity, you can find Taylor spending time outdoors with his four dogs, reading through a new book, and exploring Austin, Texas' foodie scene.
The Use-Case
Taylor has been using Shift as his daily driver since June of 2020 and implemented the tool across his entire team in September of 2021. Each client that Taylor and his team work with has its own digital environment (e.g. Google Workspace). Consequently, Taylor and his team are managing multiple different Google Workspaces (one for each client) at any given time. This means 10-20 separate Gmail inboxes, each with their respective calendar and Drive. Outside of Shift, navigating through environments was chaos as native browsers are simply not designed for this purpose.
"Shift allows us to manage all [client] environments in one central place."
Being able to easily jump between client environments has been a gamechanger for Taylor. Doing many different things for many different clients at any given time, his team relies on Shift for context switching and easy access to proprietary information within different client environments.
Getting the Most Out Of Shift
Taylor and his team use Shift primarily to optimize the way they work across multiple Google Workspaces; relying on the Shift sidebar to house all their client's Gmail accounts as well as the calendar and Drive tied to each specific account.
The Eden Data team is also highly reliant on the Shift browser to perform research. The Shift browsing experience has been designed such that each email account and application added to Shift has its own individual browsing session. This means that Taylor can open up a browsing tab within a specific email account and perform various research that is particular to the context of that client, scaling this process across the entire portfolio of client accounts he's added to Shift. Ultimately, each email account added to Shift is a "bucket" that keeps client-specific tools self-contained.
"[Shift] has been amazing for the growth of our brand; our team stays organized and we perform at a higher level because of it."
Taylor's Shift Tips
1. Start with adding only one email account to Shift
As with any new tool or process, there is an inherent learning curve. Taylor recommends taking the time to familiarize oneself with the Shift environment so that one can understand its capabilities and truly leverage its power and functionality.
2. Build training material specific for your team's use-case
While recognizing that the Shift Knowledge Base is a great library of how-to's and walkthroughs, Taylor highly recommends taking the time to record training material (he uses Loom) on how Shift should be used. At Eden Data, Taylor has a training video that he shows to each new team member which explains their specific use-case for Shift and how it saves them time.
3. Embrace Shift and go all-in
Humans are creatures of habit and we often keep old habits closeby. In the case of productivity apps, this means running Shift alongside other desktop apps they have installed natively on their computer. Taylor's approach to implementing Shift across his team is that he enforces a "jump in with 2 feet" policy, and all his employees are entirely integrated within Shift.
In need of cybersecurity consulting services? Get in touch with Taylor and the Eden Data team, 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.