About WorkBoard

WorkBoard co-founders Deidre and Daryoush have long been results-driven people – professionally and athletically. WorkBoard was born of the twin realizations: 1) The speed and transparency with which teams measure results is a large driver of the speed and efficiency with which they achieve them, and 2) it should be as easy to see how your business is doing on its plan as it is to see how your cycling buddies are doing on their rides and races.

Deidre was frustrated at not having results data, exhausted trying to compile and sure it was slowing the business down while Daryoush was achieving next-level performance breakthroughs precisely because he was getting continuous visibility to team performance data. The problem, answer, and opportunity came into focus and WorkBoard was born.

“We don't do this because we are better at leadership or alignment than our customers. We do it because know just how hard they really are, and our mission is to make them easier and our customers better.”

Deidre Paknad, CEO & Co-Founder, WorkBoard

TL;DR — After Deidre’s prior company was acquired by IBM, she ran a large global business there and tried to run it at start up speed. While she knew that meant getting everyone aligned and mobilized on the mission, having fast access to facts and metrics to make even faster decisions, and focusing the global team’s efforts, it was a completely manual motion and the organization was almost entirely work from home at the time. As the business grew, so did the level of effort and latency in aligning and measuring results — the absence of results data was a growing frustration and friction. Daryoush, a technologist who was one of the first 3 members of the Adobe Acrobat engineering team and an engineering leader at Netscape in its heyday, had an entirely different experience at the same time. A long-time competitive cyclist, he had been tracking daily training in a spreadsheet for over a decade. As his cycling team mates all began tracking their performance and training in Strava, he realized that results transparency, competitive comparisons, and performance charts all helped him optimize his training so he could train fewer hours and finish the race stronger. In fact, the whole team performed materially better as it made the shift to digital tracking and transparency together.