A Big Day

By Deidre Paknad — Tuesday, February 25, 2014

Delighted to announce the funding, my role as CEO of Workboard, and new board members today!  It’s great to share the new company and story with colleagues and customers from my ILG decade – your support on my new venture has been amazing!

I’m very excited about Workboard and its mission to improve execution velocity and intelligence for managers and large enterprises.  About a year ago, I shared my management challenges and experience with Criss Harms, former CFO at PSS Systems and now CFO at ForeScout, and my husband, Daryoush Paknad — I hoped they’d develop a solution and launch a company around it.  They expanded, germinated and validated the idea and size of the opportunity.  As an entrepreneur with enormous passion for this particular problem and solution, it was my natural next venture!

In my experience keeping goals clear, defining and executing the right deliverables and communicating status and results are much harder than they should be.  Like a lot of people, I’ve wasted thousands of hours in mind-numbing con calls, staff meetings, status updates, monthly and quarterly business reviews to manage goals, execution and accountability.  Without unrelenting execution focus and clear goals, it’s impossible to deliver great results.  Our epiphany: Unlike tools for selling, marketing, accounting, and HR, tools for managing haven’t improved in 25 years (since email and MS Office).  But the speed, travel, pressures and global complexity of managers’ jobs have changed dramatically.

We created Workboard to help managers and their organizations manage more easily, sustainably and effectively.  Our mission is to enable managers to consistently engage their teams on goals and achieve crazy great execution results without the time- and soul-sucking tedium.  Our long-term vision is to surface execution intelligence to improve enterprise results.

Like the previous companies I’ve led, we’ve set the customer engagement bar at “adores and advocates” … three notches above “satisfied”.  One of the most rewarding aspects of my career has been authentic and lasting customer relationships.  It’s how good business feels and it’s very good for business.

Our private beta is progressing well; the feedback is helping us enrich the experience and ripen the features before public launch.  Ping me if you’d like to participate.  Workboard’s Leadership Refresher email course has an expanding subscriber base and people who look forward to getting them.   Our team is growing with new user experience and interface experts, developers and marketing staff.  If you haven’t yet, I hope you’ll follow the company’s progress on LinkedIn or Facebook!

— Deidre

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