For the better part of 5 years I worked at a company called Aspen — a creative collective committed to transforming how teams work. My role was Head of Product Design. Navigator is one of several products we built during our time together.

I worked closely with Belinda Preno, our Creative Director, who led the brand development.

Navigator began its life as a “teamwork assistant” — a virtual teammate that was an expert in collaborative processes. It’s first skill was helping leaders run great meetings.

The Navigator bot would reach out to meeting participants before and after the meeting and have a conversation, requesting topics for discussion and sharing follow ups and action items.

It could even help you brainstorm topics for the agenda.

Topics would be assembled into a beautifully designed agenda, that you could use to run your meeting.

At first people really liked the bot. They thought it was cute. But the novelty wore off and then just wanted to add topics to the agenda directly.

So we pivoted: goodbye bot ✌️ Navigator is now a collaborative workspace for every meeting on your calendar.

This lasted until Covid, when we suddenly found ourselves working from home, missing the magic of in-person collaboration. Enter Playspace.