Shamaym
Delivering a Collaborative Real-time Learning Platform

When it comes to collaboration solutions currently available in the market, most are specifically focussed on communication and coordination. While these solutions help teams plan their work, manage tasks, and communicate collaboratively, there is a critical gap in the way teams learn and improve that prevents them from maximizing performance.

With no structured way to learn from past successes and failures as part of their daily work routine, teams miss critical opportunities to improve performance and drive personal and business growth. That’s where Shamaym comes in. The company helps business teams elevate their performance and adapt quickly to changing needs through collaborative learning and continuous improvement. Following is the conversation that CIO Applications had with Ofir Paldi, the CEO and founder of Shamaym to understand how his company represents the next phase of collaboration by delivering a higher value.

Following the recent pandemic, how can Shamaym help in reinstating collaboration within an organizational processes?

As more teams are working remotely, Shamaym provides a collaborative learning environment that brings the team together, helps team members share knowledge in real-time, and empowers them to build up their competencies when face to face interactions and conventional training are not an option. Our Collaborative Real-Time Learning Platform makes it easy for employees to capture lessons learned from each activity, share insights with team members, and automatically receive relevant takeaways at the moment of need.

Shamaym has indeed carved a unique niche today, but how did it all start? What’s the story behind the conception of Shamaym?

I am an ex-Israeli fighter pilot and when I first entered the prestigious Israeli Air Force Flight Academy at age 18, I was fascinated by their drill. After each flight, the plilots would debrief, covering what they learned, what they could’ve done better (and would try to do better next time), and what they did well that they wanted to remember to do again and thus every flight becomes a learning opportunity. Highly regarded as one of the top performing organizations in the world, the Israeli Air Force operates a debriefing process in which pilots share lessons learned and insights that enable all team members to constantly improve their performance.

When I left the air force after almost nine years as a pilot and became an entrepreneur, I was inspired by the kind of training that I had received there. And thus, I applied the same methodology in the business world, laying the foundation for Shamaym. Started as a consulting business, we started by working with clients to implement a debriefing-based learning model.

To put it simply, Shamaym helped teams adopt a culture where it’s not only okay but also imperative to think and talk about mistakes in order to make everyone—and the organization—better. You don’t have to hire Shamaym to learn how to learn from your mistakes. Today, companies across the globe have implemented the Shamaym platform to enable a culture of improvement and rapid adaptation. The results are quantifiable: increased sales, reduced turnover, better products, more satisfied customers, less repeat mistakes, and agile learning.

How can Shamaym help product and development teams?

Shamaym helps product and development teams drive performance excellence by making it easy for team members to capture lessons learned from each activity, share what works and what doesn’t with team members, and tap into successful tips when starting a new task or project. Problems we help these teams solve:

Difficult to identify issues before they create delays and defects in a release.

No proven process to avoid repeat mistakes that generate defects and delays.

Knowledge is not shared throughout the team, especially when working remotely.

Hard to get all team members up to speed, especially when working remotely.

Difficult to make retrospective effective and actionable

Difficult to make coaching effective.

For example, The Operations Department within a global medical device company wanted to improve on-time delivery by establishing processes and routines in their work that would help the team learn, retain knowledge, and use it to avoid repeated mistakes. The company deployed Difficult to identify issues before they create delays and defects in a release.

Shamaym with 12 team leaders and 50 employees across the Operations Department. Managers were trained to support their teams in building learning routines that included regular debriefing, sharing of lessons learned within the team, and continuous revisiting of those lessons to change work processes. Shamaym was a game changer for the Operations Department. Employees began to address issues that had been neglected for years because they seemed, according to one employee, “too complex to touch”. “Shamaym helps us break down big problems into small corrective actions that can be implemented in a very short timeframe,” that employee mentions.

How can Shamaym help sales teams?

Shamaym helps sales teams get better faster by making it easy for salespeople to capture lessons learned from each customer interaction, share what works and what doesn’t with team members, and tap into successful sales tips and strategies when engaging in a new sales activity.

Using Shamaym, salespeople come to each meeting prepared with all the information they need in one place. BriefMe+ delivers actionable insights and lessons learned from previous sales interactions to the salesperson’s inbox, allowing them to avoid past mistakes and leverage proven successful strategies.

Create ongoing opportunities for learning and coaching: Shamaym makes it easy for salespeople to capture lessons learned from each customer interaction. These takeaways help any team member improve their sales performance, and allow sales managers to offer targeted and effective real-time guidance to each team member.

Knowledge sharing across the entire team: Shamaym leverages your people’s knowledge through simple collaboration tools and circulates learning in real time so everyone stays informed. With immediate access to knowledge from the entire team, new team members can get up to speed quickly and reduce onboarding and ramp up time.

Automating Win/Loss Analysis: Following every closed opportunity, sales leaders receive an automated deal analysis with a summary of key lessons learned, which they can share with team members to ensure the relevant takeaways are turned into actions to increase the success rate of future deals.

A simpler way to work with Salesforce: Shamaym’s Salesforce integration allows salespeople to capture important meeting notes and lessons learned anytime, anywhere, and automatically insert them into your CRM while reducing the time and effort spent on data entry and management.

For example, Between 2018-2019, TripActions grew its workforce four-fold, reaching a valuation of over USD 4 billion. That put serious pressure on the sales organization to keep numbers high as the company expanded across continents. For CEO and Co-Founder Ariel Cohen, it was especially critical that as the company grew, it maintained its high quality standard, delivering exceptional experiences to its customers and “always raising the bar.” The sales organization at TripActions chose to build up its learning and improvement capabilities with the Shamaym platform because it provided a tool for teams to learn from past successes and failures, and adjust the way they get things done—fast.

Using Shamaym increased collaboration and turned team members into active learners. Every team member (100 percent) is actively engaged with the platform, with two-thirds (67 percent) using it at least once a week. Each team member writes at least one debrief each month, and each debrief is read by an average of nine team members.

How does Shamaym steer ahead of the competition?

The vast majority of current collaboration tools are focused on helping team members communicate and coordinate their work. While these systems undoubtedly add value, we believe that a higher value of collaboration can be achieved when team members help each other become better performers.