At 5 AM on August 29, 2005, the largest drainage canal in New Orleans, the 17th Street Canal, was breached by torrents of water an hour before Hurricane Katrina struck the city. Levees and floodwalls failed in 50 different locations, flooding 80% of New Orleans. No doubt the system failed. But which system?

Experts later pointed to budget cuts, outdated engineering, and weak process infrastructure. The same pattern showed up during the coronavirus pandemic: the most damaging failures were not single mistakes. They were overlapping breakdowns in governance, communication, data, tools, and accountability. This post looks at five COVID-19 system failures, why they happened, and how stronger processes can reduce the same risk in your own organization.

Continue Reading

You have 975 unread emails. Important files live on someone else’s desktop. A task was assigned in one tool, discussed in another, and lost before anyone could prove who owned it.

The best collaboration tools fix that by giving teams one reliable place to plan work, discuss decisions, share files, review changes, and track follow-through. This list covers current collaboration software examples by use case, from project boards and team chat to workflow collaboration in Process Street.

This is a guest blog post by Joe Caccavale. Joe heads up content over at Applied, the blind hiring platform that removes unconscious bias by using behavioral science.

As an organization, you’re committed to improving diversity. You want to build high-performing, diverse teams. To conquer unconscious bias, you need a hiring process that evaluates candidates consistently instead of relying on gut feel.

Email still works for formal external messages, but it breaks down fast when a team tries to run projects from an inbox. Decisions get buried, files split across threads, and the person who missed one reply loses the context everyone else assumes they have.

These alternatives to email work best when you route each kind of conversation to the tool that fits the work. Use project workspaces for task context, chat and meetings for fast decisions, video collaboration for larger groups, and a governed workflow system when the conversation needs to become repeatable execution.

The days of a business being run on email and local spreadsheets are long gone. No more sending over files, losing data, and waiting for hours to hear back from a co-worker. Marketing collaboration tools do more than keep conversations moving. They hold drafts, briefs, approvals, campaign calendars, customer feedback, and repeatable processes together so the work actually ships.

At Process Street, our collaboration stack starts with the workflows that govern how work gets done. Process Street is the Compliance Operations Platform that brings Docs, Ops, and built-in AI into one product, so policies and recurring work are documented, executed, and auditable in the same system.

Continue Reading

These Gmail tips are for people who already live in their inbox and want it to feel less like a queue they chase all day. Gmail works best when you combine fast manual control with smart automation: shortcuts are still useful, filters and labels still do the heavy lifting, and Gemini can help with drafting, search, and thread summaries when your account supports it.

The best setup is not one magic extension. It is a stack of small habits: fast keyboard control, precise search, strict labels, careful follow-up, and a few automations that turn repeat email work into a process. Here are 25 Gmail tips you’ve probably never heard before, or have not used well enough yet.

Continue Reading

Learning how to make a podcast can feel like a huge technical leap, but it is really just a process you can run from start to end each time you want to write, record, and publish a new episode. This step-by-step guide works for first-time podcasters and veterans alike, and it walks beginners through the whole journey: planning and recording, formatting the audio, publishing to the major directories, and earning your first listeners. None of it requires a recording studio or a sound engineering degree, only a clear process you follow every time you hit record.

The approach here pairs a sound engineer and audio editor’s perspective on what actually matters in audio with four battle-tested checklists. The first, the Podcast Publishing Checklist, was built in-house at Process Street, and three more were written by the fantastic James Schramko from SuperFastBusiness, a man who truly knows his stuff about sound. We first saw those three checklists in the blog post The Formula for Creating a 1,000,000 Download Podcast on OkDork.

Continue Reading

Natasha Ponomaroff is the Senior Marketing Director of Instasize, a content creating toolkit for anyone editing photos and online content on mobile. A weekly contributor on the site’s blog, Natasha tracks social media trends and shares guidance for the millions of creatives using Instasize to curate online content.

Seeking to establish a well-rounded online presence? There are many different digital marketing channels to choose from, and all of them contribute to a holistic online strategy. To succeed, you need to know how to pair the right kind of content with the most suitable platform.

Startup growth gets difficult after the first proof point. The product has to mature, customers expect more, the team expands, and investors want the next milestone to arrive on schedule.

SaaStr Europa in Paris made that pressure concrete. The talks below turn a conference room full of founder stories into practical business growth lessons, from customer health and freemium economics to partnerships, enterprise reliability, and the business tools that help teams turn advice into repeatable execution.

Continue Reading

Process automation turns repeatable handoffs into work that moves on its own. Zapier is still one of the fastest ways to connect the apps your team already uses, but the hardest part is knowing which handoffs are worth automating first.

The easiest way to start is not a blank canvas. It is a library of proven Zaps you can adapt, test, and then fold into a broader process automation system that keeps the work visible and accountable.

Continue Reading