Remote Meetings
Combining virtual offices with meeting spaces.
Teamflow was built during the COVID-19 pandemic to give remote teams a place to work together day to day. It was a virtual office: a space where coworkers could see each other, drop in for a quick chat, and collaborate the way they would if they shared a room.
People left for meetings and didn’t come back
The virtual office was great at the spontaneous stuff. The trouble showed up the rest of the day. People would leave for a scheduled meeting in Zoom or Google Meet and just not return, so engagement bled out as the day went on.
It came down to living in two places at once: Teamflow for hanging out and collaborating, a separate tool for the actual meetings. The office sat half-empty during the hours teams met most, people juggled apps all day, and you lost track of who was around the moment they stepped into a meeting somewhere else.
Bringing meetings into the office
To keep people in Teamflow all day, I designed a meetings product that lived right next to the virtual office. The hard part was holding onto the spatial, physical-feeling way Teamflow worked while still matching what people expected from a tool like Zoom.
The hub allowed people to join their meetings or enter the virtual office from one place.
Presenter mode
Sharing your screen in most tools means clicking through system dialogs and hunting for the right window while everyone waits. I reworked it into a presenter mode: a dedicated canvas for whatever you were sharing. It made taking your turn to present feel deliberate instead of fiddly.
Breakout rooms
Breakout rooms worked the same way spatial audio did in the main office. To start one, you dragged your avatar away from the group. No menus, no setup. It felt like the thing it was modeled on: getting up and moving to another corner of the room for a side conversation. That gave people the same easy agency over a meeting that they already had in the office.
How it worked out
The integrated meetings feature did what it was meant to: it kept people in Teamflow through the whole workday instead of scattering them across tools. Daily engagement went up because there was no longer a reason to leave. Teams stopped switching between an app for collaboration and an app for meetings, and the hub gave everyone a single front door for both the spontaneous and the scheduled.
The spatial model behind features like breakout rooms was also what set Teamflow apart. It was hard for competitors to copy, and it was the clearest expression of what the product was for: remote work that felt like sharing a space instead of staring at a grid.