Team is everything when it comes to the success of high-growth tech companies. We’ve seen first-hand examples where companies have failed because they didn’t find the right people-problem fit. Moreover, tech companies experience the second-highest turnover rates of all industries, an expensive and destabilizing problem for senior leaders to tackle. 

This is why we are excited to back Ourspace, a collaborative team design platform that offers a scalable and data-enriched solution to help leaders make smarter organization design decisions. 

Founded earlier this year by three tech veterans, Megan Murphy (former VP of Product at Hotjar), Stephanie Bowker (former VP of Marketing at Spendesk) and Mark Allen (former Senior Engineering Manager at Glovo) – who bonded over their shared challenges to proactively restructure and align their teams at scale with no solution to design their organizations through a people-centric and business outcome lens – Ourspace operates fully remote out of Barcelona, Paris, London & Munich.

“Tech leaders today face a big problem: they have talented people on their teams, but how they should be distributed and how to keep them engaged and aligned is currently a manual, biased and costly decision process,” highlights co-founder and CEO, Megan Murphy. 

“With the stakes so high, we ask ourselves, why are there 20+ products to design fantasy sports teams in a matter of minutes, yet most companies – whose businesses are built by teams – have nothing even remotely that effective to offer their leaders and teams?” Murphy questions. 

Ourspace offers tech leaders a data-rich canvas to visually brainstorm and weigh tradeoffs of re-arranging people, teams and ownership areas with smart permissions and views. The platform’s use cases include:

• Team design based on individual attributes (e.g., skills, seniority, tenure, domain experience) 
• Team restructuring due to product or strategy pivots 
• Vacancy cover for paternity leave, sabbaticals and vacations 
• Accountability and team goals for peer alignment 

“In my conversations with more than 60 tech leaders, the ‘OMG managing my people/product/tech stack puzzle is a nightmare’ prevailed. CPOs, Heads of Engineering and Growth leaders from startups to scaleups currently tape together at least 3 different sources of documentation which are usually out-of-date and out-of-sync with the HR team. This gives leaders the option of either foregoing data-backed team decisions or spending hours every week to maintain this essential data”, adds Murphy.

Dave Thomson, VP of Product at Stuart, a 1,200-person logistics scaleup headquartered in Paris, and an Ourspace early-adopter, comments: “At Stuart, we face the problem of working in silos when mapping squads to projects and across team ownership. Ourspace gives managers a safe space to collaborate with their peers to co-build staffing scenarios with contextual skills, interests and company goals in one centralized place.” 

Ourspace provides the entire company with an easy-to-navigate source of truth with visibility into tasks, goals, reporting structure, and how to work with them. “We’re building our product to reflect our values and the values of our customers,” says Mark Allen, co-founder and CTO, “with transparency and collaboration built in as defaults.” 

Stephanie Bowker, co-founder and CMO, emphasizes: “Ultimately, we’re not just looking to help leaders fill seats but to empower them to strategically, intentionally and inclusively build teams that reflect the diverse people they serve.” 

On why we invested, Felix Martinez from our investment team comments:

“Product-market fit is important, but equally important is people-problem fit. We know how important teams are to the success of a company, and we’ve seen examples where companies have failed because they didn’t manage to find the right people-problem fit. Ourspace is not only tackling the problem with the right product, but they have the right people tackling the solution. We’re thrilled to be backing Megan, Steph and Mark.” 

We are excited to join Ourspace’s $2.5M pre-seed round led by Connect Ventures, with participation from prominent angel investors, including Jo Widawski, founder of Seedcamp-backed Maze, as well as the founders of Grabyo and Skew by Coinbase. The fresh funds will be used to accelerate product development and customer discovery. 

Ourspace is now live on Product Hunt. Upvote!

For more information and to join the waitlist, visit our.space and follow them on Twitter and LinkedIn.