Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

In product development, the “concept and ideation” phase is often where the magic happens — or where it’s lost. A common scenario: a dozen browser tabs open, notifications pinging, and a blank document staring back at you. While modern product lifecycle management (PLM) gives us the framework, the “messy” beginning of a product’s life requires something more intuitive than a keyboard.

Welcome to Rocket.Chat Labs: our way of showing what is cooking in the R&D kitchen. No polished demos on curated datasets. No slide decks dressed up as evidence. Just real engineering, real data, and the honest story of what we found. The first in a series where we open up our R&D process: what we built, how we tested it, and what we actually found.

Island communities don’t adopt digital services the same way major cities do. Their decisions are shaped by unique challenges, from patchy internet and limited tech support to deep reliance on local trust networks. Choosing the right digital platforms means weighing not just features and pricing, but also reliability under tough conditions and whether a service fits local culture and daily routines.

The hardest part of a planning offsite isn't always the planning. It's translating that clarity, energy, and momentum into actual projects after everyone has left the room. For Sheila Head, Head of Marketing Operations at Asana, that translation work used to cost an entire work day. "The real work happens as soon as you wrap up the notes and assign action items and get people actually working on the initiatives you all aligned on," said Sheila.

Security is what makes it possible to build and ship software with confidence. But in fast-moving engineering teams, it can drift into an afterthought—a final hurdle before launch rather than a voice at the table from day one. Varun Prusty, staff security engineer on Asana's security architecture team, believed it didn't have to work that way, so he built something to prove it.