Wrike Brings Deep Customization Options To Its Project Management Service

Work management tools tend to come in two flavors: either as a really expensive but customizable enterprise solution or as a more consumer-oriented product that gives you very little flexibility. Wrike hopes to bridge this gap with the latest update to its work management and collaboration service today.

“Before [today’s launch], Wrike was like many other collaboration tools,” the company’s CEO Andrew Filev told me last week. “But the piece that was always puzzling me was how to make it fit your own team and your own business.” Somebody on your marketing team likely has different expectations of a tool like Wrike from somebody on the engineering team, after all.

So with the launch of Wrike’s so-called “dynamic platform,” the company now gives its users the ability to customize the service to their needs. Instead of a one-size-fit-all solution, the marketing team can now add fields for its leads, budget and approvals, for example, and the development team can assign tasks to its Scrum sprints — all with the help of a very easy-to-use spreadsheet-like form.

As Filev told me, the company’s development team worked on this project for almost a year. When I asked him why he thinks his competitors don’t all offer similar solutions, he told me that this turned out to be a very complex engineering problem. “It’s very simple on the surface but very complicated on the downstream,” he said.

The company clearly hopes to continue making inroads with larger enterprise customers through offering this kind of flexibility. As Filev told me, over 1 million Wrike IDs have now been created (though not all of those are obviously active users). The company’s revenue has also doubled over the last year and it has made a couple of key hires, too, including LogMeIn’s Seth Shaw as CRO and LinkedIn’s Brian Thome as its senior director of product marketing.