Expert Interview: Can the Apple Watch Revolutionize Project Management?

Michael Sliwinski, the CEO and Founder of Nozbe, was a recent guest on the TechnologyAdvice Expert Interview Series to share his insight on wearable technology. The series, which is hosted by TechnologyAdvice’s Clark Buckner, explores a variety of business and technology landscapes through conversations with industry leaders.

Michael joined Buckner to discuss wearable mobile devices and Nozbe’s new app for the Apple Watch.

Nozbe Interview

Below are a few highlights from our conversation:

TechnologyAdvice: What do you think is a big challenge that project managers are facing today? Is project management software evolving to tackle these challenges?

Michael Sliwinski: Lots of changes all the time. This is why I love this space and why I love doing what I’m doing. It’s been eight years and I feel like I’m just getting started.

Most of all right now we are more mobile. We are really using our mobile phones, our smartphones, and everything else. I think this is one of the biggest shifts. When I launched Nozbe back in 2007,  it was just a web application to be used on a desktop computer. Now it’s a whole suite of apps.

And going into this direction, more mobile, we need the information at the right time, and we need smartphones, and our smart devices, to be smarter for us. I think the next wave for our apps, for our project management software apps, will be to be more aware of the context in which we function.

Today for example, it’s cloudy weather here in Europe right now at 3 PM. I just had this interview with you, and my project management tool would tell me, “Based on all this information, plus what you’ve done so far today, you should do this.”

And I think the software can get smarter and there’s room to innovate, to really not to just tell me exactly what I should be doing, but more or less suggest what I should be doing, and it should be pretty accurate about it. So I think we are going into this smarter, based on the data, based on the information, based on the context. And this ties in perfectly with the upcoming Apple Watch.

So all of these things together will make our system smarter and work for us even more. Like to some extent they will become our assistants — our virtual assistants. And I’m excited about it because there’s so many things we can do it, and it’s fantastic when you think about it.

TechnologyAdvice: What are you most excited about right now with wearable technology and project management software?

Michael: For me, the most exciting thing about wearable technology is the fact that we still don’t know how much it’s going to impact us. We think it’s going to be a nice toy, a nice thing to have. And many of us are not even actually wearing watches, like I am. I have nothing on my wrist right now, but I am going to have an Apple watch on my wrist.

So for us, I think the exciting part will be to discover how it’s actually going to impact us. How it’s going to change our behavior, our user behavior. So how much is it going to replace a little bit of the smartphone, a little bit something else? I can’t wait to get started.

With the design of the app for the Apple watch, we had to use some radical ideas. I think for all of us it’s a space we don’t understand yet, because we haven’t been using these devices much yet.

But this is going to mainstream right now, and this is going live for us right now. So it’s a new situation, and I’m really excited about it. I want to discover this, and I want to make sure it’s not just nice to have, but that it really improves our lives significantly.

Listen to the entire show above in order to hear our full conversation, or download the show to listen later. This podcast was created and published by TechnologyAdvice. Interview conducted by Clark Buckner.

image credit: raneko

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Charlotte Ritter is a technology analyst for TechnologyAdvice. She covers business intelligence, gamification, project management, and other emerging technology. She has also written about startups, company growth, and talent management. Connect with her on LinkedIn.