Evernote’s missing piece: A visual layer

Recent reports state that Evernote, once a darling of Silicon Valley, is now in a “death spiral” after the departure of four C-level executives, slowing sales of its paid individual subscriber product and lackluster adoption of the enterprise version of Evernote.

One reason for these problems is that Evernote is a relatively mature product that, in some ways, hasn’t kept pace with the needs of its business users.

One fundamental problem I see has to do with the types of thinking tasks knowledge workers must perform today. In today’s business environment, many of the easy problems have been solved, thanks to kaizen, lean, agile and other improvement initiatives. What remains are more complex, systemic challenges that require higher-level thinking skills to solve.

Simply put, Evernote Business doesn’t add enough value to teams. It enables sharing of notes and notebooks, and integrates communication and collaboration tools like Slack, but don’t support higher-level thinking activities like brainstorming, sense-making and consensus building.

The solution: Add a “visual layer” to Evernote

What’s the solution to this problem? Imagine adding a visual layer to Evernote, integrating a tool like Webjets.io (click here for my interview with the founders of this web app earlier this year).

Imagine Evernote as a stack of index cards. Its folders are the equivalent of different “piles” that I can…