Making email manageable for teams
Jacob Wenger, CPO at Shortwave, on building a standalone business on email
This positioning is really about making email feel manageable for the average employee, not just fast for the email obsessive. Shortwave treats the inbox more like a living task list than a queue to clear. It bundles related threads, lets users drag messages into custom groups, and centers a simple pin, snooze, and done workflow so people can see what needs action now without pretending every message will be finished today.
-
The product is designed around reducing overload. Shortwave says most email clients show a wall of chronologically sorted threads, while its approach is to surface only what is new and actionable, then let everything else sit in a prioritized order chosen by the user.
-
That design choice lines up with a different customer than Superhuman. Superhuman is built around keyboard heavy speed for high volume power users, while Shortwave is aiming for something an entire company can adopt, including less technical employees who need obvious controls instead of hidden commands.
-
It also explains why Shortwave borrows ideas from chat. The company wants email and messaging to sit on the same spectrum, so it hides signatures, cleans up long quoted chains, supports bundles, and pushes shorter back and forth messages that look more like Slack than classic email.
The next step for this strategy is turning organization into a broader team workflow advantage. If Shortwave can keep making email easier for median users while adding more collaboration and AI on top of Gmail, it can expand from a nicer inbox into the default work surface where teams triage, discuss, and act on external communication.