Did you know Tamar Yehoshua, the author of this piece, is speaking at TNW2020 this year? Check out their session on ‘Human-centricity: building products with customers’ here. A few weeks ago, I reached my one year anniversary at Slack. It’s hard to believe it’s already been a year. When I look back on my first months, […]
Did you know Tamar Yehoshua, the author of this piece, is speaking at TNW2020 this year? Check out their session on ‘Human-centricity: building products with customers’ here. A few weeks ago, I reached my one year anniversary at Slack. It’s hard to believe it’s already been a year. When I look back on my first months, one of the biggest changes for me after decades of working in email was learning to use Slack every day as my primary mode of communication. I had to learn a new tool and a new organization, all at once. Once I got up to speed, it was rewarding and fun to see how Slack uses Slack. Every day I experience how working in channels makes information more transparent, lets our teams be more agile, and helps me to stay connected with my colleagues in real time. With Slack currently operating as a 100% remote workforce, I’m relying on communicating in channels more than ever. As people all around the world navigate the transition to fully remote work, the need to stay connected to one another is a top-of-mind concern. This article is a peek into how my team at Slack uses Slack, much of which is increasingly relevant during these unique times. I’ve been working in and leading tech teams for a long time, and bringing people together and aligning them around a common goal is always one of the biggest challenges. So, how do we do this at Slack? Making sure that information gets to the right people, at the right time, is what makes organizations more or less effective. At Slack, all work happens in channels. You never get an email from someone inside the company. We use channels to organize our work into focused, easily searchable conversations – for announcements, teams, projects, culture and, of course, #pm-fun. We also have a public channel for every feature that we develop, which anyone in the company can peek inside to see the latest status and updates. Every department across the organization uses channels, not just our technical teams. For example, our HR team uses channels for everything from hiring (interview and offer channels) to reorg coordination to planning off-sites. We often create temporary channels and archive them when they’re no longer needed. [Read: Here are the 3 biggest trends shaping the future of work] Our cultural norms allow us to make the most of channels. My team knows to @mention me in a channel if they want to make sure that I see something, but we use @channel, which pings all members of the channel at once, sparingly. We’re all responsible for keeping conversations on topic, and we freely use our internal shorthand, the:raccoon: emoji, to suggest that someone take the conversation to another channel. Finally, we try as hard as possible to have public conversations so that information is available to everyone. For example, we run a weekly executive product review with a small group, sparing people’s time from unnecessary meetings, and then ‘pin’ the notes in a public channel. I was delighted to find that pinning items (files, messages, etc.
