Lots of people have a love-hate relationship with the team communication tool Slack. Why? They got lost in the rabbit hole. Let’s discuss some of the main issues with Slack we can try to mitigate, so the rabbit hole doesn’t seem soooo deep.
Notification Noise
Determining what’s important in Slack is difficult to manage. If you join a channel that is too broad, and then you get too many notifications. And your workflow is constantly interrupted to get a notification about something you do not care about. At least not now.
Losing Context
It’s easy to lose threads about decisions that were made. Why? Because of the recency bias built in. Each channel shows you the most recent messages that were written. People don’t always use threads in a clean way. that means sometimes you need an important thread that you can’t find that was talked about last week, but there have been 50 messages since. Now you have to identify what keyword may help you find that key thread. It’s a lot of work. We are putting trust in a system that wasn’t built to be used the way we use it sometimes.
Yes, you can use an external app like Confluence to document decisions, but it adds a lot of overhead. And people already use Slack, so let’s use it in a smarter way if we can. We can make it easier to find discussions around product or technical decisions. Why make it more difficult?
Feature Channels Strengths
Create purposeful Slack channels that have the right people. At large organizations where you are developing features, consider making a Slack channel per feature instead of just team-based ones. Depending on how big your team is, team-based channels could work. But even with small teams, they pose a problem. What happens when you need to reference something said a few months ago?
Well, in that case, it is difficult to search exactly what you need and regain context. When you create a feature-based channel instead, context is always maintained since you only talk about things relevant to that feature. There is less “chatter” about non-relevant items. So there is less searching and guessing what to search. You know exactly where you should look up discussions about ACH payments … in the payments-feature Slack channel.
Enabling Support
The other advantage of feature-based channels is enabling the right people to respond to support and bug reports. Let’s say Diana worked on the credit card payments feature. Let’s say the operations team reports a potential bug on the app and needs support from the developer to confirm and potentially fix the bug. The PM could ask the larger team to support, potentially dragging in a developer who doesn’t have the most immediate context, or they can contact the feature channel that has the relevant developers paying attention.
This allows the developers who worked on a feature to immediately be notified if anything comes into #mobile-credit-card-payments instead of looking at for example the potentially larger #mobile-app channel. Yes, you want all developers to still have some idea of what’s going on, you do not want to allow siloing but it gives the developer an idea of how URGENT something is to them without making the PM have to sift through backlog tickets to figure out who could answer questions best. We dont have to ask who OWNS what. We ask where our request goes instead.
Passing on Feature Ownership
Let’s say Diana quits and gets a new job offer. So Beyonce is the new developer now and she would like to know conversations related to mobile credit card payments that led to decisions about architecture and tech stacks. Well, she doesn’t have to dig, she just joins #mobile-credit-card-payments and finds the context that’s there. Since this channel isn’t flooded with a lot of noise, her research is a lot more focused. Passing on the torch becomes easier.
Downside of Large Slack Channels
Sending a question to a large group of people can be intimidating for many. For example, maybe someone doesn’t want to enable too much critique on a question or idea because they do not want to be blocked. Maybe they are afraid that that question was already discussed. Maybe people are less likely to respond if they think someone else can respond to a question instead.
Large Slack channels are only useful for announcements not collaboration. Think about this especially if you see that a lot of discussions going to DMs instead of Slack channels.
Using Third Party Integrations
The amount of tools you probably use in addition to Slack is plentiful. Why keep track of them separately if they have third-party integrations. Well, the reality is that you don’t have to message something every time there is a PR to review. Integrate with Github to get updates about new pull requests or new comments on your PRs. Sending messages about Confluence or Github updates can be configured within Slack so the relevant file updates show to you in Slack.
A Little Copium
There are many ways to configure Slack to better serve you. Stop struggling with it and think more critically about who, what, and where when you’re creating a Slack channel. Stop making Slack channels no one uses. Don’t be afraid to remove one if, indeed, it is not working. It may take a lot of experimentation, but if you are not getting the asynchronous communication you want, you either have the wrong people or the wrong medium. Change the medium, change the people.