How Slack Changed My Life
On September 7th, 2023, I was laid off from Slalom and it’s Slack Practice as a part of a 7% reduction in workforce that affected over 900 people across the business.
I haven’t posted much about it and I’m sure in due time I’ll have a lot more to say about the layoff and what Slalom meant to me. Right now I want to focus on how Slack changed my professional and personal life. This isn’t a “please hire me Slack” kind of post. Nor is it some kind of advertisement for the product. This is just a post about gratitude.
I’m grateful to have been one of the first few individuals to get the Slack Certified Administrator and Consultant certifications when they first rolled out at the end of 2020 and 2022 respectively. A lot has happened with the product since then, but in those early days it felt like a secret door had been opened for me.
I had been working for Relativity, an e-discovery software company based in Chicago managing their conference room and video conferencing infrastructure. I reached a point where I felt like I was bumping up against a glass ceiling that wasn’t cracking no matter how much I forced myself into it.
When the pandemic happened, and we all had to become remote I was pretty sure my job was going to be axed. My reasoning is that most of my work was office based and now all of my conference room projects were put on hold indefinitely. It couldn’t have come at a worse time as I had twins on the way. However, my director mentioned that he felt because of the situation it was time to reinvent my role. They needed help reassessing their telephony system AND reorganizing their Slack workspace.
Relativity became an early adopter of Slack and according to some friends of mine broke Slack on a few occasions in the early days of the platform. The story goes that Relativity employees had too many different reaction emojis on a single post causing all of Slack to go down (all of this is second hand information obviously). So, to be able to cut my teeth on a workspace with that much history was a fantastic opportunity to learn the product. But I learned so much more than just another piece of software.
In learning the product, I learned how to become a better communicator.
My twins were born three weeks after COVID lockdowns in Chicago where we live. When I got back after paternity my colleagues had a few months to get use to the new way of working remotely. I was on the other hand totally confused.
Slack helped me communicate with colleagues all over the world in different time zones and still be able to get a project completed on time. I learned how to write effective user stories in order to implement custom integrations and workflows for teams. I learned how to break down big projects with agile theory in order to rename 2,000 public channels so that they fit a prefix policy. I learned how to engage with user data to drive adoption. I learned how to build process like having app approval governance to ensure users we’re keeping our data safe.
What I didn’t expect was how far this one piece of software could take my career. I left Relativity in the summer of 2021 and made Slack Administration and Consulting my full time career first at Hewlett Packard Enterprise and then at Slalom. I evangelized the product for two years of my professional career and it afforded me the chance to own my own home, travel and work with so many different companies and users to help them get the most out this investment.
As for the next phase of my career I can honestly say I’m not sure if Slack will be a part of it. I would like it to be but I’m ok if it isn’t as well. What I do know for sure is that whatever the road has in front of me I know I can handle it because of my experiences working with Slack.
