Why Our Team Stopped Using Slack
Slack is a great tool for chat, but not for project management.
We started like any team wanting to be like the cool kids. Slack is pretty and intuitive so we signed up. The fact that the company is lauded by startup teams and received a big valuation was even an encouragement to keep using it after we started having issues. We made our channels for marketing, product, design, etc. It was really great until we took on two more projects.
Then there was trouble with separating the projects from the overall company’s information and the different facets of each product within its channel. It became difficult for some of our members to decipher which channel their piece of info or input belonged in when we had a larger number of channels. It also let us get off track and lose work that we needed to find later. The channels are supposed to be searchable, but it’s so much easier to have all the documents where you need them and not have to search for them in the first place.
No matter how many cool integrations we found that would supposedly help us get things done, eventually the answer isn’t adding another tool.
“Using Slack for project management is like using a spoon for a knife.” — Walt Spence
We tried to reduce our use of slack and use it for what it’s good for. Team chat and bouncing ideas off of each other, and those ideas were then transferred into a real PM software system. Realistically we could have eliminated Slack altogether and not missed a beat in our product development. Slack was now functioning as our expensive team morale booster while the team actually got things done. Inevitably though, we drifted back to talking on slack because all of us had gotten used to it, and trying to go between two different large tools wasn’t working. This time we decided to do something about it in order to stay lean and mean. Now we are exclusively using Basecamp 3 which includes team chat that is topical as well as to do lists and other useful features that actually help us get things done without having to add them in as an afterthought.
The first thing I thought when I saw BC3 was “slack killer” and that has now come true for our team.
What Slack is amazingly good for, is communities. It’s better than Twitter and Facebook groups for communities. Being able to catch up on a conversation just by scrolling and to weigh in yourself is awesome. Participating in multiple conversations in channels that are actually interesting to you is super cool. It can be yet another way to meet awesome people who share your interests in a community slack team that is well developed and has many users. This also can lead to collaboration and networking.
We know slack is cool and there’s no denying that it has its uses, but it just didn’t work for us. We have experienced a great increase in team-wide communication since moving everyone to basecamp and it is now easy to know roughly the progress that has been made on a project just by signing in. Slack and my startup may meet again but I doubt it will be soon.
Next, see how I use Basecamp in my personal life:
