A couple years ago I wrote about why we decided to be a distributed team when we founded Talko. I didn’t say much about how to be good at it. That left some readers unsatisfied. I’ll take the bait, but must first stipulate:

• There’s no one way.
• Context matters much. Your people, your history, your project, your team size, etc. are all unique to your environment and must be accounted for.
• So, your mileage may vary with anything I say here.

Peace and love. Now let’s go.

It’s possible to decide to be distributed for all the right reasons, but to screw it up royally with the wrong tactics and tools. The more a team is distributed, the more potential for people to move fast and get many things done, but for those things to not necessarily be the right things.

Why does this happen? Because communications is really, really hard. It’s hard when everyone is together in the same room. It’s harder when people are separated by time and distance. In both work and life, there’s one thing I’ve learned about problems:

All problems are people problems, and all people problems are communication problems.

Doing distributed team projects well requires that the organization and its people, tools and processes all facilitate open communications and access to information at the lowest possible “cost”.

Scheduling a bunch of meetings is high cost. It’s not the answer. You need to set things up so that, as much as possible, great communications happens naturally, serendipitously — by accident if you will.

At Talko, where we are split between Boston, Seattle and San Francisco, we’ve benefited from having previously worked together. We knew each other, we respected each other, we’d built software together before. That’s a huge running start that many don’t have. But it didn’t eliminate the need to be intentional about distributed team practices and processes.

This is not all-inclusive, but here are several things we do to help us communicate effectively without ever being together in one place.

There is no hub. There are no spokes. We are a constellation.

People often ask “Where is Talko ‘based’?” Many assume we’re based in Boston because we have more people there than in Seattle or San Francisco. I say Talko is based in Talko (the app).

Sure, we have an official company address for the purposes of incorporation. But we don’t think of our team as being based in any one location. We give equal weight to our presence in all three cities, regardless of how many people are in each.

We refer to our team as distributed, not “remote”. The word remote infers that some aspect of the team is centralized and others are remote. “Us” and “them”. “The core” and “the others”. Watch the toxicity take over once people start thinking and acting like this.

We model our company as a constellation, not as a hub with spokes.

This isn’t the only model that works for distributed teams. Arguably, it’s not possible for a much larger organization. But I believe it’s best for any small team that chooses to be distributed.

This sounds ethereal when talking about it as an abstract model. But the model, the words used to describe it and the way it’s drawn on a napkin matter a lot. These things shape the team’s mindset, how people relate to one another, and how individuals perceive and act their role on the team. They also inform the tactics necessary for the organization to be true to what it wants to be.

For example, at Talko we encourage people to work from home 2–3 days per week. We do this even though we have office space in all three cities. It’s a tactic that helps our people empathize and relate to one another as equals, always, regardless of how many team members live in one city versus another. It’s how we avoid situations where several people huddle in a room to tackle big problems and make important decisions, then later realize that ‘elsewhere others’ needed to be part of the conversation. Tactics like this help avoid obvious sources of misunderstanding within a distributed team.

We have a clear set of top-level projects.

A project is substantive enough to be sustained beyond any particular sprint or milestone.

It has a well-defined team of people working on it. Unless you have a 1 project operation, which may be likely in the early days, a project team is a subset of the overall team. It’s essential that everyone in the organization knows who’s on each project.

A project has well-defined goals, stories and designs, milestones and timelines. Project team members are all deeply intimate with these things. All others in the company understand at least enough to know and support why the project is essential to the company’s mission.

We have 5 top level technical projects at Talko: iOS App, Android App, Web App, Service, and Slack Integration. These are the set of sustained technical efforts that we organize, track and report around. We adapt our tools to work for our preferences. The image to the left shows how we use Epics in Jira as the organizing model for our projects. This is not exactly true to the Agile (capital A) definition of Epic, but it works well for us right now. We’re rarely compelled to be 100% true to the dogma of the processes or methodologies we use. We do what works.

We invest in organizing our tools.

There’s virtually always some way, some how for someone to get whatever information they need to do their job. The question is — at what cost in time, attention, disruption?

Let’s say you need to come up to speed on the technical design for a feature. Do you:

• Schedule a meeting with the project team.
• Interrupt a developer to ask them directly.
• Go get the 2-page spec (because you know right where it is) and take 5 minutes to read it.

The first two options are costly. Operate like this as a distributed team and nobody will ever get anything done.

The point is that everyone needs to know exactly what tools are used for what purpose, and where to go to find what they need. Nobody should ever be uncertain of where or how to find something at the moment of need.

We use many different tools for different aspects of the business at Talko. Jira for projects, stories and bugs. Office docs, PDFs, and increasingly Quip docs for features that require specification. Github for source control and code review workflows. Amplitude for app analytics. Zendesk for support. Nagios, PagerDuty, Crittercism for error reporting. And more.

Beyond the specific tools, the important thing is that each is organized for maximum transparency and quick access to information. A simple example can be seen in the image to the left. It shows how the Product Management subfolder is organized at one point in its hierarchy in Dropbox. It takes some time and care to set up at the beginning, but it saves time in spades later on. There’s never a question from a developer about where to find, for example, the app analytics event schema spec — of course it’s in Product Managment > 01 Feature Specs > Analytics.

We operate on a cadence that naturally keeps people in sync.

We use cadence as a tool to achieve common awareness across a project team. Quick cycle times force regular communication and help people self-organize with a calendar that is near-clear of expensive meetings.

Shorter than typical sprints/milestones/releases create natural sync-ups, both planned and ad-hoc. It makes it difficult for things to slip through the cracks, and easy for a project team to shift priorities quickly when necessary.

For example, we do 1-week sprints. For co-located teams I’ve worked with in the past I’ve always preferred 2-week sprints. However, many things can change contextually over a 2-week period. One-week sprints require conversations to happen with a tempo that ensures people don’t fall out of sync about what matters most. No fancy meetings required typically, just a quick, often ad-hoc check-in as we move from one sprint to the next. Of course, for such a discussion to be quick it presumes that people have done their jobs prior, e.g. PM has prioritized stories and bugs for the next sprint and can succinctly communicate what and why to Dev.

Our work is done and ‘documented’ in our communications.

We write documents and detailed specifications for several things. A new and big feature area. Test scripts. Technical architecture. And more.

However, we produce far fewer documents relative to similarly scoped projects of several years ago. The document (or email) is no longer the primary artifact around which we do our work. There’s a flow to our communications and decision-making that is far more organic and fast-moving. It happens when we’re mobile and on-the-go as much as it does when we’re at our desks. It centers around text and voice messages, photos and screen-shares, and quick calls when we need to converge urgently.

All of this happens with very few scheduled meetings or document reviews.

The challenge is how to ensure all team members have access to the information they need to do their job, or to simply be an informed and participating team member. There’s no longer a presumption that everything is written in a document or summarized in mail. In fact there’s a preference that it’s not. Instead, there’s a presumption that key issues discussed and decisions made in the flow of conversation are “on the record” so that team members who weren’t there can be aware.

Tactically, there are several tools we use to make this real. One of them is our own. Since mid-2012 we’ve had all of our daily standups, design & architecture conversations, bug triages, all-hands meetings and 1:1 discussions in Talko. The fact that all conversations — LIVE calls or messages — are saved in Talko means that key issues or decisions are easily flagged, tagged and discoverable at any time in the future. This helps in a range of scenarios. When an engineer misses daily standup but needs to quickly know the status of another engineer who’s working on a blocking bug. Or, when a PM is trying to remember why a particular design decisions was made for a feature implemented long ago (see image).

Slack is another tool we use to support transparent, real-time access to our workflows and communications. We use many integrations — Github, Jira iDoneThis, Talko, Zendesk and several others. Essentially, the tool of choice for every aspect of the business is integrated with Slack. As such, Slack has become our hub for real-time status of any aspect of our engineering projects. A great example is our #github channel shown in the image. It provides a simple, stream view into what everyone is getting done. Like in Talko, what turns this from an activity stream to an irreplaceable productivity tool is the fact that all channels are easily searched. Anyone can find something that was said or done in the past and which may be important to recall at the moment.

Tools such as Talko and Slack won’t solve all communications problems. They can’t communicate for you! But it’s in tools like these where work is getting done and ‘documented’ these days, much more so than in files and emails. By turning conversations and activity streams into persistent, searchable objects these tools help our team avoid the lost time, misunderstanding and strained team dynamics that otherwise occur when people are moving fast and making decisions in the flow of communicating.

We treat team operations like a product.

A software product is never done. It can always be made better, simpler, more capable, more performant.

The same can be said for how a team works together. We treat our organization and its tools, processes and practices just like we treat the product we build together. We’re motivated to make things better.

We’re far from perfect. Sometimes we do things poorly. Sometimes things slip through the cracks. But we’re conscious and aware when these things happen. We talk about it. We make tactical adjustments when we’re convinced the benefit will outweigh the cost.

That is why, for example, I emphasize that using Epics to organize projects in Jira works for us “right now”. It’s why we recently made a change in how we do app analytics and the tool we use. It’s why we’re embracing an organic team shift from documents as files in Dropbox to Quip docs for many things. It’s why we’re currently contemplating changes in how we communicate client/service deployment dependencies to better support our aggressive multi-app release goals. And so on.

What works for us now as a 12-person team is not what will work for us in the future. As the team and our projects grow we will adapt the way we organize our work, how communicate, the tools we use and how we structure them to meet the needs of the business at any particular moment in time.

I hope this was useful. I’d love to hear your thoughts, feedback and questions.

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How we work as a distributed product team was originally published in Tap the Mic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As much fun as it is to type “/talko” in a Slack channel to begin a team call, it’s sometimes simpler to tap the phone icon in the Talko mobile app.

Like, when you’re walking down the street.

Or on the city bus.

Or making yourself some yummy breakfast.

Or any time your phone is handy and your PC is not. Which is whenever you’re away from your desk. Which, for many of us, is much of the time these days.

We’ve heard your feedback: You want all your team calls to be accessible via link in the Slack channel. This includes calls started in the iOS or Android (beta) Talko app while mobile.

So we shipped an improvement to our Slack integration that makes it work bi-directionally! Now, when you’re mobile, you can start the Slack-integrated call in Talko. A link to the LIVE call appears in the Slack channel. That link is accessible at that very moment, or later on, just as it is when you start the call via a “/talko” text post in Slack. Any member of the Slack channel can click on the link to take part in, view or replay the call in our web app (beta).

Note that this only works if you’ve previously established the integration between the Slack channel and the Talko channel. This is done by starting at least one call with the “/talko” command texted in Slack. More info on setup and call initiation can be found in our original announcement of the Slack integration.

But this Slack integration improvement isn’t everything! There’s also new goodness in our beta web app.

Sure, Slack integration customers can find any Talko call via the links that get posted into the channel. But for many teams those links are interspersed amongst a lot of text chatter.

We’ve made it simple to see all your recent Talko calls in a single view.

You may already be familiar with the Home screen in the Talko mobile app. You can think of this new web feature as the first version of Home for the Talko web app. Currently, it’s a simple list view of all recent calls in Talko. You can scroll to find one you’re looking for and enter. You access this Home view in the web app by clicking the back button in the upper left when in a call.

We’re thankful for your feedback — it helped us prioritize and deliver these improvements. Of course there’s so much more to do! We look forward to hearing what you think about these improvements, and what you’d like to see next.

Get Talko — try it with your team!

Interested in our Android beta program? Shoot a mail to support@talko.com and we’ll make it happen.

A Simpler Way To Start Your Slack-Integrated Team Calls When Mobile was originally published in Tap the Mic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Of course, many Talko calls are simple — LIVE and fast. Get done, get back to work or home to see the family. We love those types of calls as much as anyone!

But others involve both LIVE and not-LIVE conversation that may extend over time. They often include photos and/or metadata (tags and flags), which are later searchable. Design reviews, project planning calls and account status calls are examples where this is common.

This screenshot is an example of what such a call looks like in practice. It’s from our own team’s use of the app. The topic is the technical design for a feature we’re adding to our Slack integration. The call has a subject — “#slack #bidirectional”. You can see how the conversation flowed:

1. Hemant rang Shir. They talked for 51 seconds.
2. They realized they needed more clarification on the feature requirements. So they added Matt to the call as a guest. The three of them spoke LIVE for 40 minutes. During those 40 minutes Shir posted a text message (masked) and there were 3 bookmarks created. Those bookmarks are synchronized to the spot where the discussion on that topic happened. If anyone needs to recall how we agreed to “populate slack pairwise”, they needn’t listen to the 40 minutes of conversation (nor review meeting minutes). They just tap the bookmark to listen at that moment. This replay ability was especially helpful for Shir in this call because he’s new to the team and is coming up to speed on our technical designs.
3. Later the same day — after Shir, Hemant and Matt had hung up — Shir had some more specific design ideas. Hemant wasn’t available at the time. Instead of waiting for him, Shir sent a voice message, enabling Hemant to listen on his own time. While listening to the message, Hemant bookmarked what Shir said about the “internal protocol buffer”. He knew he’d want to come back to that and follow up with Shir.
4. Finally, Shir and Hemant re-connected LIVE for ~11 minutes. During this time, they solidified a final design.

This is one example of how Talko helps busy, on-the-go teams get important stuff done in a pain-free way. Plus it’s fun:-)

We’d love to hear what you think of these capabilities!

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Anatomy of a Power Call in Talko was originally published in Tap the Mic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Stopping the Chaos of Group Proliferation

A usability challenge for people using team communications tools is rampant group proliferation. This has been a problem since the dawn of “groupware” several decades ago. It starts when an existing group needs to involve a non-member in a conversation. For example, a product team that needs legal counsel in the middle of a design discussion. The only obvious way to do this in most tools is to create a new group with the core team plus the attorney.

As the tool gets used more and more, a group gets created for every possible combination of people. Many of them support a one-time or few-times interaction. Many have only subtle differences in their membership.

The result is a chaotic mess of groups, many of which rot as they’re never used again. But they continue to pollute the user interface. It’s gross.

We’ve addressed this problem in Talko by enabling the concept of “guests” in any call. It allows a team call to include guest participants for that one-time conversation. Guests have access only to that one call and nothing more from the channel. Doing it is as simple as selecting any combination of people along with a team channel from the new call flow.

We’d love to hear what you think of this feature!

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Guests Welcome (in Talko Calls) was originally published in Tap the Mic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We spend a lot of time talking about Talko for teams and organizations. That’s where we’re focused as a business. Let there be no doubt, Talko is enterprise software. There are plenty of team customer case studies published on our blog. All fun reads!

But in 2015 there needn’t be a distinction between the tools we use in work and the tools we use in life. Particularly for a communications tool! So of course I use Talko to communicate with all my immediate and extended family, and all my friends.

It’s late August right now. That means it’s time to get ready for the upcoming football season. In thinking about this, I began by reflecting on the miraculous finish to last year’s NFL season.

Having grown up in New England and as a lifelong Patriots fan Super Bowl 49 is one I’ll never forget. The ending was so perplexing —

• “David Tyree, Mario Manningham, and now Jermaine Kearse?! Has it happened yet again?!?!”
• “Why isn’t Belichick calling a timeout? Call a damn timeout!!”
• “Okay, so don’t call timeout, but let them score then! Please let them score NOW so that we at least get the ball back with some time left!! Why aren’t we letting them score?!?!”
• “Um, why are the Seahawks throwing the ball from the 1-yard line?”
• “WHOA, omg, omg, omg… Are you kidding me?!?!?!?! Did that just happen? Who is that #21? Please don’t let let this be a dream, please.”
• “Belichick is a damn genius. A mere mortal would’ve called a timeout or let them score.”

One special aspect is that the game conversations with my closest friends are forever captured in a Talko call. Any of us can relive those conversations, many of which are quite comical, whenever the desire strikes.

When I thought about the upcoming season, the first thing I did was put myself back in the “Malcolm Butler Moment”. The opportunity to do so in Talko demonstrates how the ability to replay a special or important moment post-facto can be magical. This can be the case in both work and life matter.

The SB49 conversation in our Pats Chat channel is a lengthy and often intense mix of voice, text and photos. Over the course of the day — from pre-game, throughout the game, and extending into post-game — the six of us would dip into and out of this call. We were sometimes together LIVE, and other times just leaving messages.

Somewhere in the middle you see a bookmark labeled #malcolmbutler. This is the moment where he made the game-winning play that New Englanders will talk about for many years to come. If I tap the bookmark and hit Play, what you hear is the raw reaction of a couple of us mere seconds after the interception. (note: some text posts are masked so as to protect a fully transparent peak into the depths of our despair following the ridiculously unlikely/impressive catch by Jermaine Kearse)

Now, let me take a timeout here to recognize a couple things:

1. A football game is a trivial thing relative to what deeply matters in this world. Yes, I do understand the ridiculousness of 40-something men screaming like schoolchildren, nearly reduced to tears by the freaking NFL. Stipulated. I’m not proud.
2. I have many close friends who are Seahawks fans. There are even a few Jets fans who are otherwise pleasurable people. I know many people who simply love to hate the Patriots. To all of you: I’m certain you want to vomit right now. I get it. I’m sorry.

However, that moment is real, raw and priceless — to us.

Okay, timeout’s over.

Finally, mere seconds later, others came into the call LIVE and there was a celebratory chat. Enough time had passed at this point that some actual words could be spoken.

That’s it. This type of scenario is not a primary driver for our business. But in both work and life, there are important moments that occur when we talk. Many of these moments are deserving of being quickly found and replayed hours, days, weeks, months or even years later. The ability to do so can be pricelessly sentimental in life. In work, it can save time, money and a lot of team angst.

PS: Dear Malcolm Butler, I cannot say how sorry I am for not previously knowing who you were. I will never forget you.

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#TalkoTuesday Fun was originally published in Tap the Mic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Our Slack integration is essential to how our team operates as a distributed (and often mobile) product development team. Since we released it last week, it’s been wonderful to see many teams come onboard and give it a try!

Several people have asked for more information about exactly how we use these and any other tools to drive our daily standup meetings. Here it is, in one simple photo:

What you see:

• We use iDoneThis to log what each team member has done and will do. We’ve used and loved it for years now. By the time we do standup, we know that everyone has seen “just the facts” regarding dones and to-dos. So we focus our standup time exclusively on issues, blockers or questions. It’s efficient.
• We’ve integrated iDoneThis with Slack, bi-directionally. We have a “#dones” channel. Anyone can enter a done in here with the simple “/done” command. Additionally, for those who prefer to log their dones via the iDoneThis tool or via their email notifications, we pump those back into the Slack #dones channel. So all activities end up being shown in the #dones channel.
• Every morning at standup time, we start the call with with the “/talko” command in the #dones Slack channel. Everyone’s device rings, and as you can see in the photo each team member can answer and enter in the most natural place — on the web if they’re at their desk, on their phone if they’re mobile.

In this way, the #dones channel in Slack ends up being a holistic log of all team members’ activities, along with the standup conversations that are about them.

It’s a beautiful thing! We love it, and we hope you’ll give something like it a try and let us know what you think.

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iDoneThis + Slack + Talko was originally published in Tap the Mic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

For those who’ve not yet tried it, here’s a short video showing how simple the experience is.

One of the benefits of our integration with Slack is how we bridge mobile and web. This video shows call answer/entry on mobile. Clicking the call link the Slack channel is how you enter in the web when that’s most convenient.

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Slack Integration: A Little Video was originally published in Tap the Mic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Team calling in Slack channels, for mobile & web. Recorded for replay of important moments.

UPDATE: The integration now works bi-directionally. Whether you start a team call via the slash command in the Slack channel while at your desktop, or in the Talko app while mobile, the call will be linked and posted to the Slack channel!

Shortly after our launch we heard from several teams who were using both Slack and Talko daily. We heard from product development teams who do daily “standups”, sales teams who do weekly status calls, event marketers who communicate across event sites, and several others. They described using Slack for team messaging, and Talko for team calling.

These teams were asking for a more integrated way to use Talko and Slack.

So we built it, and a couple months ago we began using it (and loving it!) every day to start our own daily standup calls from Slack. Beta customers helped us refine the integrated user experience over the past few weeks. We’re thankful for the feedback from X Prize Foundation, Litmus, Vision Critical, Nodo Arquitectos, 8:45A, Velocity Growth, and several others.

Today, we’re thrilled to announce that Talko is an “official” Slack integration! It’s now simple to set up, and openly available for any team to start using. The benefits include:

• Reliable team calls on mobile or web: Team members’ iPhones immediately ring when a call starts in a Slack channel. Regardless of location or network, everyone can have a reliable, high quality call experience.
• Transparent and productive communications: All Talko calls are recorded. Team members who couldn’t be there LIVE can enter later to listen to the entire call or just its important moments. This helps teams stay in sync, remember critical decisions, and get things done quicker.

As a bonus, teams using our Slack integration can take part in team calls via an early beta of our web app. This allows everyone to participate in the most natural way possible. Mobile team members will answer the Talko ring on their iPhone (Android is coming soon), while those at their desktop can choose to use the web app with the Google Chrome browser.

How it Works

Starting a Talko call is as simple as typing “/talko <subject>” in any Slack channel. The subject is optional, but often helpful because it indicates to others what you want to talk about. When you send the slash command, slackbot responds with a link that is visible only to the call creator. Click that link to begin the call.

All channel members’ iPhones will receive a Talko ring once you click the slackbot link. Additionally, a call link is posted to the Slack channel. Any channel member can click this link to enter the call in our beta web app. The link provides immediate entry into the LIVE call, as well as access to the call recording at a later time.

The call looks and behaves the same, whether in the web or mobile app. You can see who’s there and talking, share photos and make text posts, add audio bookmarks, and more. In the web app, you can also post a link to a Dropbox file via the “+” button to the left of the text edit control.

So there you have it. Just type “/talko” to start your team calls. We’re excited for you to give it a whirl and let us know what you think!

Want Some?

1. Pull down the account menu in Slack. Click “Configure Integrations”.

2. Scroll down the Slack Integrations list until you see Talko. Click “View”.

3. On the Talko integration landing page, click “Add Talko Integration”.

4. You’re ready to go! You’ll see a brief usage guide on the integration page.

That’s all it takes! Now just type “/talko” in a Slack channel. Everything will work smoothly if you’re already a registered user of the Talko app. You just need to authorize on the first attempt. If you’re not already a registered Talko user, we make it simple for you to register and get started in the beta web app once you click the call link in the Slack channel.

Please share feedback! And, if you encounter any issues please send mail to support@talko.com.

Get Talko — try it with your team!

Talko + Slack was originally published in Tap the Mic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Audio bookmarks in Talko pinpoint key moments

Your team has all the tools it could ever need to run like a well-oiled machine. Project management and doc-sharing tools, team messaging apps, CRM and ERP systems, and so much more. You might even use them all perfectly as-designed!

Even still, there are times when you just need to talk — weekly status calls, impromptu design discussions, daily “standups”, break/fix scenarios.

For mobile and distributed teams, this means hopping on a conference call. We built Talko to be the absolute best, most reliable tool for mobile team conferencing. What’s not to love about there being no such thing as a dropped call?!

But even the most amazing, high-quality call experience can break down if key team members aren’t there. And therein lies the reality — as we’ve become increasingly mobile (and busy) it has become near-impossible for teams to consistently all be together for a call, even for scheduled meetings. There are scheduling conflicts, doctors appointments, customer meetings, customer visits, sick kids, and (gasp) days off.

The call still happens — after all, as Freddie Mercury once said, the show must go on. But those who weren’t there are immediately out of sync. A decision was made that they need to be aware of, an outstanding issue requires their attention, or the team is simply left with an incomplete picture of project status without their input. To try to ‘close the loop’, meeting notes are shared via email, where the ensuing conversation meanders and becomes unwieldy. People then start trying to clarify though 1:1 calls. Suddenly, nobody on the team knows what’s what, and decisions made in the meeting are being un-made.

It’s madness,… and it’s why we made call recording a key part of the experience in Talko.

Any busy team trying to generate ideas, solve problems and generally get things done quickly and efficiently needs all team members to have easy and transparent access to the information they need to do their job. Team conversations and conferences are an important part of that. Providing that easy and transparent access should never require the ‘tax’ of post-meeting emails and sidebar conversations.

But having a record of the conversation isn’t always enough. It’s important to help people quickly find the moment(s) that matter. Someone trying to come up to speed on a design decision shouldn’t have to listen to an entire 90 minute design meeting if the only thing that matters is the moment when a critical decision was made and summarized.

Marking such a moment is what our audio bookmarking feature is all about.

How to Create a Bookmark

• When in a call, press-and-hold the audio amplitude track, right where the important moment begins. You can do this while LIVE, when you know someone is about to say something to remember, or after the fact by scrolling back to the important moment.
• Annotate the bookmark and include a #hashtag for easy discovery. You don’t have to do this, but it will provide a visual annotation for everyone to immediately see why the moment matters.
• The bookmark’s spot is marked visually in the call. You can quickly go to its specific moment in time with a simple tap of the bookmark. Once there, tap the Play button to listen to that moment.

That’s it. A fantastic and low cost way to help your team stay in sync. Give it a try and let us know what you think!

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Bookmarks — Not Just For Books was originally published in Tap the Mic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The most notable improvement is a change to the call hangup behaviors. One of the benefits of Talko calls is that LIVE conversations can continue later-on, not-LIVE. So a team member who missed a meeting can enter when they free up, catch up on what happened, and actually participate!

We previously had a rule that allowed the call creator to hangup the call at any point in time. There were reasons why that made sense, but it led to one oddball condition. If you started a LIVE call with your team, and someone else entered later and was trying to consume or add to the call while you happened to be in there as well, then the only way for you to exit was for you to hangup and kick them out of the call as well! It was a somewhat rare condition, but darn annoying when it happened. So, we made an improvement such that it won’t happen again:-)

Also, in addition to a set of small bug fixes, there’s an important fix related to offline participation. There was an issue that caused a small number of offline messages to not be transmitted once back online. That’s been fixed. If somebody hit this bug when sending you a message while offline, then after you upgrade you may find that you have a new unread message ‘from the past’. Now you’ll know why. Our apologies for this one — hopefully the conversation is still relevant.

As always, please share any and all feedback with us!

Get Talko — try it with your team!

Don’t Hang Me Up! was originally published in Tap the Mic on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.