Takeaways from Slack Frontiers

My Away suitcase in Venice

I’m sitting in an Airbnb in Florence while I write this. Next to me is my Minions edition Away suitcase that I purchased for this trip after contemplating it for a few months. What finally convinced me was when I saw Jen Rubio, the cofounder of Away, speak at the first Slack conference in SF last month (Don’t worry, that’s not my only takeaway from the conference).

I’m a huge fan of Slack. I’ve been using it since my last job changed from using Campfire to Slack. When I started at Group Nine Media, I had a hand in helping put together an on-boarding and best practices document for our team’s switch to Slack.

The Highlights

What’s very clear is that the organizers were very mindful of diversity at this conference. My favorite session of the conference was “Diversity as Competitive Advantage”. This is the description of the panel:

Duretti Hirpa Senior Engineer, Integrations, Slack
Jimena Almendares VP Business Leader of Payments, Intuit
Nicole Sanchez CEO & Founder, Vaya Consulting
Arlan Hamilton Founder & Managing Partner, Backstage Capital

Diverse and inclusive workplaces are more than just numbers in an annual report. What real-life systems and structures can you put in place to help the humans in your organization grow, thrive, and ultimately, deliver the best results? Hear from leaders such as Jimena Almendares from Intuit, Arlan Hamilton from Backstage Capital, and Nicole Sanchez from Vaya Consulting on how they approach inclusion and why diversity is a must-have competitive advantage.

As a woman of color working in tech, I’ve been to quite a few diversity panels. What I really liked about this one is that it was an honest conversation with a panel of POC as speakers. No one danced around topics, they shared very actionable advice, and everyone had really interesting, personal stories to share. One thing that they spoke a lot about is that it’s never too early to start thinking about diversity. As soon as a person has an idea for a product, they should bring in a diverse group of people to help evaluate and design the product. The next day, Bodega was announced by ex-Googlers, and by looking at how things unfolded, they could have really used the advice from the diversity panel when they started on their product.

An example they gave during the session to illustrate this point was about how OKCupid coded their gender selection feature in a binary way. They later spent a ton of resources to rework the site to be able to support how people truly identify. The amount of time it took them to make the changes led some people to boycott the service.

Another one of my favorite sessions was “Securing Your Data in Slack” with Larkin Ryder, the director of risk and compliance at Slack, as the speaker.

Description of the session:

Ever wonder how security is built into Slack? Wonder no more. Slack’s Director of Risk and Compliance Larkin Ryder will share how Slack incorporates security into its product and its culture, and how it can help you better meet your commitments to security and compliance.

Larkin made the talk very friendly for people with all levels of security knowledge. It was also really nice to hear how seriously Slack takes security. I’ve never thought about how many files and sensitive conversations we put into Slack, and it’s comforting to know that the are being protected with the utmost care and consideration

There were also a few sessions that fell short for me. I think the issue was that the description of the session completely overpromised the content of the session and the session drastically underdelivered. A few sessions ended very early — one of which only had 16 minutes of content for a 45 minute session.

Other interesting takeaways

From: How to scale your infrastructure and your people with Michael Lopp, VP of Engineering at Slack

• Realized that what got us here, won’t get us there. The technologies we chose in the beginning might not be the right solutions for the future
• Slack’s engineering team grew 3x in size in 2 years
• About a year ago, they decided to create an infrastructure team who made the decision to introduce new, mature technologies to scale the product. It’s like trying to change an engine while the car is going at a very high speed.

From: Building the team of the future with Andrew de Maar from Deloitte center for the edge

• The wisest decisions are made by those who are closest to the problem, regardless of rank.
• We need to push decision making to the edge of the systems cause that’s where people are seeing the problems
• Henry ford picked black for his cars because it was the only paint color that dried fast enough for his production line.

From: Intelligence at work: how Google leverages AI and machine learning

• Google’s smart reply is now being used for 10% of responses sent on mobile.
• The quick access part of Google Docs is fueled by AI and machine learning to try to predict which doc you came to google docs to open.
• Google will someday be able to tell which document all the convos in Slack are talking about and then recommend actions to you about that doc.
• 250k google drive files are shared in Slack every day. Less than a year ago, it was 60k.
• Google REALLY loves Slack.

Conclusion

I dragged my Away luggage through 3 cities, across miles of cobblestone streets, and endured a flight delay in an airport. Throughout the trip, my friends asked me about my new suitcase and I proclaimed that it’s the best suitcase I’ve owned. It really got me to think about the types of products I love. I think Away really manages to hit all aspects of it.

1. It’s charming (and adorable. I don’t even love Minions).
2. It’s well made and includes very thoughtful details.
3. It’s a joy to use. (It has that good product magic that I don’t quite know how to quantify)
4. It gets the job done.

It’s easy to see why Slack chose Away as a beta test partner as both of their products have all 4 of the above traits. As for the conference, despite of its shortcomings, Slack Frontiers also had heart and potential. If they have another one next year, I’ll be there with my Away suitcase.

What are some of your favorite conferences? Let us know in the comments!