Managing Work in Slack Using Emoji
Here at John Lewis & Partners, the John Lewis Digital Platform team looks after one of the busiest and most subscribed to channels in Slack, with over 600 active users. It is what we call our “front door” and we use it for support-related queries and also as a community where the 40 teams that use the Platform can share ideas and support each other.
We allocate one of the team each day/week to manage any queries in the channel as part of daily support activities. The rest of the team continue to develop the Platform as a Product supporting the person on the front door via our team private channel. To help us manage such a busy channel we have adopted a number of techniques including using emoji to manage conversations.
✅ Managing Request via Emoji
We have a simple process for managing requests using 3 simple emoji ✅ 👀 📱. We use threads to manage the conversation and keep it contained to the topic. We can also quickly scan down the channel to ensure we’ve answered anything in the channel
👀 We have seen your request and are investigating
📱 We have put you on hold while we ask internally for an answer or support or do some more investigation
✅ We think we’ve answered your question and any further request should be picked up in a new thread
🎫 Creating a Ticket via an Emoji
This is a super cool feature of Slack. Using a Slack Workflow and integration with JIRA we can quickly turn a request into a story using a 🎫 emoji. This raises a story on our backlog tagged as a front door request in a single click. We can then use that to track the work. We don’t tag every item, it’s not about how many requests we’ve dealt with. We tend to raise a story when the work required will likely span multiple days.
🧠 Trending Issues or Questions
We use an emoji also to trend similar topics or questions where it might be an indication that our “onboarding” documentation for teams might need some additional work or there is a common problem on the Platform that may well require further investigation. This again makes use of Slack workflow functionality, this time integrated with Google Sheets to track similar requests. We can enrich the information through a form sent to the person using the emoji to add additional information and to categorise the issue.
🌩 Feature Requesting
We are here for the 40 Product teams that work on the Platform and as a result want to harvest their great ideas through feedback. Using a 🌩 you can make a Feature Request in to our team’s backlog via JIRA which we can then review at our regular backlog session.
💖 Thanks
It is always good to give praise where due. We are about to implement a thank you to our Slack channel community using the 💖 to thank a channel member who has helped another and in the process of doing so saved us some time in responding. We can score this each month and reward the Engineer who supported others most. We value the experience of all our Engineers and they help make it an awesome platform on which to work.
This is just a quick look at how we use emoji in Slack to make work awesome. Obviously we use emoji to enrich our conversations and messaging. We also make use of many of Slack’s integrations to improve our productivity, use of workflows, communication features and more. We can even add our own emoji to allow for any situation.
Slack is 👌
How do you use Slack and emoji to manage your work and is there something else our team should be trying out ❓
At the John Lewis Partnership we value the creativity of our engineers to discover innovative solutions. We craft the future of two of Britain’s best loved brands (John Lewis & Waitrose).
We are currently recruiting across a range of software engineering specialisms. If you like what you have read and want to learn how to join us, take the first steps here.
