Integrations or death
Nowadays, to speak of collaborative economies, remote teams, scrum, communication, etc seems a bit redundant. Even if these concepts are key to achieve any modern organization’s business objectives, the world has evolved in a way that everyone perceives them as natural.
I mean, no one is surprised when they hear about remote work or scrum. We all agree that the key to success is good organization and task distribution, as well as an effective flow of communication between team members.
However, the development and assimilation of these concepts, and in turn, an improvement in processes, has allowed the world to reach the next level: it’s not only necessary for individuals to collaborate fluidly between each other to achieve their objetives. Also, the tools they use on a daily basis should be able to do so.
Without a doubt, the people who understood this the most were the guys at Slack. We all know Slack, they define themselves as “the messaging app for teams that are changing the world”. This slogan comes to life when one finds out that Slack started as an in-house tool for their founders company. It’s true, they were actually changing the world.
What sets Slack apart from other messaging platforms? Besides having an attractive UI, it’s nothing more than your typical messaging tool: direct messages, private and public channels, file attachment and notifications…these features don’t seem to stand out at all. The key to their success are integrations.
“Connect all the tools you use to Slack and avoid all that constant switching between apps. Set up your integration so that you get all your notifications directly within Slack — from support requests, code check-ins, and error logs to sales leads — all of them searchable in one central archive.”
All you need is a complete and well documented API, Webhooks, the capacity to create BOT users and you can adapt the app to any work process and even improve it.
Integrations make Slack a tool so flexible and versatile that go as far as making up for flaws in other tools of daily use. Let’s take for example Flow.
Flow is a task manager that we use in Lateral View to organize work for the design team. It’s a great tool, it has a simple and friendly UI, it’s easy to use… everything you look for in an app. But there’s something essential missing.
Yeah, you guessed right: integrations. We’re not talking about Webhooks, Flow doesn’t even have a public API, which nowadays is unacceptable for this kind of tool.
At Lateral View we needed to improve the process of task assignation for our design team. The main problem was that only designers use Flow. It didn’t make sense that every developer should create an account only for the purpose of assigning tasks.
We figured out that the only integration Flow had was via email. By sending an email to a specific address and applying a certain format in the subject and body of the email, it was possible to assign a task to a certain user in a certain project. The emails worked, but there was nothing more outdated and uncomfortable.
The challenge was to turn Flow’s integration into a friendly one. And that was when Slack came to the rescue. We decided to program a bot whose main aim was to gather all the necessary information for a task and send it via email with the corresponding format to be entered into Flow.
Great! That was how Baja Ruben was born (in tribute to a likable character that helps us open the door every day).
It was so simple as the image above. A small conversation with Baja Ruben and that’s it, task assigned!
The conclusion, at this moment in time, is evident. The success of an application depends on its capacity of adaptation to the work process of the people who use it. No team is willing to modify the way they work because of limitations in a certain tool, even if the app works. If it doesn’t adapt, we look for another one that does. And in a world so competitive as the one we live in, integrations are key to keep applications updated through time.
