Slack alone isn’t the answer

Michael Pryor, founder and CEO of leading collaboration app, Trello, explains that he thinks of collaboration like he’s organizing a search-and-rescue mission. On such a mission, you need two tools, a GPS unit and a radio. The products serve distinct purposes, the GPS tells you what direction to head while the radio helps you talk about getting there.

Slack is an incredible “radio.” Teams that adopt Slack become leaner and more efficient. It opens up the lines of communication and helps decisions get made faster. While Slack excels at helping teams communicate about the work in progress, it’s not particularly useful for outlining priorities.

Slack is a bad “GPS”. If you’re looking for a tool to help plan and execute on your roadmap, Slack doesn’t pretend to be the product for you. Slack isn’t a project management tool, it’s designed from the bottom up to be a communication protocol. The fast-moving nature of Slack makes it hard to keep a team’s long term vision top of mind. Conversations in Slack scroll off the screen much too quickly to be useful as a way to focus on priorities.

That’s not to say that Slack isn’t a useful, and necessary, part of the modern office. When paired with a project management solution like Trello, Basecamp, Jira or even Google Spreadsheets, the two together are more powerful than either would be alone. Because link sharing fits so naturally into the Slack workflow, it’s easy to pull in information from a directional GPS tool like Trello or Basecamp.

In fact, it’s becoming easier and easier to use Slack’s integration features to build powerful connections between the two types of tools. Trello has deep integrations with Slack, as do many of their competitors.

This post is a part of a series on getting the most out of Slack. Next week, we’ll share some insights into how Slack spreads. If you’d like to hear more, follow us on Medium or subscribe to our email newsletter.