Gathering information from your team in is a cinch

The new Missions Gather step for Slack

Through the course of helping customers create workflows in Slack, a common request has been to simplify gathering information from groups of people and presenting it in an easy to read format. Before today, doing so required a mix of duplicated steps and other clunkiness.

We’re happy to announce there is now a better way via the new Gather step.

The Gather step uses a form to collect information from team members. The step remains open for a set amount of time, and responses will neatly post to a channel, making viewing and understanding the results easy-peasy. It is useful when you want to collect feedback, schedule daily “stand-ups”, solicit ideas, or just get opinions on where to go for lunch.

Let’s look at a simple example that uses Gather.

An example: the daily standup

Daily status roundups are a common activity with teams or projects. Inspired by Scrum, each team member answers three questions:

• What did you do yesterday?
• What will you do today?
• Are you blocked in any way?

In Missions this can be accomplished with a single Gather step — in fact, here’s a template you can use today 😉. Now, this what the step configuration might look like:

Stand-up Gather step

And the corresponding “Daily Standup” form. Of course, you can tweak or completely replace the questions in the form. It’s up to you.

The Daily Stand-up form for the Gather step

When this step runs, the message shown below is posted into the configured channel (#standup-comedy in our example).

Standup update prompt

Each teammate selects Share your update, fills out the form and their update is posted as a threaded response to the original message. Note: threading is optional and you may post updates to a specific user or to another public or private channel.

Daily Stand-up form

Each submission sent as a new message

When the step completes, the tabled results are made available as data to subsequent Missions steps and will auto-format if embedded in messages, or be available as JSON for use in a Code or Webhook step.

The Gather step can be your entire Mission or just a piece of a larger workflow. It’s up to you!

Some use cases we think are a great fit:

• Daily standup
• 360 Peer Reviews
• Surveys
• Brainstorming
• A new take on our “Early Warning System” — learn about EWS from Rita McGrath and our very own Michael Sikorsky

We are looking forward to all the amazing ways you use the new Gather step to make your work just a little more enjoyable 👌.

Missions is a messaging based workflow system for Slack that makes teams more productive by helping to coordinate activities between people to move work forward. Our visual editor enables anyone to create custom workflows for their team. Turbocharge your team today with Missions!