Take the best of Slack for your early-stage startup
It sometimes feels like Slack has been around for ever. Everyone uses Slack, right ? Well, that is not entirely true.
At Pootsy, we love Slack and we use it for practically everything. Let me explain why and how your early stage startup can benefit from intensively using Slack.
There is an integration for that
We mentioned in our Meet The Pootsy Tech Stack blog post that we were using a lot of different tools : we use Jira for project management, GitHub for source code, codeship for continuous integration, Sentry for crash tracking, … The good news is : there is (probably) a Slack integration for every tool you use.
Every time someone starts working on a Jira ticket, we get notified. Every time someone pushes code on GitHub, creates or adds a review to a Pull Request, we get notified. Every time there is a new deployment, we know it. Every time the app in staging or production crashes, we get notified. And, even more importantly : every time a new user asks for a cleaning service, we get notified.
This might sound like spam to you but those integrations are precious because they help us keep an eye on our teams and our products. We’re using Slack as our dashboard that gathers metrics about our ongoing developments and about the products in production. The cherry on the cake ? We get notified instantly.
Bots
So now you have a few integrations, that’s good. But you still wouldn’t get the most of slack without using bots.
Remember when we talked about Jira ? There is a “classic” integration but we found out recently that the jirabot was way more powerful : it shows a full detail of tickets when they are updated and you can interact with them, for instance if you want to know more about a specific issue :
/jira PROJECT-01
Interaction is what makes bots great. At Pootsy, we wanted to have daily stand up meetings but couldn’t get them to integrate smoothly within our team : we don’t always come to work at the same time and sometimes we don’t even “come to work” because we’re working remotely. Standuply asks the same 3 questions to everyone : “what did you do yesterday?”, “what are you doing today?” and “is something blocking you?” Then, we all have 1h30 to answer.
Again, the point of this is to know what happens in your team and what might block the developers before it impacts your project, while allowing everyone to manage their time as they want.
Slack makes it easy to jump right into a conversation
Because you’re an early stage startup, everything has to move fast. Your team is always full of ideas and it can get really messy really quickly. Channels are helpful because you can have distinct conversations for, let’s say, different projects, different teams or just for fun. But what’s really great is once you add new people to a new channel, they get access to the full history, parts of the conversation you saved (pinned) for later and all the files you shared.
Along with channels, Slack recently introduced threads to allow conversation within a conversation. Also really convenient when multiple conversations happen at the same time in the same channel.
If you want to act fast, Slack is the perfect tool because it can act as some kind of documentation and facilitates sharing internal knowledge.
If you read that far, you deserve to know our favorite integrations :
- Codeship https://slack.com/apps/A0F81FKT8-codeship
- GitHub https://slack.com/apps/A0F7YS2SX-github
- Jira Cloud https://slack.com/apps/A2RPP3NFR-jira-cloud
- Mailchimp https://slack.com/apps/A0F82E726-mailchimp
- Sentry https://slack.com/apps/A0F814BEV-sentry
- Standuply https://slack.com/apps/A355V71K7-standuply
What are yours ?
